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The future of food can only be secured through the adoption of sustainable renewable practices. Tim Crews, PhD, Chief Scientists at the Land Institute, joins Corinna Bellizzi to discuss how the principles of agroecology can turn such a dream into reality. He explores agroecology’s overlapping concepts with other practices such as permaculture and emphasizes the urgent need to reduce energy use in most farming methods today. Dr. Tim also breaks down the many benefits of perennial crop farming, particularly its efficient water use, and the production of grain crops like Kernza.

 

About Tim Crews, PhD

Tim Crews is the Chief Scientist and Director of The Land Institute’s International Initiative. The Land Institute is a non-profit agricultural research organization based in Salina, Kansas dedicated to developing agroecosystems that capture key functions of natural ecosystems through the integration of perenniality and diversity. Tim has been fascinated for most of his life with how we can improve our food producing ecosystems—agriculture—by studying how people grew food before the fossil fuel era, and also how natural ecosystems function. Tim studied agroecology at UC Santa Cruz, ecosystem ecology in Graduate Studies at Cornell University and in a post-doc at Stanford. Before coming to The Land Institute, he developed an agroecology program at Prescott College in Arizona.

 

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Guest Website:

https://landinstitute.org/our-work/new-roots-international/

https://kernza.org

 

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Additional Resources Mentioned:

 

Show Notes:

Career Journey - 03:37

Agroecology - 06:10

Kernza - 18:27

Perennial Ground - 31:19

Regenerative Agriculture - 38:06

Sustainable Solutions - 47:13

Recommended Resources - 56:01

Episode Wrap-up - 58:19

 

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Agroecology: From Annual to Perennial Crop Farming | Tim Crews, PhD | The Lands Institute

Welcome to the show. In each episode, I invite you to care more so that, together, we can create a better world. As part of our commitment to create that better, greener world, I'm planting a tree for each new subscriber on my website, CircleB.co. When you join our newsletter, you'll be the first to know about new episodes, exclusive promotions, and more. Join our circle by visiting CircleB.co.

We have quite a treat in store for anyone interested in the future of food as in this episode, we get to connect with Dr. Tim Crews. He is the Chief Scientist, International Program Director, and Director of Ecological Intensification at The Land Institute. His work there promises to transform agriculture from being an ecological liability to an asset.

He first visited The Land Institute in 1981 after reading New Roots for Agriculture as an undergraduate majoring in Agroecology at my alma mater, the University of California, Santa Cruz. Over the next three decades, he pursued a Doctoral degree at Cornell, carried out a Postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, and developed an Agroecology program at Prescott College in Northern Arizona.

Our paths do echo one another in some really interesting ways, which I'm sure we'll get into in this episode, since both my undergraduate studies and my graduate studies at Prescott are underway. I've spent nearly three decades in the field of health and nutrition, so I am really excited to connect with him. I couldn't be more excited for all of you. Dr. Tim Crews, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Corinna. It's great to be here.

Career Journey

You have been a champion of all things related to food growth and ecological synergies for the entirety of your career. You even first visited The Land Institute back in 1981. What set you on this path, even at a time when it wasn't quite so popular a field in agriculture?

A lot of things happened, but there are a few milestones. I think one was reading The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture by Wendell Berry when I was in high school. That book changed the scope of consideration from being a high school kid who was actually interested in organic gardening in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to thinking about agriculture in the big picture and how it is this ecosystem that has transformed nature into our food-producing ecosystem, and how it's impacted the relationship of how humans even relate to the Earth that we're a part of, or maybe we don't think we're a part of.

That really made me look around for a university that had something to do with what I call agroecology. UC Santa Cruz had a farm and garden program that caught my eye. Almost no school farms existed back then, and I decided that one looked pretty good. Being from New Mexico, Santa Cruz was a crazy place to go to, with an ocean and redwoods, very different from the arid Southwest, so I ended up in Santa Cruz.

I did the farm and garden apprenticeship, which was a six-month intensive internship in which I learned a lot about wonderful horticulture, which has informed my gardening career and a lot of plant finesse over the years. However, I came to realize that that program was not integrated into the academics of UC Santa Cruz at that time, and still isn't, really. The agroecology program hatched while I was there with Steve Gleasman arriving as a new professor, and I immediately started taking his classes. It was in one of those that I read New Roots for Agriculture.

