Height is a solvable problem today. Chemical growth regulators make wheat shorter and prevent it from buckling and falling over. They aren't the most suspect chemicals, but not exactly above all suspicion neither...
Or you do what Claudio Grossi did, and you mix the ancient grain with short growing grains that add stability. Sometimes the solution is simpler then just throwing chemicals at the problem.
- allow modern machines to harvest it more easily
- move slighly more of the plants energy into the seed
- prevent wind damage. (small farms bordered with trees was more typical historically)
On the historical side;
- The long stalks allow the crop to be bundled and dried without the seed touching the ground.
- It makes the stalks themselves useful as a building material in walls, roofs, isolation, bedding.
- It makes for a good grip as the seeds are pulled form the stalks with an historical thresher.
In short, we didn't start breeding grains to be short until modern post industrial farming techniques. Short grain does provide better yield on industrial mono-crop farming. But would have been seen as worse historically.
My father and many other people in my family increased to neutral millets and started giving up wheat as much as they can.
Those problems are worth solving for or roll back to grossini seeds and use his creative technique to not let it withered by wind and let’s you have better nutritional value
But I'm not sure one can even buy whole milled wheat like that... mabie speciality stores? I often buy rough flour that contains some husks for taste and texture, but I'm pretty sure that's technically fully milled white flour with husks mixed back in...
The starch part is mostly the same with more or less gluten. But ye modern grains contain much more more gluten (the article even mentioned difficult rising the bread) because it makes for fluffier bread.
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If you're sensitive to gluten, then it makes sense to avoid modern white flour... but it makes for badly risen bread.
you've ever tried barley?
You harvest the top crop, the one you want, cutting above the lower height, then go back through and make a second pass with the head lower.
You'll lose some of the lower crop, crushed under the wheels, but it was there as bonus anyway.