Wes Jackson on why perennials and why not annuals

Jim Wood wrote last week in defense of traditional agriculture.  He was reacting to something he heard Wes Jackson, director of The Land Institute, say in an interview with Mark Bittman on the New York Times site, and that was that "agriculture is the worst mistake in the history of the human race."  Jared Diamond may be responsible for this idea gaining traction as it was the title of an article he wrote for Discover Magazine in 1987.

Fertilizer being applied to a corn field; Wikimedia Commons

Jim noticed that the idea was perpetuated on the Land Institute's website, and it got his hackles up because, as an anthropologist, he believes that most traditional agriculture isn't all bad.  Of course, yesterday's post by archeology graduate student Reed Goodman points out that depending on what is 'traditional' agriculture has had serious consequences before today's industrialized, fossil-fuel-based version that Wes is referring to.

The Land Institute is a forward-thinking, some might say radical hot-shot on the sustainable ag horizon.  They have been working for 37 years now to perennialize grain, for many important ecological and economic reasons. We blogged about The Land recently, but of course Wes Jackson describes their work much better, and more fully than we can. He is passionate because he wants to motivate people to undertake fundamental change, and that is difficult to achieve.

Indeed, Wes emailed us a reply to Jim's blog post, explaining what he thinks is wrong with modern agriculture, and why perennializing grains will eliminate some of the worst ecological effects of today's reliance on annual crops, monocrops at that.  He has kindly agreed that we post his comments here.

Wes Jackson

First off, I am not an anthropologist. I have spent little time in undeveloped countries. I have visited a few farms in Mexico, rural Chile and Argentina and also Tunisia. I am not doubting the observations of Professor Wood with his vast “on the ground” experience with subsistence farmers. There is little to disagree with on any of the “bullet points” and wondering if perhaps he is not aware that we are mostly plant breeders (perennializing the major crops and domesticating some promising wild species) and ecologists at work to put them in mixes that mimic something close to the vegetative structure of a prairie.

I am attaching a.) my preface and prologue of New Roots for Agriculture, 1980 and b.) Chapter 6 of my 2012 book Consulting the Genius of the Place. [Please email me, avbuchanan at gmail, if you would like copies of either of these.]

1.     The Land Institute is not suggesting that we go back to gathering and hunting. Too much water has gone through the turbines for that to happen.

2.     We do not criticize farmers of any variety. We are all locked into a system in which there is little opportunity for life outside it.

3.     We are saying that annual grain monocultures represent a kind of “hardware” around which we have historically built several versions of software. Some have been sustainable and have stood the test of time, but most acreage with annual hardware erodes.

4.     Most of nature’s land based ecosystems tend to feature perennials grown in mixtures. There soil capital accumulates. Grain agriculture features annuals which tend to be grown in monocultures.

5.     Here and there and now and then (sometimes for long periods) are examples where the ecological capital has been sustained, for whatever reason. It depends.

6.     We can now come up with herbaceous perennial seed producing polycultures, something humanity could not do until the present. Here is the reason. Essentially all annuals tend to self, i.e. accept their own pollen and therefore the genetic load does not build up. Also, a desirable mutation, such as shatter resistance, can be quickly fixed in the population. This makes the first step to domestication easy. Perennials are likely to have a huge genetic load. Early agriculturists would have been quickly discouraged at getting high yield as they did with the annuals through crossing. There would have been lots of aborted embryos. Also they would have had to wait a long time for a desirable trait, such as shatter resistance, to become fixed. In our time, given our computational power and knowledge not available then, we can overcome the problem of our agricultural ancestors.

7.     I am not an anthropologist and have spent little time in undeveloped countries. I have visited farms in Mexico, rural Chile, Argentina and Tunisia. I am not doubting the observations of Professor Wood with his vast experience “on the ground” visiting subsistence farmers and liking them. Seems I have been influenced by others who have studied the history of earth abuse through agriculture. To name a few: Dr. Walter C. Lowdermilk, Plato and Aristotle, Curtis N. Runnels, Paul B. Seers and many others.