My folks actually moved to Kansas after I left for college in New Mexico, and I came back for a winter break. My dad and I drove over here to check out this place, The Land Institute, of the guy who wrote New Roots for Agriculture, Wes Jackson. At that time, this place was only five years old and turned 50 in 2025. The Land Institute had definitely been simmering in the background of my agroecology professional development for many years. It finally came to a head when I went to Prescott College and developed the agroecology program there.

Agroecology

I'm looking at that as a potential course I'm taking in the summer term, one of the courses that you helped to design. It'll just be a treat. I understand agroecology is defined as the application of ecological principles to agricultural systems and practices or the branch of science that's concerned with this.

With agroecology, we're essentially seeking to increase yields while reducing environmental impacts, which sounds a lot like regenerative agriculture in a way. I'd love for you to help define how these topics connect to one another. You have regen ag on one side, you have agroecology, and then you have people referring to permaculture. Is this just a different language for some of the same things? How do you see it?

It is, to some extent, a different language for the same thing in that they all overlap, as is sustainable agriculture, organic agriculture, biological agriculture, and even biodynamics, all of which have some degree of overlap in looking towards approaches to producing food that function more within ecological systems. It’s like what I was referring to earlier. It is acknowledging that we are actually on a planet, and we don't set the rules for living on this planet. There are biogeochemical cycles, the hydrological cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the carbon cycle, and we're very much a part of these.

We do not set the rules for living on this planet.

I'll probably talk in a few minutes about how the advent of fossil fuel energy, or the discovery of it, has allowed us to leave or really relax a lot of how we're constrained by these cycles, unlike before the fossil fuel bonanza when we really were under the same limitations as almost every animal on the planet. Fossil fuels have allowed us to leave those.

These approaches to farming acknowledge this more than what we might call conventional or industrial agriculture, where, again, we've used fossil fuels to address most of what limits plant growth using pesticides, fertilizers, irrigation, and season-extending structures, all of these things that make any one place, like Santa Cruz, where that's my benchmark of where plants like to grow the most.

That’s beyond aquifers at this point. It's the Romans coming in and transporting water, which was the advent of that time when we were augmenting soil continually. A lot of people don't understand that pesticides and even fertilizers often come from the petrochemical industry as well. My understanding is that this is part of what got us into this really severely constrained monocropping system where we just have fields and fields of soy, corn, and wheat. If I drive up the Central Coast here in California through Santa Cruz County up to Monterey, what do I see? I see artichoke fields and strawberry fields.

Maybe we see Brussels sprouts over here, but it's very much monocropped even when we're going by the organic farms. It feels like we have all this knowledge now. We know that there's a better way. We know that plants grow better using the fertile soil that they have at their roots rather than just dumping a bunch of these fertilizers onto the top, a lot of which runs off and ends up in our waterways, creating other problems downstream. Why is it just taking so long to get to where we know we need to go at this point?

Maybe in part because the high-input method has been remarkably successful at raising yields tremendously and making it very much simpler to grow large amounts of food. By simpler, I mean less human power. You can mechanize a monocrop much easier than you can mechanize an intercrop or a polyculture. Having trees in the middle of the fields, as is being proposed with alley cropping and has been done historically with alley cropping in traditional systems, involves more human power or much smaller machines at minimum.

Let’s go back to the question that I was meandering away from a little bit of what is common and different with agroecology and these other methods. Agroecology, on the one hand, is this science of how we can develop or interpret food-producing ecosystems ecologically. When you bring up a monoculture, agroecologically, what's the issue with monocultures? There's a huge welcome mat for maybe one pest that gets into a population of wheat and then just goes right through it because it doesn't run into another plant that could disrupt its spread.

If you have multiple species, like we see in almost all natural systems, you tend to have pests, insects, and pathogens or diseases regulated. They're suppressed by their inability to just sweep through a population. That's an ecological interpretation of an agricultural system. Similarly, weeds happen when sunlight or water or nutrients are not fully taken advantage of by the vegetation. If there's some hanging around that aren't being used, there are plants that are very good at finding those resources. We call them weeds, but they get into our fields.

They're a huge issue because then they start to compete with our crops. The agroecological insight might be figuring out cropping systems that minimize the availability or cropping systems that take full advantage of those resources. Oftentimes, those are intercrops, like three crops growing together to really fully take advantage of light, nutrients, and water.

