27 March 2025
Buckwheat has a long history: the robust pseudocereal was once a staple food in Germany. Yet over time, it disappeared from kitchens and fields, replaced by higher-yielding cereals. In other parts of the world, such as Asia, Ukraine, and Russia, buckwheat is still an integral part of people's diet and is used in a variety of ways. Here in Germany, despite its nutritious grains, buckwheat is grown almost exclusively as a cover crop due to its beneficial properties for the soil and the environment.
With the BIMOTEC research project, which was launched at the end of 2024, Laura Junker-Frohn, PhD, and her team from the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences (IBG) - Plant Sciences bring forward the comeback of buckwheat to meet the growing demand by revealing its bioeconomic potential. Two institute divisions at IBG, Plant Sciences and Bioinformatics, are working together with other partners to make this ancient grain fit for dual use - utilizing all parts of the plant, including the seeds, leaves, and stems. In an interview with Laura Junker-Frohn, coordinator of the BIMOTEC project, we learn how the project aims to revive buckwheat and why this crop deserves to become firmly established in agriculture again.
Why is buckwheat so attractive for sustainable agriculture and why is it worth bringing this plant back into focus?
Buckwheat is a very exciting plant. It has a short cultivation period, meaning it grows quickly and is ready for harvest after a short time - around three to four months. This allows farmers to use buckwheat efficiently, for example as a second crop after winter cereals or early potatoes, when it is too late to plant other crops.
In the BIMOTEC research project, we are investigating the dual use potential of buckwheat to produce food and utilize its biomass for industrial purposes. Buckwheat leaves and seed hulls contain large quantities of valuable phytochemicals, known as secondary metabolites, which are used for example in pharmaceutical and food industries. We also explore if the lignocellulose from the stem biomass, which acts as the plant's structural framework, could serve as bio-based platform chemicals that replace fossil-based compounds.
This holistic use of buckwheat, i.e. the utilization of seeds, leaves, and stems, has potential to establish bioeconomic value chains where the seeds provide nutritious food, the leaves and seed hulls - a by-product of hulling - are used to extract valuable plant substances, and the stems provide bio-based raw materials. That would be a great step to achieve a sustainable bioeconomy in agriculture.
Interestingly, the only other plant that is already used holistically is industrial hemp. The seeds are used as food or processed into oil, leaves and flowers are used to make CBD products, and the stems are processed into fibres for paper and textile production. Buckwheat could be similarly developed into a sustainable multi-purpose crop.
Buckwheat is often described as an undemanding plant. What advantages does it offer for the soil and the environment?
Buckwheat has many agroecological advantages. For one thing, it requires hardly any fertilizer or pesticides, meaning no chemicals are used in the field. Buckwheat is also very undemanding and thrives in poor, sandy, and acidic soils. The only thing that buckwheat does not tolerate is cold. As a result, it must not be sown too early or harvested too late.
Due to these favourable properties, buckwheat is already used as a cover crop for green manuring. Sown after the main harvest, it loosens the soil, prevents erosion, and keeps the soil healthy. Buckwheat is known to interrupt the life cycle of harmful nematodes - tiny, thread-like worms that damage plant roots. Buckwheat defeats nematodes by inducing them to hatch without providing them with any nourishment. Because of its beneficial effects on soil health, late-flowering cultivars are used as cover crops, which are not used for grain harvest. In the BIMOTEC project, we are working on establishing early-flowering cultivars for use as a second crop. Due to global warming, our growing seasons are lengthening, enabling a second harvest by sowing buckwheat right after winter cereals or early potatoes.
Since buckwheat is not related to other crops, it diversifies crop rotation in the field. This alternation between different plant species reduces pest pressure in fields and enables balanced nutrient use. The use of new plant species such as buckwheat also increases agrobiodiversity, i.e. the diversity of plant species used in agriculture, and thus contributes to enhanced food security, ecosystem health, and climate resilience. As one of the few flowering crops, buckwheat is also an excellent source of nectar and pollen for bees and other pollinators - at a time of year when little other plants are in flower.
Many traditional crops have special health properties that are often overlooked. What makes buckwheat particularly exciting in this context?
