posted on Dec, 13 2006 @ 09:38 PM
I have worked on a number of farms and have seen grain stored extremely poorly, but have never seen or heard of a modern case of ergot in wheat in the
US. But I live in the west, where it's arid. Still, I think the most popular commercial varieties, like TAM 105, etc, are immune to ergot.
The way to store it is with those plastic buckets with tight fitting lids. We stored seed wheat in a "time capsule" by using dry ice. The dry ice
sublimates and the CO2 weighs more than the oxygen, and drives it out of the bucket. Most insect eggs will be killed or at least stay dormant.
If you make friends with a farmer, they'll usually give you some for free, or you can pick it up where a grain cart has spilt it.
Even at todays prices, it's only 5$ a bushel--that's sixty pounds!
You can get about 80 loaves of bread out of that bushel, by the way (plus eggs and milk . . .)
I would store enough to plant my front yard in wheat, and plan on GROWING what I needed. It's a grass, after all. If you have enough water, it'll
grow in almost every area short of subarctic.
Two bushels an acre will grow a good crop (as long as you get 30" of rain or so a year. plant only one bushel an acre if you are doing dryland in an
arid area.) . . . and produce around 20 times that. Wheat is easy to grow; it's just trying to grow it at a profit, where it becomes tricky.
growing to feed yourself is really easy, particularly in the US.