Handful by Handful Seed Saving and the Global Revival of Landrace Wheats

10,000 years ago, as the climate changes and global temperatures cool, people begin cultivating grasses and relying on seeds as a significant component of their diets. Through both the natural selection that occurs when some seeds (small, brittle stemmed, likely to explode and scatter away from the seed head or gathering hand) are harder to collect than others, as well as conscious choices of selective harvesting by humans (for size, ease of harvest, and taste) seed crops slowly start adapting into the grains we know today. One of these grains, wheat, begins developing in the Fertile Crescent: the land surrounding the basins of the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile Rivers. This harvest process of natural- and human-selection continues as people slowly carry wheat seeds through and out from the Fertile Crescent. In each new place, the seeds encounter slightly different soils, pests, and irrigation technology or access to water. In each place, the people growing wheat continue selecting for the very best seeds — the ones from the hardiest and most productive plants — relative to their specific place, conditions, and environment. And as years and years of this occur, over and over again, distinct variations emerge that distinguish wheats in one place from those in others. Today, we call these locally-adapted varieties landrace wheats.

Landrace wheats developed thanks to thousands of years of place-specific, human-centric selection. We have a reciprocal relationship with wheat: we propagate it and prioritize resources and re-plantings for the hardiest and most productive plants, and in return, it feeds us, forms the basis of our cultures, and gives us a map for the future.

One of the first grains, emmer, is the common ancestor of most of the wheats we eat today. While emmer is difficult to remove from its husk, or thresh, over time people select for grains that are easier to remove: a process known as free threshing. Free threshing wheats spread throughout the world, with individual landraces and their resulting flours varying from place to place. Free threshing wheat encompasses and leads to the common wheats we eat today in everything from croissants to naan. These place-specific wheats “reflect the fertility, the variety, the weather. That explains why breads from different countries are so different.” This also explains why today, much of the distinctions between different commercially-produced breads have to do with the breads’ shape and relative density, not subtle differences in the core character of the flour itself. In Jordan, “with white flour selling for a third the price of whole wheat, bakers almost exclusively make a white pita that lacks the taste, texture, and nutritional value of the country’s heritage breads.” There is very little variation in “all-purpose flour,” which explicitly reveals the lack of landrace wheat.

But in between the two extremes of emmer flat cakes and conventional Wonder Bread, we get the durum wheats: free threshing, but also tough and hardy — the name “durum” sharing the same Latin root meaning “hard” as the word durable. Anyone who has eaten pasta has encountered durum wheat, but in the past 100 years, the landraces have become rare. 

The landraces used to be the only options and were a staple food source for humanity. But over time, people began selecting seeds in more and more narrow ways. Genetic diversity in wheat declined through the 1900s, and tanked most dramatically in the 1960s-70s as genetic engineering became more and more central to the mission of the Green Revolution, or the “war against hunger.” One of the most powerful tools in this war was genetic engineered leading to High Yielding Varieties (HYVs). The Green Revolution increased the agricultural productivity of the world and sought to address a dire need for more food, such that “the world’s wheat harvested area has remained relatively stable since 1960, but in the same period, production has risen significantly.” This means that we’re now harvesting greater volumes of wheat, but using about the same amount of land to do so as we were prior to these genetic modifications.

In particular, scientists modified wheat to grow at a shorter, or “dwarfed,” height, which supports heavy heads of wheat and prevents the plants from bending, or “lodging.” This hugely impacted large-scale, industrial farms, as “the insertion of dwarfing genes from the Japanese variety ‘Norin 10’ made it possible to simultaneously increase the yield potential, harvest rate, responsiveness to fertilizers, and resistance to biotic and abiotic diseases.” A straight-standing, uniform crop is easier to fully harvest, and a fully harvested crop can feed many people. But uniform crops come from uniform seeds, and “while the new package of hybrid seeds, fertilizers and pesticides did dramatically increase yields, the cost of such inputs was prohibitively expensive for the poorest farmers.” On top of this, plants that are extremely high yielding in the perfect conditions of a lab, don’t necessarily perform well out in the real world. In particular, HYVs often require enormous amounts of water and pesticides and herbicides and artificial fertilizers to eliminate their competition and pump them full of whatever nutrients or chemicals they may need, simultaneously inoculating the soil and water with many they don’t.

