The Land Institute and perennial crops

This is an interesting article about domesticating perennial grain crops. It comes from the Land Institute in Kansas, which has spent decades working on this issue. Almost all major agricultural crops are annual species planted in monoculture, meaning that they must be planted every year, and die off after harvest. This implies that farmers must till, fertilize, and kill weeds every year, either by hand or with machinery. This is a big use of time, money, and inputs like diesel fuel for tractors and natural-gas-derived fertilizers. This contrasts with most natural ecosystems that are dominated by perennial species that grow back year after year. If farming could use more perennial species, farmers would basically have to plant crops once every few years, and thereafter would mainly harvest and perhaps do controlled burns to control weeds and pests. Farmers would no longer have to perform multiple passes with the tractor every year to till the soil, plant crop seeds, and kill weeds. The soil would retain more nutrients, absorb more carbon, and support a more diverse underground ecosystem than it would under annual crops. Granted, planting grand monocultures of new perennial crops would be as bad as planting annual monocultures, and it could potentially suffer from heavy pest pressure, but in terms of water conservation, soil runoff, carbon capture, fertilizer use, it would be a much more ecologically responsible system. And it would not be hard to modify perennial crop-based farming systems to avoid monocultures and have a mix of many species growing in the same region.

Anyway, the Land Institute is onto something. They start with the idealistic, ecologically-sound goal of perennial plant-based cropping systems, and apply rigorous science and plant breeding to pursue it. This is a real achievement as compared to those who would propose an ideal paradigm without concrete measures to arrive there, or those who would merely entertain themselves with state-of-the-art science without having a well-thought, ethical purpose for doing so.