Can better bread be a climate change solution? These bakers think so

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It’s a drizzly, cold spring day outside, but inside the Washington State University Breadlab in the Skagit Valley, richly scented steam billows out of a toasty commercial oven as baker Mel Darbyshire pulls out a tray of puffy mahogany loaves of bread.

“They look excellent,” she says, inhaling and examining their shiny, domed crusts. She pops one out of its tin and cuts into it. The slice looks exactly like the bread emoji — fluffy-topped and perfectly shaped — only this bread is a rich, warm brown on the inside.

That’s because it’s made from 100% whole wheat flour. And not just any whole wheat: a mix of different types of wheat called a “Climate Blend,” developed specifically to withstand the increasingly intense weather brought on by human-caused climate change. Both of those factors make this loaf a paragon for the future and a symbol of what bread can be in a climate-changed future.

On top of that, “it tastes amazing,” says Darbyshire.

Keeping wheat alive and ready to thrive

The perfect, puffy loaf of bread that came out of the Breadlab oven is the culmination of years of research, both agricultural and baking-centric. Its origins can be traced back to 2009, when wheat breeder and longtime home baker Stephen Jones started the Bread Lab in an old, fluorescent-lit office park in the damp, fertile Skagit Valley.

He had worked as a commercial wheat breeder for decades. But he had become disillusioned with the grain industry. In his view, the industry was excessively focused on producing smooth, perfectly consistent white flour that fills bags on grocery store shelves or gets mixed into manufactured foods.

That consistency has a price, says Jones. To produce flour that looks and behaves so consistently, the wheat it comes from has to be relatively uniform. That pushes farmers and wheat breeders to create and plant wheat varieties that are also relatively uniform, genetically selecting over time for plants of a certain height, or kernels a certain color and hardness.

Consistency is good for a product like flour; it helps keep a product like bread predictable. But it can be risky for plants themselves. In a field of plants that are genetically similar to each other — like siblings instead of two strangers from opposite sides of the world — a risk to one is a risk to all. A sensitivity to heat could wipe out a whole field, or region, if a heat wave comes along. A susceptibility to disease or pests could ruin a crop.

Jones, and many other crop scientists, have long been concerned that such selection also narrows the biodiversity of crops within a field, a farm, or even a whole region. That could, they think, increase the vulnerability of a crop. There are real-life examples of such disasters: Ireland’s Great Famine of the 1840s, for example, was driven by a potato blight disease that wiped out fields across the country and led to more than a million deaths.

For wheat, the picture is less clear. Across the U.S., a recent analysis from the University of Minnesota found that wheat diversity has increased since the 1920s, as breeders developed and distributed more types, more quickly.

Philip Pardey, an agricultural economist at the University of Minnesota and an author of the analysis, stresses that climate pressures increase the need for even more diversification, faster. “We need more, not less of that, to deal with climate,” he says.

Climate change increases the likelihood of weather whiplash, he points out, as well as the spread of pests and diseases to new regions.

“That is the treadmill of plant breeders trying to keep up with pests and diseases,” says Colin Khoury, a biologist at the San Diego Botanic Garden who has studied the changes in crop genetic diversity over time. It’s a “cat and mouse game that goes around in circles … and in theory, with climate change, that gets faster and faster every year and is terrifying to people who really know about it.”

He suspects that despite the nationwide genetic diversity growth Pardey and his colleagues found, at the smaller scale “it’s likely that our field-level crop diversity is less diverse than 50 years ago.”

These are not theoretical concerns. In the fall of 2022, a drought in the grain belt of the U.S. settled in across states including Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. It was among the worst ever recorded and led to a 37% drop in production compared to the long-term average.

At the Breadlab, Jones wanted to test a hypothesis: that field-level diversity, in any number of realms from kernel shape to color to heat resistance, could help fields and farmers weather increasingly extreme climate conditions.

“If we have a chaotic climate, our strategy is to have genetic chaos in the field,” says Jones. “To strike back, to fight chaos with chaos.”

A real-life climate test

In 2021, Jones’ hypothesis was tested. An unprecedented heat wave settled over the Pacific Northwest. Temperatures soared well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and stayed there for days. At the same time, the region slipped into drought. Washington’s summer rainfall hovered just above half the long-term average. Farms across Washington state saw their wheat yields plummet by about 40% compared to previous years. Climate scientists later determined it was 150 times more likely because of human-caused climate change.

The ferocity of the heat dome was shocking. But it provided a critical test for Jones’ hypothesis: Would the high-diversity wheat mixes he had provided for farmers stand up to the stresses?

Keith Kisler and his wife, Crystie, run Finnriver Farm & Cidery and Chimacum Grainery in Chimacum, Wash., in a narrow, lush valley on the Olympic Peninsula. They grow 14 different grains on their 150 acres, most sourced from the Breadlab. In 2021, while crops across the region were wilting in the extreme heat, they barely saw a blip.

“For me it was like, eh, heat dome, whatever,” says Keith Kisler.