Agroecology is utilizing what we can learn from natural systems as well as traditional farming systems of indigenous or ancestral peoples who produced food for eons without fossil fuel inputs. They had just solar energy growing their crops to provide the labor energy to produce food in their agriculture. Many ingenious approaches to producing food were developed through trial and error by many cultures. In many countries, peasants are struggling for land and resources and are oftentimes challenged with political forces that are favoring large-scale monocultures or removing land access in one way or another. Bananas, cash crops, you name it.

 

That movement is the other side of the coin to the science of agroecology. I would say that the field of agroecology is trying to reconcile the science with the movement and see if they can coexist within that same term. They’re both highly justifiable and very forward-looking, but have slightly different ends in terms of what they’re about. One is the science, one is more of a normative social movement. That's a unique aspect of agroecology.

Regenerative agriculture tends to be a really general term that conjures up science but does not specifically detail what it means. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. I think what holds the regenerative agriculture movement together is the idea that agriculture can actually function to improve the ecosystem of agriculture through cover crops or no-till. That right there is one of the conflicts. Some people don’t think herbicides should be used in regenerative agriculture. Others will say, "In order to have no-till, we have to apply herbicides at scale." Rodale came up with that term in the ’80s, and it’s relatively new in terms of how it’s caught on.

I’ve been a part of some of these debates, and there are two sides to this conversation that I think are really interesting and important. On one side, you have the regenerative organic certification group that wants you to basically take organic and improve it to be regenerative. You’re piggybacking on the organic movement already, but organic is only about 5% of total crop growth. On the other side, you have Gabe Brown, and he's got a certification called Regen, and he has a five-step process to move people more towards organic and away from the use of a lot of these pesticides and things like that. That also acknowledges that 95% of the growers are not organic already. You have to build something that they can lock on to and hold on to.

Maybe they want to do things better and stop doing so much application of pesticides, but you're not going to get them to the end game overnight like this. I tend to believe that that makes a lot of sense. I think there’s a place for both schools of thought. I have even been encouraged by certain applications of technology.

For instance, I interviewed on this show one of the cofounders of Monarch Tractor. They are building a fully autonomous tractor that’s electric, that you can run programmatically and where you can attach lasers to the thing, and it can zap weeds. It can identify the broadleaf weed by its leaf pattern and zap that particular weed. You can program it on a course, and it can go out there and do the work without you having to physically man it.

I think there’s one part where we’ve got this really interesting technology that is becoming more broadly available, which can minimize our need for some of these pesticides, which are also a huge cost center for farmers. Millions of dollars a year by large farmers are just spent on things like pesticides and fertilizers. The arguments for shifting to a more organic way of doing things are strong so long as they can make it work on the bottom line with regard to man hours and other investments. I think it’s really scary for a lot of them to change so much right at once. This is my top-line perspective of, "It’s complicated."

Kernza

We can take steps to go in the right direction, but what you’re doing at The Land Institute is really interesting in the perennial crop space. I want people to think about these issues, and, at the same time, perhaps revisit some of these older episodes where I’ve dug into these issues, and then learn about what you’re doing specifically with Kernza. You sent me an article that had just launched in Anthropocene magazine called Wheat on Repeat. It did a deep dive into this interesting work that you’re doing in the Kernza space. Let’s talk about that.

Thank you for bringing up Kernza. It is the perennial grain crop that we have advanced into the commercial realm, or maybe just that farmers are growing it and people are making things out of Kernza now, in contrast to the other perennial grain crops that we're developing. We are not at the point of releasing them yet into the agricultural commodity or even the local food production sphere. Kernza is a deep-rooted grass from Eurasia. It was introduced into the US as a forage grass earlier in the 20th century. It's not particularly invasive. It’s just a very productive forage that is of high quality and is planted still to this day across Montana and the upper latitudes parts of the US.

To help feed grazing cattle, right?

Yeah, exactly. Rodale, in the 1980s, took a challenge from Wes Jackson, the founder of The Land Institute, along with Dana Jackson, to try to identify prospective perennial grains or prospective wild perennial plants that could turn into perennial grains. They did a couple of cycles of selection on it in the late ’80s, early ’90s, and then shelved it. Late in the 1990s, they offered it to The Land Institute as a resource for us to take and see what we could make of it. In the early 2000s, Lee DeHaan had just come on as a plant breeder at The Land Institute and was working on developing a perennial wheat through what we call wide hybridization. This is where you take an already existing annual crop, wheat, and cross it with a perennial cousin, which is Kernza.