The name "buckwheat" is actually misleading, because botanically speaking it is not a cereal, but what is known as a pseudocereal. This goes along with one major advantage: buckwheat is gluten-free and is therefore particularly interesting for people with gluten intolerance and coeliac disease, a chronic intestinal disorder triggered by gluten. Additionally, buckwheat is vastly superior to cereals in terms of nutrient content. From a nutritional physiology perspective, buckwheat has a particularly valuable amino acid profile with all eight essential amino acids, is rich in minerals, B vitamins, and vitamin E as well as contains essential fatty acids such as linoleic acid. The high levels of secondary metabolites with antioxidant effects such as the polyphenols rutin and quercetin are known to have health-promoting effects. Only the seed hulls should not be consumed in large quantities, which is why it is only available in hulled form.
What exactly is the goal of the BIMOTEC project and how will it be achieved?
The cultivation of buckwheat as a cash crop in Germany almost completely ceased decades ago, and no breeding improvements have been made to increase yields or adapt to changing climate conditions. In the BIMOTEC project, we will work with our partners from various research institutions to lay the foundations to re-establish buckwheat breeding. In Jülich, at the Institute of Plant Sciences, we among others are looking at the root and shoot growth of 60 genotypes - including their response to drought stress and nitrogen deficiency - to find out which genotypes are most resistant to these stresses. A high resource use efficiency reduces farmers' need for irrigation and fertilizer input. A low nitrogen demand also enables the agricultural recultivation of nutrient-poor soils, such as open-cast mining areas. We perform advanced phenotyping of plant root and shoot growth, which is the quantitative measurement of plant development using our new phenotyping platform GrowScreen-Rhizo 3. This unique platform was developed by Jülich's Institute of Bio- and Geosciences - Plant Sciences and has already been used successfully in national and international collaborations with scientists and companies to study a wide range of crops and medicinal plants. Here, we can grow hundreds of plants in narrow containers known as rhizotrons, which allow us to automatically monitor root growth. To date, very little research has been carried out on the root growth of buckwheat, although the root growth traits play an important role in plant growth, plant health, and affect yield. By automated daily imaging of hundreds of plants, we can identify differences in the growth of roots and shoots of many varieties under different growing conditions, thereby identifying genotypic variation in plant performance. We are working closely together with our colleagues from the Institute of Bioinformatics to investigate the drought tolerance of 60 varieties and quantify their content of the secondary metabolite rutin, to identify genes that contribute to high drought tolerance and are involved in the biosynthesis of valuable secondary metabolites, an important trait for the use of buckwheat in bioeconomic value chains.
To help us achieve our goal of breeding dual use buckwheat cultivars, our partners at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology in Münster screen samples from our experiments for new and interesting secondary metabolites with industrial relevance. They perform in-depth analyses of the phytochemical compounds in leaves and seed hulls - a process known as metabolite profiling - to evaluate the bioeconomic potential of leaf biomass and seed hulls as a source of valuable secondary metabolites, and how drought stress or nitrogen deficiency affect their quality. For the industrial use of these metabolites, suitable extraction processes must be developed and optimized. This is where our business partner Phytowelt comes in: they scale up the extraction processes for rutin from buckwheat biomass and further valorize rutin by biotechnological transformation using microbial processes. The University of Hohenheim, Germany, refines agronomic models for buckwheat, i.e. mathematical models that simulate the growth of the plant under different conditions and can thus predict the yield. This will help farmers to establish and optimize the cultivation of buckwheat - especially against the backdrop of climate change. One important factor in increasing the yield of cereals, for example, was the targeted breeding of cereals with shorter stalks. Short varieties are less susceptible to lodging and are more resistant to weather conditions. The Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Gatersleben, Germany, is researching the targeted genetic modification of buckwheat by modern breeding methods. Thereby, the effects of targeted mutations on plant growth and metabolite content can be examined. On the long term, targeted genome editing may contribute to make buckwheat more productive, more resilient, and more versatile.
As you can see, it is an all-encompassing, interdisciplinary project with many participants. Together, we contribute to the well-deserved comeback of buckwheat.
Contact Person
- Institute of Bio- and Geosciences (IBG)
- Plant Sciences (IBG-2)
