Italian Farmer Finds Ancient Seven-Eared Wheat in Attic

When Claudio Grossi, a 40-year-old farmer near Parma, Italy, cleaned his attic in the early 1990s, he found an old sack of unidentifiable seeds left by his late great-grandfather, who started the farmstead around 1915. Skeptical that anything could sprout, he shook the dry, cracked kernels into a pile of manure and forgot about them.

To his surprise, the seeds soon grew. One variety was striking: plants six feet high, about twice as tall as commercial wheat. Each stalk bore seven ears of grain instead of one, arranged like fingers around a central ear. The kernels came in yellow, black, red, white and green—sometimes all on the same stem.

A practicing Catholic, Grossi later recognized the plant from the Book of Genesis, where Joseph interprets Pharaoh's dream of seven ears on one stalk. He milled the grain into flour and baked a loaf with a nutty aroma, rich taste and notes of sweetness absent from regular commercial flour.

Grossi believes the wheat is genuinely ancient and wonders why no one farms it today, calling it an answer to some modern problems.

Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing