It is really different from usual spelt, which was crossed with wheat and has shorter straws.
Edit: maybe this is interesting to some so I'll write a short paragraph about older varieties. There is also Einkorn and Emmer. Einkorn is considered the ultimate ancestor of all modern wheat varieties. It has been grown 10k years ago and is diploid with only two chromosome sets. Then there is Emmer, which is also ancient and appeared shortly after Einkorn. It is tetraploid and yields two corns per spikelet. If you want to eat like an Egyptian Pharao you can eat bread made out of Emmer ;-)
Rye is entirely different. It is very hardy and frost resistant and can't be baked without sourdough because of the amylase.
At the start of the Neolithic, besides barley, 2 species of wheat were domesticated separately and they evolved through domestication into einkorn wheat and emmer wheat.
Einkorn wheat has always remained a minor crop, while either barley or emmer was the major crop, depending on soil and climate. For instance in the early Ancient Greece barley was the most important, while in the early Roman Republic emmer was the more important. Later, emmer ("far" in Latin) was mostly replaced by durum wheat ("triticum" in Latin), and even later durum wheat was mostly replaced by the hexaploid bread wheat ("siligo" in Latin).
Besides the original emmer and einkorn, other wheat subspecies have appeared many thousands of years later after domestication, either through mutations, like the tetraploid durum wheat (pasta wheat) or through hybridization, like the hexaploid bread wheat (and also the hexaploid spelt wheat).
Why is that? I thought nitrogen is taken in through the roots, then distributed as other ground-based nutrition, regardless of the height.
The main thrust of modern crop breeding has been to create crops that you can successfully get to harvest under high-nutrition environments, without it literally falling over or succumbing to disease due to the turgid, fleshy growth. Even then, if you're applying more than maybe 150kgN/ha, you will be relying on plant growth regulators that inhibit auxin/gibberellin response to keep the plant under control.
In the article it describes the crops as more drought resistant etc.
As in all things commercialized, the tempting easy path weakens in the long term. Mono crops are easier to grow and then the soil gets depleted beyond all recognition. White bread probably outsells whole wheat in America but it is basically devoid of nutritional value.
“Old” means things were scarce because people had to work by hand and oxen. So a failed crop meant a dead family.
White bread is also one of the cheapest sources of energy, though depending on the geographical location either maize or rice may be slightly cheaper sources of energy, but which provide much less protein.
Among cereal products, wheat bread has the highest protein content, except for oats, but oats are much more expensive per protein content.
If you eat white bread in preference to any other starchy products, like those based on rice, maize or potatoes, this ensures a higher protein intake per a given calories content, which enables a lower consumption of more expensive sources of proteins, like those based on legumes or on meat.
White bread cannot be the only food that one eats, because other kinds of foods must provide other nutrients, but it can provide at a minimum cost major fractions of the daily intake of proteins and energy.
After experimenting with many different healthy diets, I have settled on a variant that I consider optimal, where wheat bread that I bake myself at home typically provides about a third of my daily protein intake, so its nutritional value is quite important (and the fact that it is very tasty is a welcome bonus).
The reason for the price difference is unlikely to be due to a more expensive processing technology, but mostly from the economies of large scale processing, because the production of white flour is much greater.
Whole wheat flour has slightly higher amounts of the more valuable nutrients, but due to its high price it is an inefficient way to get those nutrients. A both cheaper and healthier diet can include white bread and larger amounts of other vegetables that are better sources of fiber, vitamins and minerals than whole wheat flour. (E.g. the food that I cook usually includes ingredients like lentils, carrots, parsnips, onions or garlic, broccoli or cauliflower, bell peppers, parsley or dill etc. Spending less on those in order to make more expensive whole wheat bread would provide much less desirable nutrients, so it would be a bad allocation of funds.)
What you mean is that modern wheat was selected for high production per area, which can be attained only when the seeds contain smaller amounts of micronutrients, so that their limited availability will not inhibit growth.
On the other hand, all plant seeds, including wheat seeds, in their dry form consist almost only of nutrients, unlike the other plant parts, which usually have very little nutrient content.
So wheat seeds and also the white flour made of them are very rich in nutrients, but only in 2 kinds of nutrients, starch and protein.
Animals, including humans, need a great number of essential nutrients in order to survive, around 50 different chemical substances.
White bread provides energy and protein that has a good amino-acid profile, except for low amounts of the amino acid lysine.
For complementary proteins and for the very small amounts of micronutrients that are required for a complete food, one must eat something else.
There exists no natural food that has a perfect composition that would allow humans to live eating only that (except mother milk for small babies).
So anyone must eat a combination of different kinds of foods. People who are rich might choose to eat some paleo diet or some keto diet and it is possible to conceive such diets that are healthy.
However most of the humans must allocate a limited budget for food, and within these constraints there are large areas in various places of the Earth, including Europe, where any healthy diet of optimum cost must include a non-negligible fraction of wheat.
For those who unfortunately suffer of celiac disease, a higher cost of food is unavoidable.
Oat however is from the tribe Aveneae.
Nonetheless, these minor varieties of wheat have remained important due to their ability to grow in soil or climate conditions where the more productive modern varieties of wheat fail.
So they were frequently used as "backup" crops, for the cases when bad weather or pests destroyed the main wheat crops.
As said in the parent article, they may become again more important where soil has been made worse by modern agricultural practices.
Maybe you mean it gets more sticky if you cook it too long? But al dente I think it's amazing. It has a nutty taste that works very well with tomatoes if you ask me.
Also larger things like figs and grapes - only after you spend a few years here do you learn that dona olema has one particular fig tree that tastes like melon, and senor rodrigo has a grape vine that makes gigantic (billiard ball sized) ridiculously sweet grapes. This knowledge doesn’t travel to the next valley over, even. Oh, and then you find another vine, the same, climbing a tree in a forest that was a vineyard 70 years ago.
Kinda amazes me how much genetic diversity for crop cultivars there still is, smack under our noses, across Europe.
The roads were, well, challenging. We followed Google Maps directions to one destination, but it's not very good. It led us through a medieval town made of stone where the roads were just a centimetre or so wider than our tiny subcompact rental car and then up a steep hill from which we could actually see our destination on the other side of the village. After letting the scent of overheated clutch and burning transmission oil dissipate, we did a 3-point turn with a sheer drop on either side and no guardrails and then back through the village, hoping the breaks were good and holding our breaths passing between the houses. Locals just stared and pointed the right direction without saying a word (I guess we were not the first strangers to be misled by the Googs). Anyways the roads are harrowing but make for great stories.
Also, we found an old abandoned quinta for sale that we'd love to buy (even has paleolithic rock art on the property) but they're asking 3.5 million euros, which is about 3.5 million euros more than I have for such things.
So I'm not surprised if there are local agricultural treasures. Isn't that the part of Portugal where they speak the country's official second language Mirandese?
Yeah, Miranda is south of us, and pretty metropolitan compared to our particular corner - and here we encounter words and pronunciations we encounter nowhere else in Portugal - not even 30km down the road.
I love it here, but living in the backwater of backwaters has its pros and cons.