feature
COULD ANCIENT WHEAT
With modern wheat in short
supply and lacking genetic
diversity and resilience, Israeli
seed detectives are amassing a
treasure of ancient cultivars.

ELANA SHAP | ISRAEL21C
16 FEBRUARY 2, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
A quarter of the world’s food comes from just one crop. It grows
abundantly in Russia and Ukraine, but war has obstructed the
supply chain.

Add to this the eff ects of climate change, and a major food crisis
seems inevitable.

One solution could be lying in a seed collection housed in the
Israel Plant Gene Bank of the Volcani Center Agricultural Research
Organization near Tel Aviv.

“We have built up a collection of over 900 wheat lines. This is a
massive and rich collection compared to banks in other parts of the
world,” Volcani researcher Sivan Frenkin said. “It’s really a toolbox
for the cultivation and improvement of future wheat varieties, to
cope with climate change or crop diseases like wheat rust.”
Since the 1950s, wheat has been plentiful due to the cultivation
of modern varieties that produce high yields. Today, it is one of
three staple foods (aside from rice and maize) and accounts for the
nutrition and income of more than 4 billion people worldwide.

So where does the problem lie?
Despite its success in feeding the world, modern wheat lacks
genetic diversity and is not resilient enough to withstand droughts,
fl oods and pests. And this is where ancient wheat lines (landraces)
from Israel have a distinct advantage.

A genetic treasure
“The Near East climate ranges from arid to Mediterranean, under
which local wheat landraces have been grown for millennia,
assumingly accumulating a unique repertoire of genetic adaptations,”
states Frenkin, a Ph.D. candidate researching restoration of lost
genetic diversity of wheat landraces from Israel.

Roi Ben David, director of agricultural research at the Volcani
Center, concurred: “Israel is geographically sitting on a genetic
treasure. These are wheat lines that go back to the beginning of
agriculture where cultivation of wheat started.”
New wheat varieties could also counter the eff ects of the current
disruption to the supply chain. The war in Ukraine, he estimated,
has caused the loss of wheat equivalent to that consumed by 151
million people in an average year. Floods in India have also become
a regular occurrence and in the past few seasons have seen large
areas of wheat crops destroyed.

Wheat: Stepanyda; Background: Larysa Pashkevich//iStock/Getty Images
Be the Solution
to the World’s
Food Crisis?



Benedictus: Courtesy of Volcani Center; Green wheat: Credit: Pixabay; Emmer wheat: Wikimedia Commons;
Einkorn wheat: Kurt Stueber/Wikimedia Commons
“The genetic variations will enable the
improvement of wheat year to year to meet the
growing demand,” Ben David said.

The Volcani’s “Land of Wheat” initiative was
set up by Ben David in 2015 together with the
Plant Gene Bank under Einav Mayzlish-Gati and
Bizi Goldberg, an independent consultant in the
fi eld of traditional wheat — the prime aim being to
conserve, restore and characterize Israel’s local
and traditional wheat varieties.

“We started from scratch,” Ben David said. “Past
collections were fragmented and not taken care
of, which put it at high risk. Over the last seven
years, we have built up a very organized and
diverse bank.”
One of the team’s initial tasks was to scour the
databases of gene bank collections worldwide
looking for landraces that had grown in ancient
and traditional Israel agriculture. Detective work
included fi nding collections that had samples with
“names related to the traditional names of lines in
our region and that we knew had been collected
here,” Frenkin said.

Some of the seeds located were stored abroad
for decades, including specimens brought back
to Israel from St. Petersburg, where Russian seed
bank founder Nikolai Vavilov had amassed a
collection of ancient wheat seeds brought from his
visit to Israel in 1926.

Other important specimens were found in
institutions around the state of Israel and even in
storage at Volcani itself.

Part of the latter, said Mayzlish-Gati, is one of
the last collections conducted in the 1980s by the
Volcani’s Yaakov Matitya.

His research was documented in little notebooks
and covered trips he made throughout the country
from the Golan Heights to the Sinai Desert. These
seeds were moved to more optimum conditions at
a temperature of minus-20 degrees.

Introducing Aviv
Once the collection was fully genotyped, it was
then time to put the 900 samples to the test to
“see what we have in our hands. It was exciting,”
Frenkin said.

Propagation was carried out during two seasons
in two very diff erent climactic regions: in Volcani’s
net-houses in the center of the country with its
Mediterranean climate; and at its Gilat Experimental
Station in the semi-arid northern part of the
Negev Desert.

Some lines, including a batch collected in the
1970s, didn’t succeed in germinating, but Frenkin
is not disappointed.

“We cannot be nostalgic and think the past
was much better than the present. The modern
varieties are excellent cultivars and give high
yields, sometimes double that to landraces.

But they don’t have options for improvement.

Our project will enrich the resource of genetic
traits.” The institute has engineered a wheat strain,
named Aviv, with an ultra-short life cycle. It fl owers
early in the cooler months of January and February
to escape heat and possible drought later in the
year. Not yet economically viable for farmers,
Aviv has benefi ts for those cultivating wheat in
dry climates.

Another strain that has been developed is Mizpor
37, a late-fl owering variety that is more disease
resistant and is suitable for animal feed.

Benedictus, a wheat cultivar
developed at the Volcani
Center. Artisanal bread
Testing the fl avor, texture and aroma of bread
baked with promising ancient wheat strains is also
part of the Land of Wheat project.

To that end, a baking and tasting panel was
recently organized with four artisanal bakers and
Stybel Flour Mills, one of the largest suppliers of fl our
in Israel.

One of the bakers, Hagay Ben Yehuda, said he
was fortunate that his interest in ancient wheat
strains Einkorn and Emmer (“the grandmother and
grandfather of all the wheat in the world”) coincided
with the Volcani wheat researchers’ outreach to
bakers working with traditional methods.

Together with a farmer in the Galilee, Ben
Yehuda has planted seeds of indigenous, ancient
wheat strains obtained from the Volcani bank.

Ben Yehuda noted that ancient strains of wheat
are low in gluten and high in minerals and vitamins.

But his experience has not always been favorable.

“Emmer wheat had no interesting fl avors and
was disappointing. But Einkorn was a revolution of
fl avors that hits you with each bite.”
This is probably why his country-style bread,
which mixes 30% Einkorn fl our with both spelt and
rye, is a favorite among his customers at Hagay
Ve’ha-lehem (Hagay Bread) on Kibbutz Einav.

While it is invigorating to taste ancient wheat
varieties, breeding new ones to face the immense
challenges will take time, “10 years at the earliest,”
Ben David predicted. ■
Elana Shap has covered a wide range of subjects
for print and digital outlets in Israel and abroad,
including The Jerusalem Post, Jerusalem Report,
The Forward and Aish.com. Born in South Africa,
she has lived in Israel since 1991.

Wild green wheat
Cultivated emmer wheat
Einkorn wheat
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