An Italian Farmer Found Some Unknown Seeds in His Attic and, With Nothing to Lose, Planted Them. The Result Was Almost Biblical

Sometime in the early 1990s, Claudio Grossi, a 40-year-old farmer in Parma, in northern Italy, was cleaning his attic when he turned up an old sack full of seeds that he couldn’t identify. The bag, he was sure, had been left by his late great-grandfather, who’d started the farmstead around 1915. Grossi had no idea how long the seeds had been sitting there, deprived of water, soil and sun.

Dry and cracked, the kernels looked so old in the palm of his hand that he doubted anything would ever sprout from them. He carried the bag down the stairs, shook the seeds out into a pile of manure and then forgot about them. To his surprise, the seeds soon sprouted a few different types of wheat.

One was particularly striking: At six feet high, its plants were about twice as tall as commercial wheat. But the most remarkable feature came when it developed ears—the grain-studded parts at the top of the plant. All of the wheat types Grossi had previously seen grew only one such ear.

But the tall wheat grew a full seven ears, always in the same pattern: a long one with six shorties bunched up around it like little fingers. Even the kernels themselves were bigger than those of average wheat. And unlike the typical pale-yellow wheat kernels, they came in a rainbow of colors—yellow, black, red, white and even green, sometimes all on the same stem.

Grossi, a grain farmer his whole life, had never seen anything like it. He couldn’t find a mention of it in agricultural books. This article is a selection from the November 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine For Grossi, a practicing Catholic, the next insight came from a different book altogether.

Leafing through a Bible at church one Sunday, he found a passage in the Book of Genesis describing a stalk with seven ears, in a dream that Joseph interprets for the Pharaoh: “And he slept and dreamed the second time: And, behold, seven ears of grain came up upon one stalk, rank and good. And, behold, seven thin ears and blasted with the east wind sprung up after them. And the seven thin ears devoured the seven rank and full ears.” To Grossi, that sounded just like the mysterious crop in his manure pile.