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The Land Institute's strategy includes collaboration with public institutions in order to
direct more research in the direction of Natural Systems Agriculture.
The team at the Land Institute feels comfortable having demonstrated the scientific feasibility of their proposal for a Natural Systems Agriculture. Because this work deals with basic biological questions and principles, the implications are applicable worldwide. If Natural Systems Agriculture were fully adopted, we could one day see the end of agricultural scientists from industrialized societies delivering agronomic methods and technologies from their fossil fuel-intensive infrastructures into developing countries and thereby saddling them with brittle economies.
Perennial Grain...a hybrid of intermediate wheatgrass and triticale could produce a more sustainable food crop that lives for years and builds deep root systems to tap deeper water sources.
According to Scientific American's article about the Land Institute in 2007, Americans assume food production is easy and highly efficient already. However, reality is that agriculture requires vast areas of land, regular high quantities of waer, energy and chemicals to meet the demands for our escalating human and animal populatons.
The UN sponsored Millennium Ecosystem Assessment suggested that agriculture may be the "largest threat to biodiversity and ecosystem function of any single human activity." OUCH!"Today, most of humanity's food comes directly or indirectly (as animals feed) from cereal grains, legumes and oilseed crops. These staples are appealing to producers and consumers because they are easy to transport and store, relatively imperishable, and fairly high in protein and calories. As a result, such crops occupy about 80% of global agricultural land. BUT, they are all annual plants, meaning that they must be grown anew from seeds every eyar, typically using resource-intensive cultivation methods. More troubling, the environmental degradation caused by agriculture will likely worsen as the hungry human population grows to eight billion or 10 billion in the coming decades."
Plant Breeders, Agronomists and Ecologists Strive for Solutions
Grain-cropping systems that functin much like natural ecosystems that have been displaced by agriculture is the holy grain for agriculture researchers.
Significant advances in plant breeding science are bringing this goal within sight at last!
Kansas plant geneticist Wes Jackson looked at the ecosystems that preceded agriculture to look for a solution. Mixtures of perennial plants once dominated nearly all the planet's landscapes and they still do in uncultivated areas today.
More than 85% of North America's native plant species are PERENNIALS.
Because annuals have relatively shallow roots -- most less than 0.3 meters -- farming areas have problems with erosion, foil fertility depletion and water contamination...and lack of nature's natural farmers, wildlife.
Today the traits of perennials are becoming better appreciated for their root depths of more than two meters, plant communities that regulate ecosystem functions such as water management and carbon and nitrogen cycling. They are also highly productive yet resilient in the face of environmental stresses.
Timothy grass, a perennial hay crop, is roughly 54 times more effective in maintaining topsoil than annual crops. Scientists also find a fivefold reduction in water loss and a 35-fold reduction in nitrate loss from soil planted with alfalfa and mixed perennial grasses compared with soil under corn and soybeans.
Carbon sequestration by perennials is also boosted. Carbon is the main ingredient of soil organic matter and can contain 50% more than annually cropped fields. And perennial fields do not need to be worked every year, so less farm machinery cycles and less fertilizers and pestcides also reduce fossil fuel use.
Wildlife also benefits -- bird populations can be seven times more dense in perennial crop fields than annual crop fields.
And perennials are far more capable of sustainable cultivation on marginal lands, which already have poor soil quality or would be quickly depleted by a few years of intensive annual cropping.
Perennial plant breeding research are focusing on wheat, sorghum, sunflower, intermediate wheatgrass and other species as perennial grain crops.
At The Land Institute, breeders are working both on domesticating perennial wheatgrass and on crossing assorted perennial wheatgrass species with annual wheats. Although perennial crops such as alfalfa and sugarcane already exist around the world, none has seed yields comparable to those of annual grain crops...and here is where creative plant breeding works with the growing environment, selective breeding stock, and judicious use of fertilizers to increase the yield of these perennial grains.
Deep roots mean resilience, and that trait might be more important than many short term plant attributes currently valued by agriculture.
Additional programs include the Climate and Energy Project (CEP) See www.climateandenergy.org . The Land Institute formed this new project on climate and energy in February 2007. Because of the close connections between climate change, energy from coal, and agricultural vulnerabilities -- research is growing to explore the issues and find solutions to the issues that connect energy and farming.
The Land Institute
2440 E. Water Well Road,
Salina, KS 67401
785-823-5376
www.landinstitute.org
Nancy Jackson, Project Director
Climate and Energy Project
P.O. Box 442217
Lawrence, KS 66044
Ph: 785-331-8743
jackson@climateandenergy.org
www.climateandenergy.org