It's intermediate wheatgrass, the forage grass, a relative of wheat, not closely related, but related enough that every once in a while, if you cross-pollinate them, you will get a viable plant. That's what happened in Lee's early program and now Shuen Wang's wheat breeding program, where they've made some hybrids, and then you work on backcrossing that wheat hybrid to wheat or to Kernza and improve on the performance of that hybrid over time. That work continues to this day. It's genetically challenging because this hybrid is a little unstable, and so it's a slow process to develop a perennial wheat. There are a lot of attributes that are already there because of the annual wheat parent.

Back to what Lee DeHaan was doing, he was doing this crossing work, but he also just had a little patch of intermediate wheatgrass on the side that he was selecting on, just cycle after cycle for a few years, for traits of agricultural interest, like yield and not dropping its seed at the end of the year, like wild species tend to do. He made much faster progress than he thought was possible. He saw changes in this intermediate wheatgrass that were like, "This is worth trying,” and actually ratcheting up the scale of this selection program and seeing what happens.

It responded really well. There have been quite a few traits or characteristics of this wild plant becoming a grain that have improved dramatically over the last 15 or 20 years. Lee DeHaan became a full-time breeder of intermediate wheatgrass years ago. He came up with the name Kernza, which describes this grain, and it has taken off. We released it before it was ready, and it's still, in some ways, not ready to be a grain crop. It's a proto-crop. It's a work in progress that is probably almost halfway to where we think it will become in 10 to 15 years as a full-fledged, viable perennial grain that could be an economically viable choice for many growers across the Midwest.

It's still in the early stage at which early-adopting farmers who are somewhat adventurous and really interested in agroecology want to try it and want to get in on this because it does deliver such profound soil health attributes. It all but eliminates erosion. It starts to build soil organic matter. It retains nutrients. It prevents nutrients from running off either through leaching or into waterways through runoff and erosion. In Kansas and a lot of other states, those nutrients going into waterways cause a lot of contamination. They stimulate the growth of blue-green algae and make water bodies almost toxic. If your pets drink out of a lake in Kansas in August, they just might die in some cases. It's that toxic.

I've even seen they have warning signs in our local fields. If your dog develops leakage or is constantly licking at their genitals, it may be that they drank some of this water that's contaminated. You need to take them to the vet as a warning sign.

Those are probably herbicides or endocrine disruptors or something, but there are so many things that can run off of a high-input farm field. Having a crop that does not leak nutrients and that does not need tilling can build soil organic matter and actually improve soil health over the time that it's growing and producing. It's not a cover crop that you just have to incorporate and that doesn’t produce food. The food-producing crop is healing the planet. That's the promise of these perennial grains.

A food-producing crop can heal the planet if it does not leak nutrients, does not need tilling, and can improve soil health over the time it is growing and producing.

I've gone ahead and pulled up the article in Anthropocene magazine. This is by Dr. Emma Bryce. She’s actually covering here a Kernza-based pasta. I believe there's also an image right here. This is Kernza growing in a field. It looks simply beautiful. It looks like wheat to me. It looks like the forage I would give my horse. I think later on in the article, it shows the rootstock.

To give people context, there's a gentleman here holding up a tuft of the grass. The rootstock itself is taller than he is. This has to do with the potential of this particular plant to both be incredibly drought-resistant because its roots go so far down in the soil, stabilize soil, help sequester carbon, and do all these incredible things.

My question for you with regard to this Kernza as an opportunity crop is whether it would also be commonplace on, let's say, the part of a grower. Let's say somebody is to go ahead and say, “Yes, we're going to lean into Kernza. We're going to grow this in broad swaths of fields.” They've traditionally sprayed wheat fields with glyphosate to get everything to dry up at the same time so they can harvest all at once. Would that problem exist here, too? What are your thoughts on that?

What was the problem you're identifying there?

Just a farmer's propensity to want to harvest the crop all at once, so applying something like glyphosate to be able to dry the crop so it can be harvested at the same time.

I wanted people to see above the gentleman's head is a wheat root system. That's wheat on your right, and that's Kernza literally in the soil on the left. That's partly why Kernza and other perennial grain crops build more soil organic matter. It's that amount of carbon actually going into the ground, which is the part of the plant that actually stimulates the greatest accumulation of soil organic matter. It also explains why nutrients have a really hard time escaping below ground from that root mass on the left. Keep in mind that the roots on the right are wheat at their fullest maturity.

