Why ‘chaos wheat’ may be the future of bread

It’s time to look beyond all-purpose flour.

Column by Michael J. Coren

September 17, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Farms were once a riot of biodiversity. A single field might have contained five different varieties of corn, a mix of oats and barley or whatever jumble of grains suited farmers from France to Ethiopia.

These offered a hedge against hardship: plant mixes in the field shifted with the weather. More rye one year, less wheat another. The French even had names for such flours with shifting ratios of grains, from “grande meteil” to “ble ramé,” each one rising into a delicious bread all its own.

But when industrial roller mills arrived in the late 1800s, the supply chain coalesced around white bread virtually overnight, writes Stephen Jones, founder of the Breadlab at Washington State University. The new mills meant white flour could be produced at enormous scale for low cost. Professional wheat breeders developed strains for refined white flour, stripped of its nutrient-rich germ, which could be stored longer. In 1890, 90 percent of U.S. households baked their bread at home. Forty years later, 90 percent were buying mass-produced white bread instead.

This transition to monoculture helped drive a fourfold increase in U.S. wheat yields. It also created a food system vulnerable to climate shocks and reliant on enormous inputs of agrochemicals. Today, global grain production emits more greenhouse gases than Russia, Brazil and Germany combined, while researchers in the journal Nature estimate that wheat yields in North America could fall 1 to 10 percent for every degree of warming without adaptation.

So I was intrigued when I saw King Arthur’s “climate blend” flour in the baking section of my supermarket. Could it be the vanguard of a new breed of crops making their way into everyday products?

I bought the flour for my kitchen. And I also obtained my own wheat seed climate blend from the Breadlab — a mix of Salish blue, a perennial released in 2021, as well as hardier varieties developed over the last few decades.

I wanted to see what it’s like to grow a wheat crop in my own backyard — and share it with readers around the world to hear about their experiences. Here’s what I learned trying to grow what the Breadlab calls “chaos wheat,” and why we still have a long row to hoe before the food system is on a sustainable path.

Baking bread in a hotter world

Jones spent years breeding commercial wheat strains for the grain industry. Almost all his work was focused on enhancing wheat’s starchy white interior, or endosperm. Disillusioned with commodity agriculture, he started the Breadlab at Washington State University in 2009 to focus on smaller farmers.

He calls his approach chaos wheat, a genetic gamble deploying diversity against a volatile world. The lab’s varieties — developed by painstakingly crossing one wheat plant with another — balance yield, flavor and resilience. The results don’t yield as much white flour as conventional varieties, but field tests show the plants offer a mix of resistance to drought, pests and volatile weather, while requiring less water, fertilizer and agrochemicals.

“We present genetic chaos in a field,” says Jones, “so [the plants] can deal with chaotic events.”

Convincing large-scale farmers was another matter. Of the 47 million acres of wheat planted across the United States, experts I interviewed said very few have been planted with varieties like those produced by the Breadlab. “I tried to change the commodity system,” admits Jones, who served as director of the Breadlab until earlier this year. “You just can’t.”

So he turned to smaller farmers looking for ways of growing grain, and premium brands that could turn the flour into higher-priced products, as an alternative that’s “replicable, rather than scalable.” While more labor intensive — sometimes it requires years to fine-tune wheat blends for specific environments — a growing number are embracing the approach as part of the regenerative agriculture movement seeking to improve soil health and cut carbon emissions.

King Arthur Baking Company, the employee-owned company that released its Climate Blend Flour last year, is probably the most well known. The blend of wheat varieties, including a perennial capable of growing for years rather than being replanted every season, is part of King Arthur’s push to source 100 percent of its flour from “regeneratively grown wheat” by 2030. The result, says King Arthur, is a rich, nutty flour that can work in any whole-wheat recipe (something I confirmed in my own muffins).

The scale so far is tiny (just 120 acres), and prices are higher: A one-pound bag of Climate Blend Flour sells for $2.98, compared with $1.12 for standard whole wheat. But the company says it hopes to drive down costs as it assesses the climate benefits. “We believe in this work and understand it needs to be a long-term commitment,” Janis Abbingsole, the chief operating officer at King Arthur Baking Company, wrote in an email. “We need to allow time to listen to our growers and support them as they test and learn.”

Others are joining them, says Reniera O’Donnell, the food lead at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing waste. While most are premium brands, smaller suppliers and local markets, big names are entering the space: Nestlé plans to source half of its key ingredients from regenerative farming by 2030, while Walmart, PepsiCo, Unilever and Kellanova are in a program to reduce the impact of U.S. soy and corn farming.

