LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The U.S. is one of the world's major exporters of wheat. Climate change is putting that crop at risk, so researchers are trying to find ways to make it more resilient and delicious. For NPR's Climate Solutions Week, we're looking at how the climate affects what we eat and how what we eat affects the climate. NPR's Alejandra Borunda from the climate desk visited a farm in the Pacific Northwest.
ALEJANDRA BORUNDA, BYLINE: Farmer Keith Kisler climbs up a stepladder next to a tall metal funnel. He pours kernels of purple and brown and golden wheat into it.
(SOUNDBITE OF POURING WHEAT)
BORUNDA: Then it gets ground into flour between two massive gray stones.
(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINE WHIRRING)
BORUNDA: And that flour goes into a barrel and is wheeled next door to the farm's bakery, where it's turned into delicious bread ready to be sliced and eaten.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNIFE SLICING THROUGH BREAD)
BORUNDA: Keith and his wife, Crystie, run Chimacum Valley Grainery on Washington's lush green Olympic Peninsula. They specialize in grains like wheat on their 150 acres, and they've embraced a creative approach. It's helping them get through increasingly weird and intense weather brought on by human-caused climate change. Their strategy is to grow an incredible diversity of grains. So when Crystie looks out at their narrow valley, it looks like...
CRYSTIE KISLER: A sort of crazy patchwork quilt.
BORUNDA: That's because it is.
C KISLER: How many different crops are out here or will be out here? Like...
KEITH KISLER: About 13 to 14...
C KISLER: Yeah.
K KISLER: ...Of different varieties.
BORUNDA: Most of the Kislers' grains were developed by the Washington State University Breadlab. That's a group of scientists who are also bakers. And they're totally obsessed with finding ways to make grains like wheat more resilient to climate risks and taste better.
STEPHEN JONES: I and everyone else, we breed. We bake with it. We mill it. We do the whole process.
BORUNDA: That's wheat scientist and baker Stephen Jones. He led the lab for years until he retired this summer. He was smitten by love for wheat back in the 1970s in agricultural college. But at that point, the industry was hyperfocused on increasing yield, or how much wheat could be grown. Jones cared about yield, but he was also looking for something more, like how to bring more diversity into farmers' fields.
JONES: It's important from a resilience standpoint, but also, we don't dismiss the beauty of it and the flavors.
BORUNDA: That whole process starts at farms like Keith and Crystie's. Jones has worked with them to develop a wheat mix called the climate blend. It's a mix of hardy wheats that thrives in increasingly volatile climate conditions.
K KISLER: For me, growing it in the field, it is an amazingly stable crop.
BORUNDA: Its resilience has been tested in the past few years. In 2021, an unprecedented heat dome drove some of the hottest weather ever recorded in the Pacific Northwest. Many farms struggled and lost crops, but Keith and Crystie were fine.
K KISLER: Because most of everything I'm growing is what Steve - Dr. Jones is putting out. It's, like, this really high-diversity genetics. So for me, it's like, eh, heat dome - whatever.
BORUNDA: Humans have cultivated wheat for thousands of years, and there used to be enormous genetic variation. Jones says that helped crops withstand extreme weather.
JONES: They had tall. They had short. They had all different types of things. And what was hidden in that variation was the ability to adapt to a situation.
BORUNDA: But in the past century or so, agricultural policy and economics have pushed farmers towards planting and producing more uniform crops.
JONES: If you went into one of the 45 million acres of wheat in this country and you looked at that field, it's basically genetically identical. OK, that's cool, right? But it's not smart.
BORUNDA: Drought, heat waves, insects, disease - they're all bigger risks for a more uniform crop, and it's not theoretical. A recent study found that in 2022, drought slashed wheat yields in major grain regions of the U.S. by nearly 40%. That's as bad as the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Jones says that points to a strategy.
JONES: If we have a chaotic climate, our strategy is to have genetic chaos in the field to fight back with - chaos with chaos.
BORUNDA: So far, the theory is working, at least on Keith and Crystie Kisler's farm. The wheat is healthy and produces as much as conventionally grown wheat. The flour is silky and rich, and the bread baked in a wood oven is delicious.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNIFE SLICING BREAD)
BORUNDA: Believe me - I ate nearly a whole loaf.
From the Chimacum Valley, I'm Alejandra Borunda for NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGE JACKSON'S "TOWN'S END") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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