A maverick geneticist may be poised to launch a revolution in agriculture

FARTHER AFIELD
Tom Willey
T & D Willey Farm


A maverick geneticist, whose countenance evokes that of bison from the Kansas prairie to which he is native, may be poised to launch a revolution in agriculture like no other since the inception of cultivation itself ten millennia past. Wes Jackson’s profound insight has several times graced our EcoFarm conference over its 30-year history and this year’s report on decades of ongoing effort at the Land Institute to perennialize grain agriculture was impressive. The septuagenarian gene wizard, reared on a highly diversified small farm outside Topeka, has spent the greater part of an entire scientific career comparing energy dynamics of native prairie ecosystems to the grain monocultures that have usurped the landscape of his region. Former MacArthur genius award recipient, Jackson illustrated how 75% of humanity’s food calories are produced by cultivating annual cereal grains, food legumes and oil seed plants that similarly command three quarters of all the world’s croplands. Selecting seeds of easily manipulated annual species like emmer wheat and wild barley quickly rewarded our farming ancestors’ original efforts at plant domestication. Annual grains’ requirements for reseeding and regrowing a shallow, limited root mass for each harvest demands prodigious fossil fuel inputs for plowing, fertilization and pest control which wreaks havoc across our fragile biosphere. But Jackson has observed that vastly more extensive, perennial root systems of native prairie grasses and flowers produce significantly greater photosynthetic energy yields with few or no inputs while stabilizing environments in which these flourish. Jackson and colleagues at his Salina, Kansas Land Institute have pursued novel breeding programs over the last third century, hybridizing modern cereals with their wild, perennial relatives in an attempt to establish perennial grain polycultures in mimicry of the natural systems monoculture replaced. This seemingly quixotic scheme has more recently been embraced by additional breeding teams at a growing number of research facilities around the globe. Jackson’s bold approach seeks to tackle the essential problem of agriculture, disruption and destruction of the very natural systems that sustain its productivity. Should science and agriculture succeed in this effort to perennialize grain cropping, a monumental step toward sustaining our human race on the planet will have been taken.

–Tom Willey
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