8.     The United Nations says we are losing some 30 million agriculture acres per year due to agricultural land degradation. Also, one study shows that for 1700-2000 the globe lost slightly less than 1 billion acres of ag land due to degradation of some form.

Here are a few points we believe we can defend as to why we should be optimistic about the potential of perennial grain mixtures.

1.     Production: “In most parts of the world, human activities, and agriculture in particular, have resulted in decreases in net primary productivity from the levels that likely existed prior to human management. (Chris Field, 2001, Science)

2.     More Efficient:  Perennials have greater access to resources over a longer growing season.

3.     Time-tested: Diverse, perennial plant communities have been successful micro-managers of landscapes for millions of years.

4.     Reallocation Potential: Perennials have “excess capacity” that can be reallocated to grain production.

5.     Sustained yield: Perennial grains have the advantage over annuals in terms of sustained yield on marginal landscapes.

6.     The revolutionary transformation of wild species into crops has been done before (with annuals).

7.     The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) report said: Production (of food) at the expense of conservation (of the wild biodiversity) OR conservation at the expense of production. The either-or assumption can be replaced with “conservation as a consequence of production” with perennial polycultures.

In addition to the greenhouse problem being addressed with perennial grains, there are two other realities which Natural Systems Agriculture addresses:

1.     Agriculture is the “largest threat to biodiversity and ecosystem function of any single human activity.” (MEA)

2.     Humans are poor micro-managers of complex, dynamic processes taking place across large landscapes. Diverse perennial systems are elegant micro-managers of nutrients and water.

And more succinctly: 

I do not criticize grain farmers who have been forced to come up with software to do the best with the “hardware” with which they have been stuck for 10 millennia. Several small scale enterprises have come up with software (agronomic methods) to make do, depending on where they are and the history of their culture. With the new hardware (perennials on the horizon), now ecology can enter the picture in a robust way for the first time. What has to run ahead of everything else on the global scale is an historical reality. On a large scale annual agriculture destroys the ecological capital behind our food supply. It has done so long before the industrial era because annual systems are poor micromanagers of nutrients and water.

 Summing up?
A lively discussion about how things were, are, and ought to be is a salubrious thing for the social media.  In this case, the differences of views expressed reflect different perspectives and time scales and the like, not different assessments of the issues that Wes has devoted so much attention and creative work to.  And Jim Wood, like many anthropologists, is interested in other aspects of agriculture.

The more these discussions can be aired, and the more widely, the more likely it could be that these serious issues are addressed.

The Land Institute and the 50-Year Farm Bill

Agriculture is a major, if not the major contributor to loss of biodiversity, unclean water and ecosystem destruction, with ominous possible prospects for the future of our survival.  But there are many people thinking about how to lessen its impact.  Mark Bittman did a fine job a few weeks ago describing the work of one of those people.  Wes Jackson and The Land Institute that he founded 37 years ago on the Kansas prairie represent a growing awareness that agribusiness can and must change.  They are working to make it possible for agriculture to transition from annual monoculture, 80% of agriculture today, to perennial polyculture, that is, from growing a single crop that must be planted from seed every year to fields of multiple, complementary perennial plants chosen to contain pests and weeds, and contribute to soil retention, not erosion.

Source

The Land has done the hard work of perennializing a grain they call Kernza, although more needs to be done before it's finally commercially available, perhaps within 8 years. (See this for a report on bread made with Kernza flour.)  We think The Land will deserve a Nobel Peace Prize when Kernza's finally on the market.  Norman Borlaug was awarded one in 1970 for his work on the Green Revolution.  Perennializing grain will be even more significant, as it has the potential to decouple farmers from agribusiness and its unsustainable practices growing hybrid annual grains requires (indeed, to reverse many of the effects of the Green Revolution).  Agribusiness is big business, but trades short-term profit for long-term survival.