For most of the year, you have just minimal roots, smaller seedling roots occupying the soil or none at all. The propensity for soil to erode and for nutrients to leak, and then the tillage to keep that system going because it's an annual plant, you can't have vegetation that you're putting that annual seed into the ground that's going to compete with it. That opens up a lot of vulnerable land to the elements and to invasion by weeds and things like this.

That photo is really useful to just visualize a lot of why we're interested in developing crops that are on the left of that photo, keeping in mind that most natural ecosystems are dominated by perennial plants like the one on the left. That's forests, grasslands, savannas, rainforests, tundra, deserts. The majority of the plants producing biomass are perennials, and this sums it up perfectly.

Most natural ecosystems are dominated by perennial plants.

If you look on the right and we're looking at the wheat rootstock, it really does not have deep roots. I did an archaeology dig back in 1997, 1998. It was a collaboration with the Université de Paris X and also University of Iowa. I went to France, and did this dig in the middle of a wheat field, which was just on the coast of the Oise River. The Oise has sloping banks, and every year it would flood a little bit, but gently. The site in the middle of this wheat field was perfectly preserved.

To get down to level, the first thing we had to do was remove the wheat. We found that using sickles in the middle of the field was only so good because we eventually had to get the root balls out anyway. We just started pulling it out. It was actually fairly easy to pull out in clumps as opposed to going through the added labor of first having to clear the portion of the field that we would be digging. From that manual labor perspective, you really thought there was no way we would have been able to pull out these roots.

It's hard to kill a Kernza plant by hand.

Theoretically, if a fire were to come through, it would grow back the following season from the same rootstock, right? That's how it evolved.

Yeah. Fire can stimulate Kernza to be more productive.

It then adds the nutrients from the stock back to the soil.

Perennial Ground

It burns off the above-ground biomass that might be blocking sunlight from hitting the growing tips of the newly sprouting grasses, so both of those. Jumping back, though, to one of the comments you made about how more drought-tolerant perennial grains might be, and Kernza in particular, because of those deep roots. It's not really the case that they use less water. These perennial grains and perennials, in general, tend to wake up right when the growing season starts to happen. They leaf out. Whenever you leaf out, you're losing water through transpiration. The plant is alive and, by definition, water is moving through that plant.

3Perennials actually tend to require more water than their annual counterparts, all things equal. A perennial sunflower or silphium that we're working on uses more water than an annual sunflower. So much of the annual sunflower's life is spent when it’s this big or this big or this big. The growing season of that is relatively narrow compared to the long growing season from April until November when the perennial is growing.

That said, when it rains in Kansas, and increasingly with climate change, you have really torrential storms, really intense, just pounds for two hours and all this rain comes down, oftentimes exceeding the ability of the soil to absorb that water. You get it to run off, and that's when erosion happens. That's when nutrient leakage happens, and you lose that water resource for the crop over the next month or so.

When you have a perennial brown cover, because it's been there for 1, 2 or 3 years, the soil structure develops aggregates or clumps with cracks in between. You also have individual plants die and decompose, so that where their tap roots were or their fibrous grassroots, you have channels there where water can just go right into the ground. It's been shown quite conclusively that these perennially covered lands infiltrate water more readily and for more volume of water than plowed land or even no-till land.

All those rootlets that are extending far deep into the soil also reach further down into the soil to access water that's beneath them.

Exactly. When it comes to needing water in three weeks, with really deep roots, you can access a much larger volume of soil-stored water than an annual can, especially if that annual is relatively young. This is like a game changer in some places where you may not have timely rains to germinate the crop. That can be a disaster if you miss three weeks of the growing season because it just didn't rain.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, this is a particular problem with planting sorghum and some other traditional crops. If you have a plant that is timed or can just come up, it doesn't need water to germinate the seed as long as water shows up at some point here. As you said, you can live off of the stored groundwater for a little while in a way that a little seedling can’t. It's really more resilient in that respect, but a lot of people will say, “These perennials, they're drought-hardy.” It's not that they can tolerate the lack of water, it's just that they're much more functional with capturing it and then getting it to use again.

