A perennial genius and me
Wes Jackson is a genius, at least according the MacArthur Foundation. And there we were, sitting across the table from him in a “green room” before we both appeared on a nationwide radio show!
I was reminded of this brush with celebrity when a good friend posted an article from the Washington Post. The article was about the organization Jackson founded in 1975, an outfit called the Land Institute. Jackson has spent a lifetime (he’s 85) researching the idea that all of agriculture, beginning with the first seed planted, has been a mistake, and lest you think that I’m exaggerating, that’s an actual quote from our conversation. Now, agriculture as it’s practiced here in the corn belt has seen some major changes during Wes’s time at the Land Institute, as no till acres have increased from around 2 million acres in the early 70s to over 100 million acres today. But we are still planting mostly annual crops, primarily corn, soybeans, and wheat. Since no-till farming relies heavily on the use of chemicals that Jackson considers poison, this is not a change that meets with his approval.
Since agriculture itself has been around for 10,000 years, give or take a millennia, I suppose it’s no surprise that even the ageless Jackson hasn’t had time to fix it.
I’ve seen any number of articles singing the praises of his organization and the work they do. All of the articles follow a heavily trodden path across the, well, land at the Land Institute.Here is how the world works, according to Wes, and how his views are faithfully and without question transcribed by every journalist: agriculture as we practice it is exploitative of the land and of the people who work the land. Agriculture poisons the soil. Agriculture is based on a mistake, the cultivation of annual crops, and much like that first bite of the apple in Eden, our ancestor’s reliance on annual crops has led to thousands of years of toil, weeds, and degradation. Jackson would correct that mistake, or rather, give us another bite at the apple, by switching to perennial crops. As every article about the Land Institute tells us at length, perennial crops outcompete weeds, have deep roots to survive droughts, don’t need cultivation, thereby saving soil, and are all around better for the world.
Why in the hell didn’t we think of this before! That’s why Wes is a genius, I guess. Although he largely discounts what is obvious to most practitioners, and that is the fact that no-till largely mimics perennial crop production by not disturbing the soil.
Jackson is absolutely correct about the benefits of perennial crops. But there are a few worms in this apple. Like, we can’t eat grass. Or alfalfa. Most perennial crops in agriculture are grown to feed cattle, and they have all the benefits that Jackson describes. However, perennials don’t efficiently produce seeds and vegetative matter that we can eat. Wes has been working on that problem for nearly a half of a century.
I hadn’t heard much about the Land Institute since our NPR appearance in 2016, so I opened the article posted by my friend with a great deal of interest.
And found that the Land Institute has developed a perennial plant that has seed, seed which can be turned into flour. Good News! Perhaps not as easy to bake with as wheat flour, but still, progress is being made. The journalist writing the article uses the new grain, called Kernza, to bake bread. It’s delicious! More good news!
The flour costs $11 a pound, versus wheat flour at $1 a pound. That fact, which finally surfaces several thousand words into the article, is not such good news. Also according to the article, it yields about 30% of what wheat yields. Whoops. Still some work to do. A quick perusal of the Land Institute financial reports reveals another problem. Farm income is listed as just over $2000 for 2019. Now, the purpose of the Land Institute is to do research, and any farm sales should be incidental to that aim. They are, after all, in the business, as the Post lays out in the headline of the piece, of solving climate change and feeding the world. But $2000 in saleable production? That really has to raise questions in the mind of any farmer who, before he solves climate change, corrects the 10,000 year old agriculture conundrum, and feeds the world, has to support his family.
Jackson complained in our conversation that “I don’t know why farmers don’t like me.” Stupid farmers, resenting being accused of poisoning the world and destroying ecosystems. In every thing I’ve read about the Institute and in our conversation with Jackson there is an implicit assumption that farmers will resist a shift to perennial agriculture, for reasons which are never made clear but are presumably nefarious. I find that passing strange, as farmers have been raising perennial crops for a very long time. Should the Land Institute’s researchers ever develop a perennial crop that is economically competitive with corn and soybeans, the transition will be breathtakingly quick. Farmers are well aware of the advantages of perennial crops.
The first farmers used annual crops because they reproduce by seed, using every bit of their energy toward that goal. When humans plant those seeds and care for the resulting plants, less seed is needed to maintain the plant population. The excess is available for human consumption. Perennial crops, on the other hand, largely reproduce vegetatively, and often don’t provide a human food source. Agriculture has many costs, as Jackson points out, but it has allowed life, including yours and mine, to flourish. Can we reduce some of those costs by using improved perennials to replace annual crops? Not yet, but we can hope.
The Danforth Plant Science Institute in St. Louis recently announced a grant that will facilitate the genotyping of perennial plants from around the world, to allow quicker genetic improvement for the development of commercially viable perennial crops. Although the grant award doesn’t mention the possibility that genetic engineering might speed along that process, it will be the logical result of the work. Wes Jackson is an ardent foe of genetic engineering, and, in a 2017 interview, expressed his opposition to the technology in near religious terms.
It will be ironic indeed if Jackson’s dream is realized in labs in St. Louis, just down the street from the former headquarters of Monsanto.