Why is soil erosion such a problem?  Because soil is essentially a non-renewable resource; it takes on the order of 1000 years to create 2 centimeters of topsoil, which, given conventional monocultural practices, can wash away in a single season.  Industrial-agriculture relies on monocultures based on annual plants that must be replanted each year, and that means plowing and loosening the soil.  And, annuals, with short lifespans, only put down short roots.  

When soil erodes, it takes with it tons of toxic herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers that were applied during the growing season, which end up in rivers, and then the mouths of rivers as in the Gulf of Mexico, where they can create huge dead zones, thousands of square miles of hypoxic waters, unable to support marine life (except for jellyfish, which thrive in these hypoxic zones; it's not a good sign when jellyfish take over).  Perennial plants with their deeper roots can be a major contributor to the prevention of soil erosion.  And, polyculture well-considered requires less toxic chemical use, less fertilizer, and less tilling of the land.

NASA-NOAA map of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico; Wikimedia

5-Year Farm Bills/50-Year Farm Bill
But Bittman, and Jackson in the video accompanying the op/ed, already told this story beautifully.  What we want to talk about today is the 50-Year Farm Bill proposed by Jackson and colleagues.  Since the Great Depression, food and farm policy in the US has been structured according to farm bills that are passed every 5 years or so.

These bills have been largely political mine fields and pork barrels that maintain agribusiness more than they are solutions for the real environmental, cultural and financial problems plaguing agriculture today.  It's not all bleak, however -- since the 1990's a small fraction of the budget has been dedicated to funding beginning farmers, minority farmers, organic farmers, and fruit and vegetable farmers (these are "specialty" crops).  This has been important.

But, the 2008 Farm Bill has expired, and the temporary extension passed by Congress did not include funding for these programs. As Brian Snyder, president of PASA, Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, put it in a recent blog post, 'What's at Stake in the Farm Bill?":

Even taken together, these important reform efforts are still a fairly small fraction of total farm bill spending, but they have an outsize impact – and they are helping to create the foundation for a more a more sustainable and equitable farm and food system in America.

Good news: these innovative programs were all funded as part of the last farm bill that ran from 2008 to 2012.

More good news:  they also receive renewed, and in some cases increased, funding in one or both of the Senate and House farm bills currently being considered in Congress.

Very bad news: when the current farm bill had to be extended in January to give Congress more time to complete it, nearly all of these innovative programs were denied funding in the farm bill extension that was negotiated between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and passed by Congress on January 1 of this year.

The Congress is currently debating very different versions of the new bill from the House and Senate.  One of the major sticking points this time around, at a time in our history when one of the fiercest debates in Washington is the extent to which the government should help the undeserving poor, is the amount of money that will go to the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), food stamps -- this is thanks in no small part to tea partiers who've decided that it's their job to keep tax money from people who need it.  But innovative farm programs are also at stake.

Again, as Brian Snyder writes,

Congress should seize the opportunity to get our food and farm policy back on track.  Congress should pass a new five-year farm bill that includes robust funding for the programs that keep our families fed and healthy, build local economies, protect and restore natural resources, and spur the next generation of farmers.

Cap carbon!
How soon Congress will pass a bill is not at all clear, mired as it is in extremist politics.  The Land Institute, in any case, proposes a much broader view, with attention to food security and sustainable practices for the long term.  Jackson and Wendell Berry wrote in an op/ed in The New York Times in 2009, "We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities." The aim is to bring about gradual change in the way agriculture is done, to stop "the ecological spending of ecological capital necessary for food production".

