Alerted by a tweet from Pat Heslop-Harrison, I delved into British Pathé’s new Youtube archive of 85,000 historical films. The following little gem turned up when I searched for wheat.
I shared it with my go-to guy on wheat genetic resources, and he had this to say:
Multi-branched spikes have been investigated by a number of researchers (including Cal Qualset from whom we have germplasm he developed). It’s interesting to see farmers harvesting a variety with the trait. It seems an obvious way to increase yield (make the wheat spike into a sorghum-like inflorescence) but results have not been as encouraging as the morphology suggests.
Have fun searching for your favourite crops.