The Kernza Fields

The Land Institute in Salina works to create perennial grains for a sustainable agricultural future

Mother 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

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

( fertilization, etc.), we may be able to extend the productive lifetime of a stand.”

Brandon Kaufman, a farmer from Moundridge says yields of 1,000 pounds of Kernza grain (about 15 to 17 bushels) an acre is not out of the question. This is far less than the average winter wheat yield, which the United States Department of Agriculture estimates to be about 50 bushels an acre, but Kernza grain brings as much as eight times the current price of wheat per bushel. “One marketer could take tens of thousands of acres of production if we could grow it,” says Kaufman.

Currently, Kaufman is working to meet this demand. He and Brandon Schlautman, a lead scientist at the Land Institute, are partners in a business they started in 2018 called Sustain-A-Grain. They plant wheatgrass on about 200 acres, spread out among fields ranging from 20–40 acres or more.

Kaufman and Schlautman are also attempting what is hoped to be the next stage in Kernza crops—moving to biculture planting. By planting Kernza together with alfalfa, clovers, or chicory, farmers are able to diversify their fields, and in Kansas this means optimizing them for cattle grazing.

“Our [ financial] safety net here is our cattle. It [Kernza] offers very high-quality forage,” Kaufman says.

And because of Kernza’s growing cycle, fields can be grazed from November through mid-April, when ranchers are traditionally feeding hay—meaning no swathers, balers, or moving bales are necessary. When the grain is ripe, in late July, the wheatgrass is taller and forms a canopy over the forage crops, so it is no more difficult to harvest by a rolling combine than traditional wheat.

Equally important, these types of regenerative agriculture practices have several specific environmental benefits. Because the perennial grains keep the soil covered, annual tillage is avoided and the farm fields are able to store extra carbon in the soil rather than release it into the atmosphere during the tillage. Also, compared to traditional crops, perennial grains such as Kernza have longer, deeper roots—extending more than 10 feet underground—that help

The Perennial Crop

Learn more about the Land Institute’s Kernza perennial crop with these resources

Kernza.org offers a comprehensive overview of the Land Institute’s research into regenerative agriculture and perennial crops with excellent videos and feature content. Also visit LandInstitute.org for more info on how the institute is engaged in transforming industrial agricultural practices.

The short film “Unbroken Ground: A New Old Way to Grow Food,” produced by Patagonia Provisions, is part of the adventure clothing maker’s mission to support regenerative agriculture and sustainable food production. You can see the 22-minute documentary on youtube.com for free.

Kansas Kernza growers Brandon Kaufman and Brandon Schlautman would like to hear from other farmers interested in growing perennial wheatgrass. Email them at sustainagrain@ gmail.com. capture more carbon dioxide. The release of carbon into the air, where it becomes CO2 and traps heat, creates a greenhouse effect responsible for raising the earth’s temperature. Scientists say this rise in temperature contributes to extreme weather and higher risks of infectious disease. A recent report from the nonprofit World Resources Institute calculates that if 10 million acres of farmland adopted regenerative agriculture practices, that land could potentially store 100–200 megatons of CO2 a year by 2050.

These environmental benefits of perennial crops could also become a direct financial benefit to farmers if a system were legislated where they could sell carbon credits based on how much CO2 they’ve helped capture. Kaufman, Schlautman and others see a market for similar agriculture environmental credits for soil moisture sequestering (which reduces surface flooding and helps replenish underground aquifers) and nitrogen capture. Nitrogen fertilizer used to grow traditional crops promotes substantial leaching of nitrogen, contributing to surface and subsurface water contamination.

“These things are more realistic than at any time in my career,” says Allan Fritz, who manages the wheat breeding program at Kansas State University and develops hard red winter wheat varieties for eastern and central Kansas. “Chasing nitrogen that otherwise might get released into the water table—the sustainability piece of this is becoming very important.”

“It would be an incredible service that agriculture could provide, reducing or eliminating those types of problems,” Schlautman says.

“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,” Kaufman adds. “People are not willing to change until it hurts their pocketbook,” he says. “Right now, there’s a tremendous opportunity to try new things because the market is so sour for traditional mainstream crops. … If we can start to mitigate some of that with resiliency in our soil and create diversified income streams off of each acre, we all benefit.”

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