The 50-Year Farm Bill document includes this paragraph:

Perennialization of the 70 percent of cropland now growing grains has potential to extend the productive life of our soils from the current tens or hundreds of years to thousands or tens of thousands. New perennial crops, like their wild relatives, seem certain to be more resilient to climate change. Without a doubt, they will increase sequestration of carbon. They will reduce the land runoff that is creating coastal dead zones and affecting fisheries, as well as saving and maintaining the quality of scarce surface and ground water. U.S. food security will improve.

Wendell Berry puts it less prosaically in a piece he wrote about the 50-Year Farm Bill published in  The Atlantic last year. As always, his concern is for traditional agricultural communities and sensible practices. 

I have described the need for a farm bill that makes sense of and for agriculture -- not the fiscal and political sense of agriculture, as in the customary five-year farm bills, but the ecological sense without which agricultural sense cannot be made, and without which agriculture cannot be made sustainable.

The program would need the support of the president, the Department of Agriculture, the Congress, non-profits, corporations and citizens.  Five-year farm bills would be incorporated into the plan, and head incrementally toward food security and sustainable farming.  This is, we think, a good idea, but even better would be if, in addition to sensible farm policy, bold political decisions were taken to limit anthropogenic climate change, such as those recently recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change such as capping carbon emissions, limiting the burning of fossil fuels.

Sensible and smart as it clearly is, we're not terribly hopeful that such a 50-Year Farm Bill will be adopted any time soon.  Our politicians don't think long-term because it doesn't pay off in the immediate currency of politics, even if a long-term policy like this one would produce handsome returns in many ways down the road.

We're not hopeful that meaningful carbon caps will become law either, sensible as they are, for much the same reason.  Is the groundswell of interest and research into sustainable agriculture evidence of an incipient revolution in how we do business, though?  We can hope.

We will never see the real answer, however.  What we're doing is leaving the surprises for our descendants, who will have to face the societal consequences of our long-term neglect.

Something to root for

Yesterday, we commented on the typical kind of societal, scientific, and biological complexity associated with genetically engineered food crops. Will evolution have its way, or will we keep one step ahead of famine? The issues have to do with world population demanding industrial-scale agriculture (or, at least, that's how modern societies are constructed).

Assuming that climate change doesn't change the entire name of the game, Mega-dust-bowl fashion, we are still feeding the world on the back of 'portable' fossil fuel (for fertilizers, insecticides, tractor and shipment fuels, and so on). We lay out huge fields of a single crop, as far as the eye (or a soaring eagle's eye) can see. These are largely grasses, the staple foods of most of the world. But the way we do this leads to disaster.

We are losing topsoil faster than a stripper loses clothes, and pretty soon farmland will be as bare as a stripper, too. We have water pollution problems due to runoff not just of soil but of fertilizer and pesticide. One reason is that we rely so heavily on annual grass crops. These need to be plowed under each year, baring and loosening the soil, which makes it vulnerable to runoff.

And mega-agribusiness removes family farms and their communities. Small farms traditionally had a mix and rotation of crops, grazing and other livestock (and their manure), and so on. And though the work was very hard, they had community. This lifestyle is not for everyone, but many pine for it, as it disappears.

However, a different kind of genetically engineered crop is being worked on by a few researchers in the US and elsewhere. Most notable is The Land Institute, in Salina, Kansas. There, under the direction and inspiration of Wes Jackson, new ideas are taking root. Many wild grasses related to commercial food grasses are perennials rather than annuals. They last for years, keeping roots to anchor the soil, reducing the need for fertilizers, keep the topsoil in place, and so on.

Jackson and his group of dedicated experimenters are using traditional agricultural breeding, and where possible, scientific methods, to get commercially useful annual crops to take on the relevant aspects of perennial stock, so that we can have perennial wheat, corn, and other crops. With even modest investment, they will likely be able to succeed. If they do, it will meld real science, both high-tech and traditional, with sound long-term future implications for our physical bellies and our social hearts.

Nobody claims that this will be easy, but it is easy to claim that we have little choice. The Land Institute has a web page where you can learn about these efforts: landinstitute.org