By David Clouston | Photography by Karen Mikols Bonar
The Kernza Fields The Land Institute in Salina works to create perennial grains for a sustainable agricultural future
M
other Nature’s a multi-tasker. Her forests, for example, provide a canopy for birds and mammals that scatter seeds, dig the leafand plant-strewn floor and fertilize its soil. It is a self-sustaining ecosystem that provides food for its inhabitants, year after year. At the Land Institute, a Salina-region nonprofit research organization founded in 1976, plant breeders and ecologists are working to apply this concept of natural ecosystems to staple crops of the Kansas plains. The idea is to eventually grow perennial grains, legumes and oil seeds alongside a variety of other long-lived plants in self-sustaining ecosystems, to create sustainable agriculture that mimics a natural environment and to escape the depletion of soil, nutrients and water supplies that many fear are threatening the future of industrial farming. Their first successful crop is Kernza, a trade name for the organization’s varieties of perennial grass related to wheat. Grain harvested from Kernza intermediate wheatgrass (scientific name thinopyrum intermedium) works deliciously as an ingredient in bread, cereals, snacks and more. It can be used as a whole grain, as flour, and can be malted or mixed directly into beer and whiskey, for example.
Our No. 1 export in the U.S. is soil. It washes away, it blows away. Our best nutrients are leaving with it. And yet, food security is the reason many of our ancestors came to this country.”
–Brandon Kaufman
OPPOSITE Stalks of Kernza grain stand in a field near Moundridge. ABOVE LEFT Brandon Kaufman works one of his Kernza fields near Moundridge. ABOVE RIGHT Close-up of the Kernza grain. Photograph courtesy Sustain-A-Grain.
Kernza kernels are 30–50 percent the size of wheat, but Kernza has more bran and fiber and fewer carbohydrates. It is an innovation that has won over some of the key decision-makers in the nation’s food industries, such as Mary Jane Melendez, chief sustainability and social impact officer at General Mills. “We believe that Kernza has the potential to make a positive environmental impact on soil health and resilience by capturing carbon in its long roots,” says Melendez. In order for Kernza and other new perennial grains to become widely planted by farmers, they have to become financially sustainable. “Profits are highly dependent on location,” says Tessa Peters, director of commercialization for the Land Institute. “We are still trying to understand exactly how many years a grower should expect to see a crop when the grain is grown on production-scale acreages.” Much of a grower’s financial success can depend on whether they have a market for selling the forage and other grasses that would grow alongside Kernza. Profitability is also dependent on preventing a yearto-year decline in grain yields, she adds. “Currently we tell growers to expect four years before needing to rotate out of Kernza, but we are hoping that as we learn more about agronomic practices
WINTER 2020 | KANSAS! MAGAZINE
27
