SASKATOON – What word goes with all of the following words?
Spelt. Emmer. Einkorn. Polish. Pigmented.
If you answered wheat you’re either a crop scientist, an extremely well-informed farmer or you peeked ahead in the story.
Or you may have attended the annual Cropportunities conference at the University of Saskatchewan, where plant breeder Pierre Hucl told farmers and grain industry officials some things about wheat they probably didn’t know.
Like the fact that some prairie farmers may one day be growing blue wheat.
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That doesn’t mean all the imagery about oceans of grain is about to take on a whole new meaning. The wheat isn’t blue on the outside, but it does contain a layer of blue aleurone beneath the seed coat, similar to the blue corn that’s used to produce specialty corn chips.
There’s not enough blue material in the grain to get blue flour or bake blue bread, Hucl said. But if it was properly processed there’s no reason you couldn’t make blue crackers. It’s a good marketing tool for corn, so why not for wheat?
Unfortunately, government funding agencies haven’t put blue pigmented wheat very high on their research priority list and told Hucl to seek private industry funding.
So he did just that at the Cropportunities conference, telling the audience that if anyone had $10,000 or $15,000 in their pocket, they could buy exclusive rights to blue aleurone wheat.
“I was joking, but I wasn’t joking,” Hucl said later. “I have a line that’s fully developed and we could be multiplying the seed up within 12 months.”
Purple wheat is already commercially produced and processed in New Zealand, where it’s used to add color to multi-grain breads.
Some of the other wheats Hucl talked about are more likely to be appearing in prairie fields. For example, spelt wheat is now imported from Eastern Canada and the U.S. by some specialty millers on the Prairies. Spelt products sell at extremely high prices in health food stores.
Hucl received approval for interim registration earlier this year for an unnamed spring spelt variety and expects some seed could be made available to pedigreed seed growers next spring.
He said specialty wheats have a good, but limited, future.
“The large processors will not be interested. This is for what I call the ‘micromillers’,” he said. “I think we’re talking about tens of thousands of acres for some of these special wheats.”
In fact, a boom in acreage is probably the last thing farmers want, since a limited supply is crucial in maintaining the high price that makes these unusual wheats a potentially attractive alternative crop.