 

Many things have resonated for me just in hearing you go through this water use issue. In California, we had something like 11 or 12 atmospheric rivers tear through the state. In the 2023 to 2024 season, it was really hard because you get that water all at once. When you get that water all at once, it increases runoff. It damages crops. I went through the Watsonville area and saw some fields that were just underwater. When you have that happen, it can cause the roots to rot.

You can lose the entire field of food. Really, just to see the devastation also on some local animal farms that had to evacuate animals because suddenly the barn was two feet underwater. It's just the low point on the land was really in trouble, so to speak. These catastrophic rain events can come through, damage crops, damage our ability to deal with things like runoff, create landslides. Roots like this are soil-stabilizing. They will keep the land in place. I think that's something that we too often forget.

I think recognizing that the fertile soils that we farm in almost every case were actually developed under the diverse perennial vegetation that preceded agriculture in that place. That's positively true here in Kansas. We have these deep, what are referred to as mollisols or grassland soils. They have these wonderful dark topsoil horizons that go about 2 or 3 feet into the ground.

That took hundreds to thousands of years of those prairie grasses that are very similar to the Kernza roots growing and turning over, dying, and microbes consuming that, and their microbial necromass, or dead microbes, glom onto the mineral particles. They build these incredibly fertile soils. Those soils are not being made with annual wheat or annual corn or annual sorghum, nothing like that. Especially when you till and disturb the soil and break up aggregates, microbes eat up that soil organic matter very quickly when we disturb the soil that way year after year.

Regenerative Agriculture

That's why in most of our landscapes around here, and most grain-producing agricultural landscapes, we've lost between 20% and 60% of the soil organic matter that was there before, that was there under the diverse perennial vegetation that came before agriculture. When we talk about regenerative agriculture, how are we going to regenerate that soil? Soil organic matter is like the holy grail of regenerative agriculture. That is the primary focus that brings that movement together, building healthy soil. Here at The Land Institute, if you want to regenerate, let's look to the ecosystems that generated it in the first place and set this benchmark of what's possible in this climate and in this soil type with these minerals.

In almost every case, the benchmarks people use, like the Soil Health Institute, are the natural ecosystems that exist in that area, little patches of prairie or forest, or they go to a cemetery where it's never been disturbed, and they sample that, and they go, “Look what's possible on this landscape.” It's incredible. It's almost always the diverse perennial vegetation of that ecosystem.

I'll go on just a little bit more. There's a lot of interest in putting perennials somewhere on the agricultural landscape, whether it's a hedgerow, prairie strips or a rotation of alfalfa. People are recognizing, let's get perennials into this landscape because they're really beneficial. We're just saying, “Let's just not stop there. Let's just go for the actual crop fields themselves and convert them into an ecosystem that is much more like the one that built these soils in the first place.” To us, that is the pinnacle of regenerative agriculture. We know it's possible.

There is a lot of work, but I am reminded of a story that Tom Newmark told when he came on this show. You might be familiar with his work. He was cofounder of a not-for-profit called the Carbon Underground. He also led New Chapter, which is a vitamin supplement company that has since been sold to Procter & Gamble. He's been in the natural foods industry for a long time. He told the story of the biodynamic regenerative field he was running near Finca Luna Nueva, which is an agroecological preserve next to the forest built in there. They run conferences and things like that and bring people down to see how they're doing things differently and more biodynamically.

Where is that located?

This is in Costa Rica. He said, "We thought we were doing everything right. I think we are sitting here, we're doing all this work to build our soil health and running things biodynamically and interspersing different crops and nestling it in near the forest and water sources and things like this to actually have a really rich growing ecosystem." What they found was that their carbon just paled in comparison to the forest floor. When they compared it to the forest floor, they were like, "What are we doing wrong? We've been working so hard at this thing." The one thing that they were doing wrong, they identified out the gates, was they were still plowing.

They ceased the plowing and were able to really start to build the carbon within the soil. It still paled in comparison to the forest floor, but not as stark of a contrast. It would make sense. The forest floor, that's the ultimate regenerative system. Trees die, and entire forests of microbes and mushrooms and all sorts of things come out to degrade that unit and bring the nutrients to all of the plant matter and all of the little microbes and insects and things that are in the soil. That's going to be like crème de la crème, almost like you would find in, let's say, a peat bog or something like that.

