When most people think of grain, they think of a field with a single type of vegetation. But new research shows that crops made up of mixed grains are more resilient and yield higher than conventional crops.
First, to be clear, I’m not talking about growing different grains such as wheat and rye in separate rows in one field.
Instead, it refers to a crop known as maslin, in which the seeds of two (or more) grains are actually mixed and sown. The result is a crop in which different types of plants are mixed with each other. They are harvested together, processed together, and ground together into multigrain flour.
According to Cornell University scientists, maslin crops have actually been around for over 3,000 years. And while it is still utilized in places such as Eritrea, India, Georgia, Greece, Sudan and Ethiopia, it is largely unknown in most countries of the world. Standard, predictable fashion.
Alex McAlvay/New York Botanical Garden
So what’s so great about Maslin?
The Cornell University team says that even if weather, pests, or other factors adversely affect one grain type in such crops, other types of grains are likely to fare better. . This means that farmers eventually get a harvestable crop at the end of the growing season – that crop consists of a relatively small amount of one grain and a larger amount of the other.
That ratio is also present in the leftover grain used to sow the next year’s crop. This factor allows muslin to evolve rapidly in that the proportion of grain types is continuously adjusted according to growing conditions. limited to Changes in these conditions follow trends that flow from one year to the next, so the annual maslin ratio should be optimized for the upcoming growing season.
As an added bonus, the grains of one maslin crop differ in physical characteristics such as height and root depth, so neighboring plants of different types are in direct competition with each other for resources such as soil moisture and nutrients. Therefore, it is reported to grow better than if it were planted only with the same type of grain.
In fact, researchers found that Eritrean wheat maslin mixed with barley produced 20% more wheat and 11% more barley compared to wheat-only and barley-only crops.
Alex McAlvay/New York Botanical Garden
“Subsistence farmers around the world have been managing and mitigating risk on their farms for thousands of years, and to do so, have developed strategies adapted to these regions. A researcher at the New York Botanical Garden: “There’s a lot we can learn from them, especially now, in the age of climate change.”
The paper on this research, which Cornell University graduate Morgan Ruell began while studying farming in Ethiopia, is published in the journal. Agriculture for Sustainable Development.
Source: Cornell University
