20 The Nation. October 30, 2017THE
FUTURE
OF
FOOD
T
he 12,000-year history of grain agriculture is essen-
tially a long-running set of experiments to turn grass into
something that humans could reliably harvest and eat.
Humanity’s first crops—including barley and two varieties of
wheat called emmer and einkorn—started, of course, as wild
plants. Hunter-gatherers probably sought those plants for
their fat, nutritious seeds. Around 10,000 bc, humans began to cultivate
them, and the abundant calories those plants produce made it possible for
civilization to flower in the Middle East’s Fertile Crescent. But in choosing
to cultivate and breed those seeds, the first farmers committed human soci-
ety to a long dependence on the annual grain, a crop that dies at the end of
each season and is born again the next from new seed. In order to germinate
successfully every year, the seeds of annuals need free space on the ground,
away from predators and competing weeds. For centuries, the primary“There’s a big burp of carbon dioxide that goes out with
that.” In the last few decades, people like Reicosky have
urged farmers to cut back on the wasting of soil and the
dumping of carbon through a method called “no-till,”
which involves planting seeds beneath the remains of the
previous season’s crops. But no-till farmers often turn to
herbicides to keep the weeds down.
If more of the world’s daily bread came from perenni-
als instead of annuals, there would be less need to clear a
path for seedlings every season. Perennial farming could
build the soil year by year instead of tearing it apart.
Starting as early as the 1920s, both American and Rus-
sian scientists tested a few lines of perennial wheat, hop-
ing to save farmers the cost of replanting new seed every
year. But the dream of a perennial grain revolution didn’t
gather momentum until 50 years later. In 1977, Wes Jack-
son, co-founder of an agricultural-research organization
called the Land Institute, was strolling through the Konza
Prairie Biological Station in northeast Kansas—several
thousand acres of grassland that look much like the Great
Plains did before they were plowed up for agriculture.
Jackson had just read a report from the US comptroller
general showing that more than five tons of topsoil per
acre were eroding from the average grain farm annually.
And he wondered: Why couldn’t a farm look more like
this prairie, with a motley collection of annuals and peren-
nials growing side by side? The prairie didn’t need to be
replanted year after year, and no one needed to till the soil
to get the grasses to grow. But to make a farm modeled
on a prairie, with food plants instead of wild ones, you’d
have to rewrite agriculture basically from scratch. Jackson
believed that his vision was possible, but he imagined it
would take 50 to 100 years of plant breeding—ambitious
when you consider how many millennia it took to create
the grains we have now.
In the early 1980s, Jackson persuaded Robert Rodale
(son of J.I. Rodale, founder of the Rodale Institute, one
of the oldest organic-farming organizations in the coun-
try) to search for a perennial that could substitute for
wheat. The Rodale Institute rooted through seed banks
and tested nearly 100 candidates gathered from around
the world, before landing on a species called Thinopyrum
intermedium, a wheatgrass first collected from Turkey
and Afghanistan. Relative to other wild grasses, this one
had seeds of a decent size and shape—not shrunken, dis-
colored, or bristling with the needle-like awns that can
make grasses hard to harvest and thresh. And there was
some evidence that it may have been eaten by humans
several millennia ago.
The breeding experiments proceeded on a small scale
until 2001, when Lee DeHaan joined the Land Insti-
tute’s staff. He had been an admirer of Jackson’s since his
teen years, when his father, a farmer, heard the scientist
give a talk in Minnesota. After that, Lee wanted nothing
more than to devote his career to perennial agriculture.
In 2003, he launched a large-scale program at the Land
Institute to convert T. intermedium into a functioning
grain crop called Kernza, a play on the name Konza.
It was the same year that the Human Genome Project
was completed. Kernza’s DNA has never been geneti-
cally engineered; its genes get reshuffled via the scatter-The Researchers:
University of
Minnesota plant
scientists Jacob
Jungers (left) and
Prabin Bajgain stand
in a test plot of
Kernza.MADELINE OSTRANDERmeans of creating that space has been tillage: churning
the soil until it’s mostly bare, first by hand or with tools,
then with animal-drawn plows, and more recently with
heavy machinery like tillers and cultivators.
Across a large area, the results of plowing and tilling
can be disastrous, as became clear in the United States
in the 1930s, when drought turned the heavily plowed
soils of the Great Plains into the nightmare known as the
Dust Bowl. From that decade forward, the US govern-
ment vigorously promoted soil-conservation measures,
including methods like windbreaks. Annual erosion rates
have dropped decade after decade, but the United States
still loses soil 10 times faster than nature can replace it.
More recently, scientists have also discovered that
activities that churn up the soil, especially tilling, play
a role in climate change. Soil holds nutrients, minerals,
and carbon, bound up into organic matter by the various
tiny animals, fungi, and microorganisms that inhabit it.
When you churn it up, some of that soil carbon breaks
down and escapes into the atmosphere, adding to the
load of carbon dioxide that is now altering the planet.
One recent study estimated that agriculture, over the
millennia, has contributed about 133 billion metric tons
of carbon to the planet’s atmosphere. “I talk about an
intensive tillage event as the combination of a tornado, a
hurricane, an earthquake, a tsunami,” says Don Reicosky,
a retired US Department of Agriculture soil scientist.Over the
millennia,
agriculture
has
contributed
about 133
billion metric
tons of
carbon to the
atmosphere.THE FUTURE OF FOOD