Sesame is one of the world’s oldest crops, and the essential ingredient in tahini. Yet in many countries, people still harvest it by hand.
The reason is simple. When traditional sesame ripens, its capsules split open and scatter the seeds. This natural process makes mechanical harvesting difficult, because many seeds fall to the ground before a combine can collect them. Solving it means rethinking the plant itself, the kind of challenge that modern breeding is uniquely equipped to take on.
Breeding the crop for the machine
Modern agricultural machinery works best with plants that mature uniformly, retain their seeds, and have a structure suited to mechanical harvesting. Improving the combine is therefore only part of the solution. The crop itself must also be adapted.
Using advanced breeding techniques, Israeli researchers have developed “Mika”, a new sesame variety designed from the ground up for harvesting by combine. It is a smart re-engineering of a traditional plant, and it could reduce manual labor, lower production costs, and make large-scale local cultivation more practical.
Mika is now being tested on 14 hectares in the Hula Valley. If successful, it could offer sesame growers worldwide a practical path to mechanized harvesting-reducing labor requirements, lowering production costs, minimizing seed losses, and enabling more reliable cultivation at scale. By making sesame better suited to modern agriculture, Mika has the potential to strengthen the crop’s global supply chain and help meet growing international demand.
Making tahini even better
Tahini is often described as a “superfood”. Made entirely from ground sesame seeds, it is naturally rich in plant-based protein, unsaturated fats and important minerals.
The Mika variety adds another nutritional advantage, one that shows just how precisely a crop can now be shaped. According to Ynet, its seeds contain an exceptionally high level of iron: 58.6 milligrams per 100 grams. The resulting tahini is also described as slightly sweeter and thicker than conventional tahini.
This shows how plant breeding can improve more than agricultural yield. Researchers can now select for qualities that benefit the entire chain, from the farmer operating the combine to the consumer choosing nutritious food.
Small seed, big potential
Mika brings together several important goals in a single innovation:
- Efficient mechanical harvesting
- Greater local food production
- Reduced dependence on imports
- Adaptation to challenging local soils
- Improved flavor and nutritional value
It is a powerful example of modern breeding at work: taking an ancient, nutritious crop and reinventing it for today’s machinery, markets, and food needs.
The result could be locally grown sesame that is easier to harvest and tahini that is even better for us.