One of the seed mixes that succeeded that year, and in seasons since, is called a Climate Blend. It was specifically developed to handle more extreme weather. The mix takes the Kislers’ specific weather and climate conditions into account, helping wheat better respond to climate pressures. It’s also grown using so-called regenerative agricultural techniques, like planting crops between harvests so the fields don’t lie fallow and reducing the frequency of plowing. Such practices can help keep soils healthy, and there’s evidence they can help preserve soil carbon.

“Growing it in the field, it’s an amazingly stable crop,” says Kisler. It persisted that year through not just the heat dome, but heavy snows, extreme rainfall and other weird weather.

The lab develops similar mixes for other small growers across the region. Each one takes years of fine-tuning and revisions, a process that is labor-intensive and challenging to scale in a way that would serve the 47 million acres of wheat fields draped across the nation.

Every successful growing experience moves the effort forward, says Jones. And it is growing: the Bread Lab is working with longtime partner King Arthur Flour to sell regeneratively grown Climate Blend flour. Currently, the commercially available flour is sourced from Montana and South Dakota farms. Still, Janis Abbingsole, chief operating officer at King Arthur Baking Co., says more of their farmers are interested in experimenting with Climate Blend seeds and the flour it produces.

“There’s movement around it,” she says, and a burgeoning number of growers “that are willing to take some of their acres and give it a shot.”

But the best farming practices in the world don’t matter if the product doesn’t taste good. That’s where the Breadlab differs from other science research centers. Its focus is in the name itself: not the Wheat Lab, or the Soil Lab, but the Breadlab.

The whole wheat wonderland

The Breadlab is in Burlington, Wash., a few hours north of Seattle. It’s next to a pickle factory, and a faint scent of vinegar tinges the air outside. But inside, graduate students slap dough on counters, shaping it into neat loaves. On nearly every surface, there’s a pile of cookies, a half-loaf of some experimental bread, or a bin of richly colored, sweet-scented flour.

Here, scientists and bakers — some of whom are professionals in both — work on solving another challenge: how to make Americans love, and eat, more whole wheat.

A gaggle of them are clustered around Darbyshire as she cuts into the tender brown loaf made from the Climate Blend flour.

Jones picks up a slice to taste it. “It’s buttery and rich,” he says, his mouth full. A few moments later, his eyes light up. “It’s delicious,” he says. “The best ever.”

The lab’s manager, Janine Sanguine, takes a bite. “I mean this in the best possible way,” she says, “but it tastes like it’s made with white flour.” Jones belly-laughs in response.

The bread is called the Approachable Loaf. It’s a recipe perfected over the years by the lab’s bakers and scientists. It is made with 100% whole wheat flour, and it is exactly as its name implies: Approachable. It’s simple, familiar and soft, and it will last several days on the counter before going stale.

They developed the loaf because they repeatedly heard that whole wheat bread tasted bad. That’s a hangover from the 1970s, says Jones, when many whole wheat products were bad — including bread he himself baked.

But, he says, better-bred wheat created specifically with the whole wheat in mind and better baking techniques can change people’s minds.

Simply swapping whole wheat for refined white flour would slice the environmental costs of growing and processing wheat by 20% and quadruple its nutritional impact, says Ema Tanovic, an analyst at Boston Consulting Group. She recently led an analysis on the environmental impact of eating whole grains rather than refined.

“If you consume the whole grain version, you are getting four times the nutrition with 20% less impact,” Tanovic says.

That’s because the process of making white flour wastes somewhere between 20% and 30% of the wheat kernel. That’s food farmers spend time, money, water and other environmental resources to grow.

The wheat kernel has three parts: the endosperm, a pocket of starch that makes up about 80% of the whole kernel; the protective outer coating called the bran; and the tiny, fatty, rich germ, the place from which a kernel sprouts. To produce white flour, the bran and germ get stripped from the starchy bit, which is then ground up. The bran and germ contain most of the nutrients and that gets discarded.

Jones has calculated the gain slightly more generously than Tanovic. As he sees it, “we could increase the amount of food we get per wheat acre by 30% if we just eat the whole wheat.”

Wheat’s losses are on par with the average amount of food waste in the U.S. more broadly. Some 30% to 40% of all edible food ends up in the trash. The annual climate impact of that waste is equivalent to running more than 40 coal-fired power plants for a year. Any shift in that pattern, Jones says, is a step in the right direction.

One spring Saturday, the Breadlab hosts a pop-up bread sale in their parking lot. They light a crackling fire in an old metal buoy, which used to bob in nearby waters, to warm people who come out despite a cold drizzle. Dozens of attendees buy up nearly every loaf and bag of whole wheat flour within a few hours. Three young children walk up to the counter, their mother beside them.

“What’s this kind of bread?” asks Ada Jane.

Her brother, Henry, reads from a sign. “Climate Blend?” he asks. “What’s that?”

By the end of the day, they walk away with a loaf of whole-wheat bread, some whole-wheat flour, and instructions for using it in their own baking at home. Jones smiles. That, he says, is how it all starts.