It's all a matter of breeding

Not so many years ago the gales and heavy rain that we experienced last week would have lodged the ripening cereal crops as flat as a pancake. The fact that they are still standing is due to the success that plant breeders have had in producing robust short stemmed varieties. All done by traditional breeding techniques rather than by genetic modification. Although, of course, what they have done is itself a form of genetic modification, it's just that no laboratory gene poking has gone on.

One downside, there is always a downside, of producing short stemmed varieties is that the crops are unsuitable for breeding harvest mice Micromys minutus. Harvest mice weave their nests among the stems of growing long grasses. The species was once associated with cereal fields, where nests and mice were seen during harvests – hence the common name. However, modern, earlier-ripening, short-stemmed cereals are of no use.