Plant · P-678

Barley

Hordeum vulgare

Barley is the cereal that grows where wheat and maize give up, feeding people from the Andes to the Tibetan plateau. The grain is eaten whole or pearled, milled into flour, and malted for beer and whiskey, and worldwide more of the crop goes to livestock feed than to human food. It also doubles as an unusually tough cover crop, tolerating alkaline and salty soils that wheat cannot handle - it is even used to reclaim salt-damaged land - and it establishes fast enough to nurse wind-sensitive seedlings like carrots and onions through their first weeks.