The Green Revolution increased agricultural productivity overall, but in the process, it opened the doors to seed patents and predatory seed corporations, and for people working at a small scale, “many farmers gained very little, and rural poverty persisted largely unchanged.” The Green Revolution led to genetically adapted and manipulated plants that were designed for machines, not for people. In focusing on these lab-based, hybrid varieties, we’ve locked ourselves more deeply into a culture focused on consumption: farmers need to buy new seed every year, and also pay for pesticides, artificial fertilizers, and water. In addition to chemical consumption, contemporary wheat varieties have half the protein content of ancient grains like emmer, and many people cannot properly digest these genetically modified wheats. This poses an issue when “more than 70% of commercial wheat varieties currently grown have the ‘Norin 10’ dwarfing genes in their genomes.”

In this mechanization, we’ve ignored the seeds that gave us the strength and the food that fueled us to reach this point of mechanization in the first place. The opposite of uniformity, landrace wheats are adaptable and “traditional farmers grow polyculture mixtures of landrace populations, allowing nature and farmers to work together to develop the best locally adapted varieties.” These traditional agricultural models mean farmers “can enhance yield and quality of crops by selective seed-saving to improve traits such as winter hardiness in cold climate, resistance to disease or rich flavor.” In comparison, conventional wheat hybrids adapt only when scientists in a lab allow them to. Many farmers following contemporary agricultural practices don’t save seed from their crops, either because the crops are sterile hybrids with uncertain reproductive capacities, or because the farmers had to sign contracts where they legally cannot grow seed from the previous year’s harvest, and must instead buy new seed every year. But seed saving has been crucial to humanity ever since we started cultivating food, and even today, for many small scale farmers, seed saving is the only option.

The Green Revolution sought to increase our capacity to produce food, but in the process, it has created a culture that relies on chemical fertilizers that can contaminate drinking water and aquatic ecosystems, and that sprays pesticides on insects that later develop resistance to these pesticides, requiring more chemicals to eliminate them. This is a stark contrast to addressing those issues at the root cause and selecting seed from the plants that responded strongly to adverse conditions. Eli Rogosa, director of the Heritage Grain Conservancy, grows and studies ancient wheats in comparison to popular engineered varieties. She describes how “in the modern system, if you get a disease [...] very often they spray.” This eliminates the step of prioritizing seeds from the hardiest plants, and so the wheat genome stagnates. Rogosa explains how the hardiness of localized seeds matters more than the engineered capabilities of hybrid seeds, as in her trials “the old varieties out-yield the modern varieties in organic soil.” Rogosa is part of a movement of seed savers growing heritage wheat, slowly adapting it to the stresses and conditions of specific places. Over time, these varieties will become new landraces.

One of the old landraces, a particular strain of durum wheat, developed near the Fertile Crescent in an arid and basaltic place called the Houran Plateau. Today, we call this wheat Hourani, after its parent landscape. Hourani wheat developed in a consistently shifting political landscape. The Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires have all passed through the Houran Plateau, each seizing the land for a time, and now we know the area as Palestine, Jordan, and Israel. But through all these changes, the seeds have stayed relatively constant. Whether in friendship or by force, people have been sharing seeds here for thousands of years.

Hourani is part of the ranks of durum landrace wheat, which farmers are again growing more and more widely across the globe. These durum landraces developed over time to thrive in droughted conditions and to resist pests and disease. But in today's world of conventional agriculture, irrigation, pesticides, and genetic editing, growing landrace wheat is also an act of resistance to the ecological anonymity of High Yielding Varieties. In a world where it takes seconds to begin a war, these wheats are slow, hopeful solutions to feeding people and feeding them well. In the centuries in which wheat developed, seeds changed hands countless times. And thanks to all the people who still save and share seed, we still have these landrace wheats today.

I first heard Hourani wheat’s story from Elizabeth DeRuff, Agricultural Chaplain and founder of the organization Honoré: a non-profit working to “transform food and farm systems so that they reflect reverence and the regenerative capacities that are present both in the wheat fields and within us.” I met DeRuff at a tending day for one of Honoré’s fields in Sonoma County, California. While Honoré works with several heirloom grain varieties and landraces, DeRuff was particularly enthusiastic about the Hourani wheat that would soon be ready for harvest. DeRuff told me the story of the handful of seeds that started Honoré’s fields of Hourani wheat, and it was this story that germinated my interest in learning about ancient wheat.

Near the Sea of Galilee lie the remnants of a fortress called Masada: built by King Herod, but occupied in 73CE by the Sicarii, a Jewish rebel group who isolated themselves there, buried the seeds to prevent Roman soldiers from accessing them, and according to legend, committed mass suicide as an additional act of resistance against the Romans. In the 1960s, Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin and his team excavated the seeds, preserved due to the aridity of the climate, with Hourani being considered a “biblical wheat” due to its age and significance.

