Seven Ears on a Stem

The Attic Discovery

Eli: Early nineteen-nineties, a hamlet in the hills outside Parma. Claudio Grossi is clearing out his attic and finds an old sack of seeds. Reportedly no label, no planting instructions, nothing to say how old they are. There's little reason to expect much from them. So he tosses them onto a pile of manure and forgets about them. Then they sprout. Several kinds of wheat, white, red and black ears, more than two metres tall, he says. And one plant sends up a single stem carrying seven ears.

Mara: The listener who wrote in asked it plainly: how did they turn out to be an ancient grain that could fix modern farming problems? It's Wednesday, October 28th, and today's angle is why an ancient grain's greatest strengths might also be its undoing.

Eli: That seven-eared stalk is where it starts. From the manure heap it goes into a kitchen, a field in early June, a flour mill and a university trial plot. The hope pinned on it is simple: that a forgotten attic grain could help wean farming off its chemicals. Whether it can is still open.

Mara: Grossi's own first read was that the plant was faulty. He's said he took that branched ear, unlike all the others, for a defect. Then he found its name: Grano del Miracolo, miracle wheat. Grossi says it's the grain spoken of in the Bible, the one brought from Egypt. Examinations at the University of Parma reportedly placed it in Triticum turgidum, plump wheat, and it's catalogued in the regional register as a durum wheat, with its own code. The branched type is known as a poulard wheat: very tall, with ears that fan out into a little pyramid.

Eli: So, a tall, branching old cousin of pasta wheat. Nothing a modern breeder built.

Mara: Older than any breeder. A Roman natural historian wrote it up as Triticum ramosum, branched wheat.

Eli: And farmers around Parma remember it growing there since at least the early nineteen-hundreds. That makes it a landrace: a local variety shaped by farmers saving and resowing their best seed, year after year, rather than one bought from a breeder. And here's the gap. Grossi linked those seven ears to older traditions, and he says his grandfather left him this grain. But a stalk isn't a history. Where and when the grain began is still unknown, and nobody has reported dating the seeds from his sack. So far it's a striking plant with a famous name. What it can actually do in a field is Mara's half of this.

From Soil to Oven

Mara: In the field, Grossi says, it earned its keep. By his account it got through droughts better than the commercial wheats he knew. That two-metre height does real work here: the stalks grow tall enough to throw shade over the weeds underneath. And he says it didn't need the fertiliser and herbicide those modern wheats lean on. Reports on other old wheat populations describe the same knack for crowding out weeds. For a farm trying to spray less, that's the whole pitch.

Eli: A field that needs no spray still has to turn into bread. Grossi tested that himself. He harvested the grain, milled it into flour and baked a loaf in his own kitchen. The dough rose poorly next to commercial-wheat dough. But as it baked, he noticed a strong, nutty aroma, and he says the bread tasted deeper than he expected, with a sweetness he didn't find in ordinary commercial flour. A good loaf. Just not a straight swap for the flour on a supermarket shelf.

Mara: The rise depends on the gluten network, a stretchy protein web that traps gas so dough puffs up. This grain carries less gluten, though nobody's put a number on it, and one piece of research behind that wasn't peer-reviewed. Beniamino Perobelli, a sustainability manager who discussed those findings, called the extra minerals and non-gluten proteins very pleasant surprises.

Eli: So in the early two-thousands, as Grossi tells it, he started working with an older local baker who still kneaded by hand. They tried smaller batches. They tried taller wicker baskets to hold the dough up. And they found that kneading it less helped it keep its shape.

Mara: So the bread can be coaxed into shape, a few hand-made loaves at a time. A whole field standing up to summer weather is a different test.

The Summer Collapse

Eli: Early June. A blogger who's planning a visit gets Grossi on the phone. He tells her to hurry if she wants to see the wheat, because it won't be long before it lodges. Lodging is when tall stalks get bent or knocked flat, usually by wind and rain, before the grain's ripe. Grossi says the height is a liability: heavy wind, rain or hail can flip the stems over and ruin a harvest. So he manages the tall wheat's tendency to lodge by planting it alongside shorter varieties for physical support.

Mara: So the height that shades out the weeds is the height that falls over.

Eli: Go back to that stalk on the manure heap, seven ears on one stem. It's why Grossi chased this grain, and now it needs a crutch. None of this is new, either. In 1900 the Italian farm journal L'Italia agricola called miracle wheat not very hardy and often hurt by winter. It wanted rich soil, ripened late and tended to degenerate. And it was hard to thresh, separating the grain from the straw, because the ears come off the stalks too easily.