I love that story, Corinna. When you were mentioning permaculture earlier, there's a lot of permaculturalists who are wanting to develop a food system that's like what you're describing, that would have forest components. It would have multiple layers in a canopy and grow your kitchen garden near your house and integrate as much biodiversity and plant diversity as possible in the food forest around their house. That's an entirely viable approach for communities or individuals and a very challenged approach in feeding 8.3 billion when many people are not living on those landscapes.

However, the mentality is really appropriate and can be applied in many situations, whether you're going full-scale food forest or just implementing what makes sense in terms of water flows and using resources efficiently on this local landscape, wherever you find yourself. Just throwing in that contrast of movements again and ideas that people are pursuing, it is very much consistent and overlapping with some of these others. However, permaculture really focuses on your place and the specifics of your local geography in choosing food and minimizing labor and inputs.

 

When you brought up the electric tractor weed zapper, the one thing that comes to mind there that we think a lot about is the amount of energy it takes to even do various what might be considered regenerative renewable practices. At this moment in time, if you were to implement that system in Kansas, only about a fifth of the electricity would come from a renewable source. The rest would come from burning oil or natural gas. Until we're all renewable in our electrical grids, and Kansas actually has a fairly high percent, a lot of states have less than 20% renewables still.

Many of us don't think we will ever get to the point where we are going to be able to match our demands for petroleum or gas or other forms of fossil fuel with renewable electricity. These statistics I'm giving are before the whole auto fleet has gone over and the whole tractor fleet and our baseboard heaters and everything else we're imagining is going to go renewable, solar and wind. We tend to think at The Land Institute, and I can say this with some confidence, generally, that we will need to downpower some. We will need to learn to live with less, and it won't be horrible, either. We can't expect there to be some seamless transition where we almost don't notice that we've gone renewable.

If you read Vaclav Smil's book, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going, when he talks about nitrogen and cement and steel and plastics, there's precious few replacements for those extremely energy-expensive underpinnings of modern society. The renewable revolution does not address those foundational elements of our society very well.

We are thinking we really need to create agricultural systems that tend to grow themselves more than requiring pretty energy-expensive high-tech inputs to create a sustainable agriculture, which is what I'm hearing with the tractor weed zapper. I'm not dissing it. I'm just cautioning a level of optimism around what I would consider a pretty high energy, meaning GPS satellites, everything that's involved, Musk’s satellites flying around to make that system go.

We need to create agricultural systems that can grow themselves more than requiring energy-expensive high-tech inputs to produce sustainability.

Sustainable Solutions

Must Elon Musk come on every episode? I don’t know. I'm sorry, I had to stop and laugh there because I heard the satellite network he put up in space is causing more damage to our atmosphere. It’s just like there's no solution that comes with zero cost. I think that's the thing we have to get to the bottom of. We can create some really interesting technological advances that are going to help us do things differently and better. We still have to get the rare earth minerals out of the earth to support these batteries and these vehicles. How else are we going to power them? There's an environmental cost to that.

We're talking about drilling into permafrost, like, let's say, melting some permafrost in Greenland to get at the rare earth minerals that are there. Why would we consider doing these things? There's going to be a cost. I like the creativity of it. I have bought a nature preserve here. It's an open space preserve. They have grazing cattle on it because they need to allow ruminants on the field specifically to graze down the grass short enough that this beetle that hunts by sight can see its prey. It's a preserve that preserves a beetle, a native Californian grass, and a salamander. There are challenges. People live alongside it. They plant stuff. I'm even guilty of planting mint. If you know anything about mint, mint is somewhat insidious.

 

It both flowers and extends its reach by roots. I have a planter bed that I put mint in. Let's just say every year, I have to do my best to clean it up. It always comes back. What I have noticed in taking my morning walks with my dogs is that if the cows are on the field and they've just freshly walked over this area, the entire area smells like mint. The mint has displaced some of the perennial grass that is being worked to be preserved. I'm not saying it's my fault, but somebody planted mint, probably someone that lives a little closer even to the field than I do. As it stands, it's a problem.

Even then, that's been identified by the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County. It's like, “What are we going to do about the mint?” It's not something where we can get a tractor out there to go after these broadly. What do you do? This is just a small example of what a farmer might contend with, because you have a pest plant, because in their perspective, this is a pest plant. It comes in and start to create problems on their field. They have to take care of it one way or another. What do they do?

