When it comes to nutritional value, grasses are probably the world’s most important plant family. All our cereals, including maize, wheat, sorghum, rye, millet, rice, barley and sugarcane are grasses. Grasses also provide fodder for animals that supply us with meat, leather and milk.  Within the South African agricultural sector, cereal accounted for about 30% of total gross agricultural production in the country in 2017, with total output of 18.6 million tonnes for wheat and maize in 2020-21 (Agriseta 2019; Lyddon 2021).

Introduction

Earth is currently in the grip of the Quaternary glaciation, where climate alternates between cold temperature intervals, called glacial periods, and phases of warmer climate, called interglacial periods. Glacial-interglacial cycles have waxed and waned throughout the Quaternary Period (the past 2.6 million years) and are believed to be driven by changes in the orbital pattern of the Earth that has periods of about 20 000, 40 000 and 100 000 years.

Long before Charles Darwin came up with his theory of natural selection,(and in doing so providing the English language with numerous adjectives for his name), Frenchman and naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744 – 1829) (Figure 1) attached his own name to the concept of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. ‘Lamarckian’ refers to this doctrine which is also known as “soft hereditary”, but it was merely an incidental feature of Lamarck’s philosophy on nature.