The Future of Farming Countryfile

Wheat.

It's one of our oldest and most basic food sources.

Entire civilisations were built on the stuff.

It was created by a happy accident of nature,

10,000 years ago,

where three wild grasses combined

to produce this vital food source.

It's gone on to feed the world.

Even today, wheat provides 20% of the calories consumed

by humans worldwide.

Its most common reincarnation - the humble loaf.

No wonder it's known as the staff of life.

And it's easy to take for granted,

but in 50 years,

this could be a luxury that few of us can afford.

Rising population and a changing climate

are putting pressure on the way we farm.

We simply need to be able to produce more food,

and we're turning to science for the answers.

This is where you actually bring the seeds to work on, is it?

Yeah. So, he's actually opening up the seed

with some fine forceps and a scalpel,

and taking the embryo,

and we put that on a plate of nutrients.

Here at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany,

they're looking at ways to tackle the problems of the future.

We need to be doing things differently

if we're going to increase yields enough

to feed the world in the future.

So, we need to be looking at sources of variation

that conventional breeding just can't reach.

We're bridging the gap between some of the basic science,

such as this,

and the commercial breeders who are producing

the varieties that go out on farm.

We've reached a stage now where yields have

plateaued a bit on farm,

and it's quite clear that with the challenges of increasing

global population,

key pesticides are being taken out of use,

and energy - energy costs an awful lot - that we're going to

have to produce more from less in the future.

It's estimated that we'll need to produce more wheat

in the next 50 years than we've produced in the previous 10,000.

So, clearly, we need step changes.

We need to almost redesign the wheat plant.

But now Countryfile can exclusively reveal a major breakthrough.

Dr Howell's team have redesigned the wheat plant

by going back to its roots.

We're trying to actually copy that lucky chance

that happened 10,000 years ago.

So, we're taking a large collection of these goatgrasses

and we're crossing them with -

this is modern pasta wheat - to produce this synthetic wheat.

-Is this a GM technology?

-No, no. This is conventional breeding.

We're making the same crosses that normal breeders would make,

only we're just using much wilder species.

In simple terms, they're crossing an ancient but hardy wild grass

with a domestic wheat plant.

This makes synthetic wheat.

This synthetic wheat then provides the building block

for breeding new, improved wheat varieties.

Left to itself, this cross would die,

so they're quite literally giving nature a helping hand.

So, you're following that natural, historic journey of wheat but,

if you like, trying to improve it,

so you get some of the qualities of this goatgrass into wheat today.

Absolutely, yeah. So, we think that

there are some untapped variations for things

like drought tolerance, insect resistance, disease resistance.

And, we're beginning to think now,

some excellent yield improvements, as well.

The results have been extraordinary -

far exceeding their expectations.

We were expecting to see the diversity increased,

we were expecting to see disease resistance,

but what we weren't expecting was so much of a yield increase.

In tests last year, the best of these actually out-yielded

the cultivated parent by more than 30%.

Wow. I mean, how surprised were you by that?

I double-checked the results - let's just say that.