These are the challenges, but what you're describing, it’s more like what we imagine the challenges looking like for some perennial grain farmers of the future, where it's almost more of a natural history question, managing, tweaking the system somehow, whether it's finding a herbivore that likes to eat mint specifically or a plant or plants. This is a really unique circumstance, just because of the desire for really low vegetation. Otherwise, there may be something that could out-compete that mint that would do it naturally. It's a tricky goal that's being pursued and a worthy one.

It just gets you thinking about the whole picture. Initially, when I moved into this spot, there were horses on the property, but the horses were too discriminant in the specific plants they would eat. That meant that the beetle wasn't having as much success, and they were seeing the population start to decline. They transitioned to the cow, which was less discriminant. It's a really unique situation.

When you observe it and do a little reading on it, it's like, "Okay." I might think I have an idea of the challenges that farmers might run into, but really, it varies so much by your micro-ecosystem and that particular environment. We've got to feed people. We've got to create solutions. There's going to be an element of perennials, I'm sure, in there. I applaud the work you're doing.

Thank you. It's exciting. There's a lot of momentum with Kernza, both in the US and Europe. I was just meeting with a group in Kenya that was interested in trialing Kernza to see if it would grow on the slopes of Mount Kenya. We don't know, because of the day length in particular, how well suited it is. We think it might need more of a temperate latitude, dark-and-light set of seasons to trigger the vegetation growth and seed production. There's one way to find out. A lot of people are excited, but that's true also with some of these other crops.

With oil seeds, we have a legume crop that will be for a pulse like a lentil but also a perennial plant protein. Wheat and sorghum. They're working on barley in Sweden, a perennial barley, flax, and a perennial quinoa project is off the ground in Bolivia. The more that you can have the crop grow itself because it's a perennial, you're not reseeding every year. If you have an agroecosystem can suppress weeds, and if you have a legume in there to fix nitrogen, you start to have an ecosystem that requires relatively low levels of labor and resource inputs to produce food.

Cycling phosphorus and rock-derived nutrients from the food that we take off the field is a really big question. It’s not one that we address a lot at The Land Institute, but we recognize how the recycling of nutrients in urine, in particular, back to fields that we took the food from will be important in the long run. That's how the forest works and the grasslands. They cycle nutrients over and over and over again. Since we're living so much in these large urban areas, how do we get those nutrients back to the fields, especially nutrients like phosphorus that are incredibly finite? Many people realize that we will run out of fertilizer phosphorus, and what do we do then?

We don't need it to run off into the lakes and rivers and oceans either.

We use it once. We dig these big holes, put it on, and then it runs off, and we dig more out, put it on, and it runs off. We need to cycle it. We need to come up with systems that can do that within reasonable, energetic boundaries. When we reduce the amount of energy we're using in society, we'll come up with a lot of creative solutions because then we will have to.

As long as there's a lot of fossil fuels swimming around, we come up with crazy ideas, even in the regenerative and organic spheres, because we just have a hard time not using high energy when it's so cheaply available. I'll stop there on that topic. I could go on, obviously, but I think whenever we're thinking of what makes sense ecologically in agriculture, we have to constantly keep track of what we're doing energetically. Right now, agriculture is a big source of greenhouse gases, and we need to desperately improve on that. Part of it is the fossil fuels that run agriculture.

For certain. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been an incredibly enlightening conversation, and I would love to have you back again. We can always dive more deeply into a particular aspect of the energy requirements of agriculture and how that's shifting. I know that to find out more about you, people can visit The Land Institute. Are there any other resources that you want to point people to, including perhaps a book or two by Wendell Berry? I'm adding that to my reading list.

I said The Unsettling of America. I love the novel Jaber Crow and The Sabbath Poem, and a number of books of essays. Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community is a great one, one of his older ones, but he has so many in all of those categories, just a very rich source of inspiration. Wes Jackson's book, New Roots for Agriculture, is still a classic, I think. It’s very relevant, even though it was written in 1980.

If you're interested in Kernza also, there is a website called Kernza.org that's all about Kernza and growers and where products can be found. The Land Institute's website also has a lot of reprints, scientific and reprints of articles for the public that are available on it. I’d be ghappy to show up another time, and just a delight, Corinna, to intersect with you in person, virtually, given our overlapping backgrounds and interests. It’s really a pleasure to be on this show.

Recommended Resources

Thank you so much for joining me. This has been my pleasure.

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Episode Wrap-up

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