Botanists and breeders have long been interested in combining the best nutritional properties of wheat with winter hardiness and unpretentiousness of rye. As a result, at the end of the 19th century, a hybrid of wheat and rye was created, used while forage crops, that is, for feeding domestic animals.
What is the name of the mixture of rye and wheat?
The very first artificially created hybrid of wheat and rye in history is called the intricate word triticale. It arose when a combination of two Latin words: triticum, which means wheat, and secale, meaning rye.
The creator of the triticale is the German breeder Wilhelm Rimpau, who brought it out in 1888. Meanwhile, the hybrid was not widely available at once. For the first time it began to grow on a production scale in 1970 in the countries of North America. Six years later, wheat and rye hybrids were cultivated in Ukraine, in the city of Kharkov. Today triticale is cultivated by a lot of countries (at least three dozen), among which leaders are France, Australia, Poland and Belarus.
Features of triticale
The hybrid of wheat with rye - triticale - absorbed all the best properties of both species and even multiplied them. The main advantages of triticale include:
- increased frost resistance;
- reduced demand for fertile soil;
- resistance to fungi and infections;
- increased protein content (1-1.5% higher than wheat);
- the content of micro- and macronutrients in grain at the level of wheat.
Basically triticale is grown for food purposes. Increased protein content solves the problem of lack of this element in other forage crops. Also, the hybrid is added to the flour when baking wheat bread (about 20-50%), and this has a positive effect. The nutritional value of the bread increases, which at the same time hardens more slowly.