Plant growth and development strongly depends on the activities of meristems, the plant stem cell niches, which can generate flowers, leaves or new branches. The number, size, position and identity of meristems ultimately determines a plant productivity, i.e. how many seeds a plant can generate or the size of its fruits. The last decades have allowed immense progress in our understanding of basic meristem activities, mostly with lab model plants such as Arabidopsis. Grasses like barley are important crop plants, and we are now starting to employ our knowledge on Arabidopsis stem cell systems to investigate and engineer barley architecture. In addition to this applied aspect, we found that technological innovations such as single cell RNA sequencing and gene editing, together with vast genome datasets allow us now to work with “difficult” crop plants in a similar manner as we are used from the Arabidopsis model.