Barley

Barley is the quiet fourth cereal. After corn, wheat, and rice it is the fourth most-produced grain on earth, with world output of roughly 145 to 155 million tonnes a year, yet outside a brewery or a feedlot most people rarely think about it. It leads a double life that defines the whole market: the great majority of the crop, about 70 percent, is fed to animals, while most of the rest is malted into the base of beer and whisky. A small remainder is eaten directly as pearl barley, flour, and soups, the ancient use that has faded almost everywhere.

That split runs right through the price. Malting barley, grown to tight specifications for protein and germination, trades at a premium over feed barley, and a crop that misses malting grade "falls" into the feed market at a lower price. The plant itself is a hardy, short-season grass that tolerates cold, drought, and saline, poor soils better than wheat, which is why it is grown at the margins of the grain belt: the Canadian prairies, the Australian wheatbelt, the Russian steppe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the high, dry, and northern edges of Europe where little else ripens. That salt tolerance is why barley became the grain of the arid Middle East in the first place: in ancient Mesopotamia, centuries of irrigation slowly salted the soil, and the Sumerian records show farmers shifting from wheat to barley as the salt rose, until barley was almost the only cereal the southern fields would still yield.

Barley is one of humanity's founding crops, domesticated in the Fertile Crescent roughly 10,000 years ago alongside wheat. It was the everyday bread grain of the ancient world before wheat displaced it, the grain that Sumerians brewed into beer and used as a unit of wages, and the ration that fed Roman soldiers and gladiators, who were nicknamed hordearii, the barley-eaters. The reason it lost the human plate to wheat is gluten: wheat's particular gluten forms a strong, elastic dough that traps the gas from yeast and rises into light leavened bread, while barley has little of the right kind, so barley bread bakes dense and flat and came to mark poverty (a Roman soldier who failed was demoted from wheat back to barley rations). As people grew richer they traded up to wheat, and barley retreated to the two jobs it does better, animal feed and malting, which is also why it fills so many European folk songs, from John Barleycorn to Burns: it is the grain of beer and whisky, sung over rather than eaten. Its long arc from bread to the feed trough and the malt house is one of the longer stories in the history of food.

For a grain of its size, barley has only a thin futures market. Euronext lists a malting barley contract in Paris and Australia's ASX runs an East-coast feed barley contract, but neither has the depth of the wheat or corn markets, and much of the crop is priced as a basis to wheat or through direct contracts between growers, maltsters, and feed buyers. The trade is dominated by the European Union (the largest producing bloc) and Russia, with Australia, Canada, Argentina, and Ukraine the other big exporters; on the buying side China (feed and brewing) and the Gulf states, above all Saudi Arabia, which imports enormous volumes to feed sheep and camels, are the swing buyers whose demand sets the export price.