1926
November

After working out a plan for an expedition in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I went together with the agronomist Eittingen to the valley of Esdralon where at present the Jewish colonization is concentrated and where Aaronsohn had made the main finds of wild wheat. The vegetation was mainly arboreal. Only during early spring is it possible to see the herbaceous ephemerals to which the wild wheat belongs.

In the foothills of the mountains from which a subterranean stream flows into the Esdralon valley, I actually found a large stand of wild wheat together with an admixture of distichous barley. This was on vacant land with soft, fertile soil surrounding the crops themselves. The wheat here looked distinctly different from what we had collected in Khoran in Syria. The spikes and the spikelets were large, reminiscent of those of cultivated wheat but with rough awns and large grains. This was far from a xerophyte like the Syrian wheat and in essence the plants were close to cultivated wheat.

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Nazareth and the Plain of Esdraelon at S.W. - hills where the boy Jesus played. Palestine

The wide valley of Esdralon, with a kind of black soil, is exceptionally favourable for agriculture. The level character of the area makes it possible to do completely mechanized work here. The most productive of the local wheats have been selected and are sown by Jewish farmers.

The cultivated variety that Vavilov described near the village of Hawran is still grown to some extent, as are a few varieties such as Salamouni, which is ideally suited for making bulgur, a cracked cereal used in tabbouleh. However, while the locally adapted varieties suited to bulgur and another traditional dish, kishk, have persisted in Lebanon, bread wheats had largely been lost in the decades just prior to Vavilov’s visit, when the Lebanese began to import their flour from Syria and Africa.

Extracted from Where our Food Comes From by Gary Paul Nabhan
and used with permission.

1926

The very first excursions to Arabian villages revealed fields which displayed wheats of a peculiar composition. Here I collected for the first time the basic subspecies which I later named the ‘Khoranka’. This is a remarkable, large-grained, hard wheat with stiff straw and highly productive, compact ears. At present the Khoranka has already been introduced on to tens of thousands of hectares of cropland in the highlands of Azerbaidjan. And right here, on the slopes and at the edges of the fields I saw for the first time stands of the wild wheat.

Herbarium specimen of wild emmer from a 1910 monograph by Aaronsohn published by the USDA.

Unfortunately we arrived at the site where the wild wheat occurs when the ears to a great extent had fallen off. It was only with difficulty that we could locate them by clearing away the stones, although they had fallen to the ground in large quantities. The drought tolerance and straw-stiffness of the wild wheat proved, however, to be considerably exaggerated. Detailed investigations showed that the wild wheat grew among the stones in soft, fertilized soil, retaining water. In this respect it is little different from cultivated wheat. It became necessary to make severe corrections of the exaggerated statements made by Aaronsohn and Cook. Furthermore, the Syrian subspecies of wild wheat actually turned out to be small-grained and its ears were not very large either. No doubt the drought resistance of the locally cultivated wheat, widely grown by the Arabian settlers, was of much more interest and of course we concentrated our attention on it.

The wild species of wheat (Triticum dicoccoides [Koern.] Aarons.) was naturally of interest as an evolutionary link. Subsequently, however, when studying the wild wheat and experimenting with attempts at hybridization, we encountered still more drawbacks for its utilization for practical purposes. But, the exaggerations of Aaronsohn had one positive effect: the generous Americans built up a special research station near Haifa, where great work on breeding field crops is done.