Mara: That's roughly when Italy turned away from it. After becoming prime minister in 1922, Benito Mussolini launched what became the Battle of Wheat, a campaign to 'free the Italian people from the slavery of foreign bread' by pushing higher-yielding varieties. Breeding moved toward shorter plants with stiff stems that resist lodging. Old wheats can stand about thirty centimetres taller than modern ones. And one account suggests that height may be exactly why miracle wheat fell out of favour.

Eli: And the shorter wheats pay. Pier Luigi Rossi puts modern wheat at about double the old varieties' yield per hectare. Grossi is farming the very trait Italy bred out.

Mara: What nobody has shown yet is whether a wheat that needs a crutch to stand can pay for the land it stands on. That's the mill's problem, and Eli has the mill.

The Commercial Bottleneck

Eli: The mill is Molino Grassi, and it teamed up with Grossi on a wheat Italy had bred away from a century before. Its technicians objected at first. The flours were too weak and hard to work, they said, with productivity of one to five against traditional wheat. Grossi says the flour costs a bit more because it needs slower, more careful processing. Milling started on the eleventh of October, 2013.

Mara: One to five. Roughly a fifth of what the same field of modern wheat gives.

Eli: And they sold it anyway. The flour went to bakers, restaurants and home cooks, in Italy and abroad, and in 2014 it reached the United States for the first time. The man with the manure heap is now described as the custodian of an old variety.

Mara: A specialty grain isn't necessarily a delicate one, though, not in a drought. Francesco Sottile, who's based in Sicily, says 2024 brought one of the island's worst droughts in thirty-five to forty years. Many commercial wheat growers walked away from their fields that April. Some smaller farmers growing heritage grains, he says, still harvested.

Eli: Bringing in a harvest isn't the same as bringing in a big one.

Mara: No, and Sicily's farm accounts show both halves. Between 2013 and 2017, durum landraces there yielded about a quarter less than standard varieties. Their costs ran a little higher. But they sold for nearly double the price, and the margin per hectare came out around three times bigger.

Eli: So the sums only work when buyers pay extra for fewer sacks. That's the corner of the market where Grossi's flour lives.

Not a Savior, but a Shield

Mara: The newest chapter runs through the University of Bologna. Grossi gave researchers there seed samples, and they've run field trials and genetic tests on the grain. One report says the testing confirmed an ancient landrace, likely grown in the region centuries ago; that's a single, contested claim. If the trials show the variety is distinct and stable, the group plans to seek seed-catalog registration, Italy's official listing that certifies a variety as distinct, uniform and stable so its seed can be sold. That evaluation usually takes several growing seasons.

Eli: A listing makes the seed legal to sell. It doesn't close Sicily's yield gap.

Mara: Read the evidence one way and Grossi is joined by Francesco Sottile, Massimo Fiorani and Tzion Fahima: old grains carry genetic diversity, need fewer chemical inputs and hold up better in extreme weather. The drought harvests in Sicily are their kind of evidence.

Eli: Read it the other way and it's Cristina Piazza, Pier Luigi Rossi, and Grossi again: these grains yield far less, lodge easily and can't supply the volumes a staple has to. The seven ears and the hint of toughness are what drew interest in modern uses. Grossi sees the wheat as relevant to today's problems, though nobody's pointed to one problem it solves on its own. Its yield and its baking haven't been proven at scale. The old talk of miraculous harvests was always a hope, never a measurement.

Mara: Grossi sits in both camps: praising its toughness while propping it up.

Eli: So the attic seeds turned out to be miracle wheat. By Grossi's account it rides out drought and weeds without chemicals. But it lodges, makes weak dough and yields about a fifth of modern wheat, which keeps it in specialty flour rather than replacing industrial wheat. One report says the find isn't proof that a single ancient grain can solve the climate crisis or replace modern wheat; its importance lies in the genetic diversity and farming knowledge it brings back. That's still argued over, and promise in old varieties doesn't mean every ancient grain wins everywhere.

Mara: Grossi planted unidentified attic seeds despite having little reason to expect much from them. They're now a flour sold on two continents, and maybe one day an entry in the national catalogue. Three things to watch. Whether Bologna's trials produce a formal pedigree and hard stress-tolerance figures. Whether anyone ever carbon-dates the seeds from that attic. And whether Italy grants the registration that would let the grain be grown legally on a wider scale.

Eli: Dig into poulard wheat.

Mara: And follow science with us.

Eli: That's where we'll leave it. I'm Eli.

Mara: And I'm Mara. Thanks for listening. Until next time on Angle.