Ancient wheats like Hourani are productive under drought conditions and can be dry-farmed with high success rates. 1,200 gallons of water goes into growing the conventional wheat for five pounds of flour. In comparison, the heritage wheat needed for five pounds of Honoré flour takes 0.05% of this water, or 63 gallons. A write up by the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission highlights the impacts of this use with the statistic that “during the period of 1996-2005, global wheat production used about 15% of the total water ‘footprint’ being used to irrigate all kinds of crops around the world.” Ancient wheats grow with no additional irrigation, making them a viable solution to producing food in water-scarce conditions.

But as I began to research Hourani, I learned the handful of seeds excavated from Masada (and the handfuls grown after that) weren’t the only ones. Small scale farmers in agrarian villages have been consistently growing Hourani wheat for thousands of years. In 1926, motivated by famine and hopes for agricultural solutions, a man named Nikolai Vavilov came to “the Bekaa, a stretch of the Fertile Crescent where wild wheat had recently been identified and promoted as a remarkable source of genes for breeding drought tolerance into bread wheat.” Vavilov was a geneticist for the Soviet Union, and director of the Bureau of Applied Botany in Leningrad. Vavilov’s goal was “to protect the world’s food supply” and his travels took him all over the world. In Bekaa, in search of wheat, Vavilov describes his experience, saying “here I collected for the first time the singular subspecies which I later named ‘Khoranka’ [locally called Hawrani].” But this leaves the question open as to what Vavilov meant by the distinction “for the first time.” And we don’t know what became of the “Hawrani” seeds Vavilov collected: how many times the seed bank regenerated the collection or shared the seeds with farmers, or if the seeds continued to spread, handful by handful, from there. Some of the seeds from Vavilov’s collection have survived decades of political turmoil and are being grown out and tested today.

But all throughout, in Bekaa and other small villages, Hourani has continued to grow. In the early 2000s, Eli Rogosa, leader of the Heritage Grain Conservancy, collected Hourani seed in the Palestinian village of Wadi Fukin, close to Bethlehem. Rogosa has learned traditional wheat farming techniques from Wadi Fukin farmers, and now shares seeds — including Hourani — with others. Rogosa has been building relationships and sharing knowledge with farmers in Palestine and Jordan for years. These farmers have embraced Rogosa’s seeds,“mak[ing] them baladi [—] the Arab word for locally adapted village seed.” Landrace wheats are so place-specific that people are making an effort to seek out and support bakeries using traditional flours. Community organizations, like Al Barakeh Wheat in Amman, Jordan, are growing heritage wheat for traditional bread flour. The Al Barakeh Wheat Project engages volunteers in the community to plant wheat in abandoned lots, and “hopes to revive not only the rich, hearty bread, but also the communal culture that birthed it”

Back in the Bay Area, Honoré’s wheats are going out to bakeries in San Francisco, where customers can purchase their own Hourani loaves. Wheat has continuously adapted to meet humanity’s needs for thousands of years, and humans have adapted to propagate wheat. Where wheat goes, we go. And where we go, wheat follows. After decades of pouring money and resources into constructing standardized agricultural conditions, people are returning to bioregion-specific crop varieties. Conventional farming practices rely on wasteful use of finite resources: a futile, expensive, and destructive approach to agriculture. Instead, working with local landscapes and allowing seeds to adapt to meet the specific conditions and challenges of a place, shows us a path forward to a more sustainable, affordable, and resilient future.

Today, as the climate changes, and global temperatures rise, people are cultivating landrace wheats: reintroducing them into their communities and cultures. Through both the natural selection that occurs when some seeds (hardy, productive in drought, resistant to disease) stick around long enough to harvest, as well as conscious choices of selective harvesting by people (for nutrition, digestibility, and taste) wheat varieties slowly start adapting into the grains of our future. Across the world, in river deltas and dry fields, backyards and former parking lots, this process of natural- and human-selection continues as people slowly share their seeds: handful by handful. In each new place, the seeds encounter dramatically different soils, pests, and changing climates. In each place, people select the very best seeds — the ones from the hardiest and most productive plants — relative to their specific location, challenges, and environment. And as years and years of this occur, over and over again, distinct variations emerge that distinguish successful wheats in one place from those in others. These wheats follow us back into war-torn cities and rust belt towns. They keep changing hands: some by force, most in friendship, as we re-center our communities around these slow, hopeful solutions to feeding people and feeding them well. Today, we call these locally adapted varieties landrace wheats.

written november third 2023 by lucy park

edited april twenty sixth 2026 by chaitan butte