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Do you eat bread? Pay attention to the wheat harvest. Street Prophets Coffee Hour [1]

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Date: 2023-07-02  

Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour, the place where politics meets up with religion, nature, food, art, and life. Come in, have a cuppa and a cookie (or three!) and join us.

Remember Goldie Hawn in Butterflies are Free? “Freedom is the most important thing in the world to me—after I’ve eaten.” There may be something to think about here, if you read the daily Kansas wheat report. And things aren’t all that different in other states. I don’t know how the Ukraine wheat harvest is going, with the war situation, but it’s worth paying attention to, also, since Ukraine has supplied such a large part of wheat on the world market.

Within the last week, farmers here have done their first cut of winter wheat. For those not familiar with wheat harvest, the first cut is the best one, although second cuts and even third cuts can be good, too, if much smaller. Results are all over the place. One farmer may have 80-90% of their fields producing reasonably well, at 80-90% of average, with good to excellent wheat quality: bushels per acre, weight of a bushel, moisture content, protein content (some are reporting higher protein count than usual, which is what you need for bread, although that protein is the gluten some people can’t tolerate). A farmer nearby may have abandoned 90% of their fields and not sprayed the rest, resulting in a lot of weeds. Those fields have to be harvested with older style equipment, better able to deal with tall weeds. And in parts of the state, and other states, entire crops have failed. In the Wichita area and the southwest part of Kansas, most farmers abandoned their fields altogether.

Wheat (or any other crop) fields are abandoned because of the severe drought we’ve had. Not enough moisture over the winter in areas already too dry means the wheat wasn’t going to produce enough to justify tilling and spraying as it grew, so it was turned under and, if the farmer was smart, they had crop insurance to collect. So I’m not worried about most farmers’ financial stability. But no wheat to sell means less flour on the market. Less flour means higher prices for what gets to the market.

(Winter wheat is the “hard” wheat with high protein content suitable for bread because of how it will rise. Spring wheat is “soft” wheat, for cake flour or cooking as a grain, with very low protein. All-purpose flour is a mix of the two.)

Surprisingly, some of the better yields are coming from wheat with a shorter growing season. Farmers who couldn’t get to their fields at the usual planting time because of the weather planted short-season wheat. You’re familiar with the concept if you do home vegetable gardening. What’s listed in the seed catalogues as “early” corn is actually corn with a shorter growing season. It produces smaller ears, and fewer of them, but it’s good if you can’t plant on time or if you want to pick your corn, as it says, “early”. Short-season wheat isn’t the first choice, but it’s been a good thing to fall back on.

I used to make loaves of bread when I had a family. Potato bread was the favorite for most things, but cheese and onion bread is great for sandwiches. Now, I make ciabatta rolls in winter. But even before most people thought about climate change seriously, I was aware of it. I participated in the very first Earth Day in 1970 (we wore black armbands to signal mourning the loss of the planet). I have always spaced baking, or anything that will heat the house, for cool days. And the ciabatta recipe goes back in the box until fall. Now, if I bake anything at all, it’s biscuits in the air fryer, early in the morning. The air fryer doesn’t release heat into the house the way a toaster oven or large oven will do, biscuits cook in 8-10 minutes, and who needs all those carbs, anyway?

If you want to make biscuits that are quick and easy—and you have a low-energy air fryer—check out Missouri mix, a homemade version of Bisquick. Or, do the old fashioned thing of mixing cream into self-rising flour.

And if you have space and are serious about prepping, flour stores well in the freezer. Stock up, if you’re so inclined.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/2/2178882/-Do-you-eat-bread-Pay-attention-to-the-wheat-harvest-Street-Prophets-Coffee-Hour

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