NCI Cereal Innovators Webinar Series | Featuring Dr. Shetty and Lowell Kaul

Lowell Kaul and Dr. Kalidas Shetty

Each month, NCI gives an update in the “Cereal Innovators” series that offers insight into the world of baking and cereal grains. This episode featured two special guests: Dr. Kalidas Shetty, professor at North Dakota State University and Lowell Kaul, of Organic Kaul Farms. The two had an in-depth discussion on ancient Emmer Wheat.

The presentation began with Lowell Kaul focusing on the history of Emmer Wheat and its variety of uses. Lowell discussed his family's long history in farming, highlighting that his great grandfather traveled to North Dakota in 1885, where he began farming Emmer Wheat. Lowell’s describes his focus of the presentation as: 

“North Dakota common Emmer, a biblical wheat from ND farmer point of view” 

With the history of Emmer presented by Lowell, Dr. Shetty continued the discussion by touching on the health benefits of Emmer as well as ways it could be incorporated more in today's foods. Dr. Shetty highlights: 

“Emmer Wheat, while it is ancient wheat, has modern relevance to build health benefits related food ingredients to counter emergence of diet-linked chronic diseases and also has climate resilience benefits. Therefore, Emmer can be used in improving flat breads around the world to advance health benefits of foods and also integrated to add value to other grains.”

He also highlights this key take-away from his presentation:

“We need a whole food approach to health, and Emmer is an example of increasing this whole food diversity for health benefits. Therefore, agricultural value addition has to integrate health benefits.”

With the perspective of an Emmer Wheat farmer from Lowell Kaul, and a scientific look at Emmer Wheat's health benefits from Dr. Shetty, the webinar held unique discussion and inputs from two industry professionals. Northern Crops Institute greatly appreciates both Dr. Shettys and Lowell Kauls professional input and their involvement in our webinar series. At NCI, we continue to work towards fulfilling our mission to support regional agriculture and value-added processing by conducting educational and technical programs that expand and maintain domestic and international markets for northern grown crops. 

To get more information about this webinar, including handouts and slides that were used, please contact Krista Jansen at krista.j.jansen@ndsu.edu. 

For more information about future webinars offered at NCI, click here

Check out the recording below!