#monocultures

Research suggests that the world’s soils are now eroding 100 times faster than new soil can form, and an estimated 33 percent of soil is so degraded that its ability to grow crops is compromised. Meanwhile, monoculture — the strategy of sowing huge fields with a single crop — achieves higher yields but also puts more pressure on soil and increases the risk that plants will succumb to pests or disease.

Many of humanity’s solutions to these problems also create other issues, Land Institute researchers say. Fertilizer can counter soil degradation, but it pollutes waterways and produces nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Pesticides might reduce threats from insects, but they destroy other vital species. Cover crops will curb erosion, but they can be difficult to plant and maintain.

And modern farming is hugely carbon intensive. Factoring in fuel for machinery and food transport, methane produced by belching livestock, and the carbon that’s lost when ecosystems are converted to cropland, agriculture accounts for about a quarter of humanity’s annual planet-warming emissions.

Yet farms are also threatened by climate change, which will increase the risk of prolonged droughts and catastrophic floods.

In Kansas, one of the nation’s leading producers of wheat, these problems are on full display. The state loses an estimated 190 million tons of its rich topsoil each year. Climate change has made Kansas summers hotter and drier, but also makes rainstorms more intense. The state’s farmers are among those most at risk of losing crops as a consequence of human-caused warming.

'It’s a disaster,' Tim Crews, the Land Institute’s lead soil ecologist, tells me one damp day in June. Our shoes squelch in the mud as he leads me around the institute’s Salina, Kan., campus. As we talk, the rain is almost certainly destabilizing soil and washing it into surrounding streams.

Crews sweeps his hand out, as if to indicate not only the farm fields across the road but the entire U.S. agricultural system.

'This is the ecosystem that feeds us, and it has just been nuked,' Crews says. 'Is this really the best we can do?'

Land Institute scientists disagree about how to describe what they’re proposing. Is it a natural evolution from the past 10,000 years of annual agriculture? Or something more like a midcourse correction?

Rachel Stroer, the Land Institute’s president, calls it a 'paradigm shift.'

'Instead of an annual monoculture,' she says, 'we’re trying to create a perennial polyculture' — cultivating diverse mixes of long-lived plants.

'We want to create an agricultural system to feed humanity that uses nature as the measure of success.'

Before people started intensively farming here, Kansas boasted some of the richest soils on Earth. In native prairies, dozens of grass species intermingled with clover, wildflowers, lichens and shrubs, their roots extending as far as 15 feet into the ground. Periodic fires sparked by lightning or set by native people helped clear debris and promote new growth. Insects, birds, prairie dogs and buffalo foraged in the vegetation, while millions of munching microbes buried carbon and other nutrients deep in the earth.

'The ecosystems that built the soils upon which we eat today, and that we have degraded, were perennial and diverse,' Stroer says. 'That’s where we get those two characteristics that we’re trying to bring back into agriculture.'

Yet proponents of perennial polyculture have a problem: More than half of all calories consumed by people come from grains, and no one has ever domesticated a grain that lived beyond a year.

That challenge falls to plant biologists such as Lee DeHaan. The son of a Minnesota corn and soy grower, he’d heard family members talk about the Land Institute’s ideas with some skepticism.

'But it captivated me,' he says. 'I saw it as solving food for humans, environmental problems and financial security for farmers.'

He began experimenting with a wild grain known as Thinopyrum intermedium, or intermediate wheatgrass. Originally from the steppes of Europe and Asia, it had been brought to North America as forage for cattle, but scientists had a hunch it could also feed people.

In the early 2000s, Land Institute scientists planted their first plots of intermediate wheatgrass. When the plants matured, DeHaan and his colleagues selected the 1,000 top specimens to replant. And when those plants matured, they chose the best among them for further breeding. It was the same process that farmers have been using to domesticate crops for millennia.

To the scientists’ surprise, those early harvests were wildly successful. The new batch of plants had stronger stalks and bigger seeds that didn’t fall out of their husks before they could be harvested.

'We started to realize we were not that far away from something farmers could actually use,' DeHaan says.

'But the original domestication of crops took hundreds and thousands of years,' he adds. 'And with climate change, we don’t have that much time.'

So he turned to tools that were unavailable to his ancient predecessors: gene sequencing, artificial intelligence and advanced supercomputers. Once DeHaan identified the genetic markers associated with the traits he was looking for, he didn’t need to wait for the plants to fully mature before picking the best ones to breed.

After two decades and 11 cycles of this process, the Land Institute has domesticated a form of wheatgrass whose seeds are two to three times bigger than those of its wild ancestor. Under ideal conditions, it can provide as much as 30 percent of the yield of traditional wheat. They call their trademarked creation Kernza — an amalgamation of 'kernel' and 'Kansas.'

But the plant’s best qualities are below ground. DeHaan shows me a photograph of Kernza’s roots hanging in a Land Institute stairwell — the life-size image is so long, it takes up two stories. In the first four years after planting, Land Institute research suggests, a one-acre plot of Kernza will pull roughly 6.5 tons of carbon dioxide out of the air and into those deep roots.

Kernza can’t completely replace regular wheat — at least, not yet. As Jenny kneads our bread dough, she explains that the weaker gluten proteins in Kernza flour make it harder for loaves to hold their shape. And because Kernza grains are so small, the flour also has proportionally more bran, the hard outer coating of a grain. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — bran is full of fiber, protein and other nutrients. But it’s not exactly ideal for making angel food cake. Still, mixed with an equal amount of whole-wheat bread flour, it’s shaping up to make a good-looking loaf.

Jenny places the dough inside a cast-iron cooking pot, which will help the bread bake evenly, and slides it into the hot, waiting oven... The proof will be in the eating. Jenny pulls our loaf from the oven, filling the kitchen with a tantalizing, yeasty smell.

'I’m excited that there’s movement in the idea of more sustainable agriculture,' she says. 'I hope this can prove there’s a market.'

Finally the bread is cool enough to cut into. Jenny takes a bite, tilts her head and chews. 'It tastes like —' she trails off, then tries again.

'Texturally, it’s like rye, but a little spongier,' she says. 'And it’s almost like it’s got a hint of herby or spicy-ness.'

She grins. 'It’s delicious.'

And we both grab another slice."