Embracing natural chaos

Chaos wheat is really an ancient strategy farmers have always employed to cope with uncertainty, says Alex McAlvay, an ethnobotanist at the New York Botanical Garden. A mix of different species and varieties, known as maslins, offered an insurance policy: plants compete less with one another for soil resources, and their diverse genetics ensured at least some varieties thrived even when conditions were hard.

Researchers studying maslins in the few places where they’re still grown, such as Ethiopia and Eastern Europe, have found they can offer 2 to 3 percent higher yields, more reliable productivity and outperform monocultures during tough years. But the No. 1 reason farmers told McAlvay they still grow maslins? Taste and texture.

The problem, McAlvay says, is that mixed grains are precisely the opposite of what today’s industrial food chain demands: uniform grains optimized for Wonder Bread. But McAlvay predicts climate change means maslins’ weakness will become their strength. Models predict extreme heat and drought will shrink the size of wheat kernels and harvests in today’s fields even as wheat cultivation moves farther north.

“People will have to pivot to strategies people have used for thousands of years for resilience,” says McAlvay, “rather than just a really good yield in a really good year.”

Will it work?

Any climate solution in agriculture must roll out across millions of square miles of farmland within two to three decades, argues Kenneth Cassman, an agronomist with the University of Nebraska. “Anything else,” he adds, “you’re really talking about working on a food system for the wealthy who can afford to think about these details of the food they eat.”

Today’s climate blend wheat, at least for now, he argues, doesn’t pass the test. Customized blends that take years to fine-tune by region can’t be planted fast enough to bring down global emissions, he argues. Instead, he foresees most progress arriving through the same process that delivered most of the remarkable agricultural advances of the last century: continuous, incremental improvement of existing crops, methods and decisions that go into every step of modern farming, particularly as a new generation of data-driven, precision agriculture takes root. “We’re excellent at putting together lots of small innovations to get the change we need,” he says.

Could fields of diverse, climate-friendly wheat someday be one of those innovations? Perhaps, Cassman says, if they can advance fast enough.

For Jones, the Breadlab is just the beginning of applying modern science to the ancient successful strategy of resilient biodiversity, a tiny down payment relative to the billions of dollars plowed into conventional agricultural research. “Imagine if we … invested in it,” he says. “The research has to be there and you have to do it.”

Even if you could accelerate the necessary improvements, Cassman cautions, the problem may not even be in the field. “After 50 years in my career, I’ve seen that if things can be done by some entrepreneurial farmer … there’s a reason they didn’t scale,” he says. “The challenge is you have to have a market for it.”

Do this at home

I was ready to be that market. So I picked up a bag of King Arthur’s Climate Blend Flour and made two pans of whole-wheat muffins with my wife. With the muffins hardly out of the oven, my 2-year-old gave his enthusiastic stamp of approval, devouring most of them before we could sample them ourselves. They didn’t last three days.

This may be the easiest climate solution everyone can do right now: Switch to eating more whole wheat. Eating the most nutritious part of the wheat kernel is not just healthier, Cassman suggests, it’s far less wasteful, shaving off 20 to 25 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions and land, water, fertilizer and pesticide use from the grains we eat, estimates the Boston Consulting Group. Breadlab also offers a recipe for the “approachable loaf,” a fast, easy way to make fresh whole wheat bread part of your life at home.

As for growing my own wheat, my attempts on the sandy, windswept cliffs of San Francisco were less successful. The dunes behind my house grow mostly sour grass and pine trees, and what little wheat I raised was stunted by the city’s foggy summer.

Anticipating Karl the Fog, I sent out 16 packets of Breadlab’s chaos wheat to readers from Argentina to Arlington, Va., who volunteered to grow them. Over the following months, tales of success and hardship trickled in. Spring shoots battled drought, rodents, deer and withering heat. But a portion of the wheat withstood almost all of them.

Perhaps most successful were Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang of Forest Knolls, Calif. Their plot of wheat endured California’s record-breaking summer heat and hungry deer. After a modest harvest in July, Judith used a spice grinder to mill the wheat and invited her three grandchildren (and friends) to feast on the grains of their labor.

“Our pancakes were fried in a bit of butter and oil then served up with more butter, honey, and maple syrup,” wrote Judith. “Everyone agreed that they were healthy-delicious. And would they do it again? YOU BETCHA!”