Destructive Agriculture is Solvable

land used for agricultural purposes. Monoculture crops like wheat are often grown in enormous single species plots and provide sustenance for millions of people, but they also lead the problems. The problems in agriculture are nitrate leaching, soil erosion, farmer debt, loss of soil organic matter, herbicide resistance, over production, pesticide poisoning, and the list goes on. Strawer is the acting president

of the Kansas based Land Institute. Her organization works to promote regenerative agriculture, our rejection of monoculture farming in favor of investing in seeds that come back year after year and a reduced dependence on chemical fertilizer. The land Institute itself breeds new varieties of perennial seeds, one called rnza.

It's something they hope will replace traditional wheat in everything from cereals to crackers, to beer and bread, all the while helping to restore nutrient balances in the soil and clean the air we breathe. And so what we want to do is solve the problem of agriculture, which means to create an agriculture that is as regenerative as the natural systems that build the soil upon which our food

systems depends. My co host down Apple Bomb spoke with Strower about regenerative agriculture and what it can do to help solve the problems faced by farmers and consumers alike. Here's their conversation. Rachel, can you start by explaining to me what exactly is wrong with the crops that we're growing. Our agriculture system is extractive. You can think of this as like a bank account. Our agriculture takes more out of the resource bank account, which is soil, water, nutrients.

So I'd like to say our food system is sort of a terminal feedback loop of extraction. So you're talking about essentially reversing the course of agricultural development as it's gone over the last ten thousand years and changing it to make it something more natural and more reflective of the natural world. Yes, and at the Land Institute specifically, we are developing perennial grain crops with the intent to grow them in agricultural systems in diverse mixture, so that

there are multiple species growing in one field. Perennial crop sounds very specific. What's the difference between planting an annual crop and a perennial crop and why is that so important for the environment. An annual crop is tilled up every year, so the soil is disturbed on an annual basis.

And what we've done over time and in particularly in the last hundred to two hundred years, is we have accommodated for the destruction that we create in tilling by using chemical inputs, and so the perennial grain grows back year after year and produces a harvestable food crop on a perennial basis, so that we don't have to till and therefore don't have to use as much or any of the chemical inputs that we use today. What's the relationship of this idea, this form of regenerative agriculture to

the problem of carbon emissions. Will this reduce carbon is? That? Is that one of the goals of this of this change. Not only does it draw down the carbon that was released over the last ten thousand years, but it's sustained that much of that carbon in the soil over the long term, year after year, as the roots stay in the ground year after year. So we believe that we can read the quester much of what has been lost in both the soil carbon as well as the plant

matter of a perennial stand of grain production. But the system that you're talking about, presumably it's more expensive, it produces less output. I mean, I'm wondering, you know, if this is the better way to do it, how why did humanity, you know, stumble upon this cosletely different method pursuing it with great energy ever since. I mean, there must be a reason why we shifted to this monoculture

extractive method in the first place. Yes, there's a lot of different theories about why we didn't develop perennials at the beginning of agriculture. One is that when our ancestors looked for food in the wild, they noticed that they happened upon annuals that actually had larger seeds than the perennials, and so they selected the annual plants not because of their annual tendency necessarily, but because of what they were producing.

And then secondly, there was this sort of natural selection that happened on those annuals as they began to be cultivated that caused them, even without intentional breeding, to become even more suited and yield higher inputs. There's also the benefit that the annual dies every year that it cannot survive, so you can always replace your stand in the next year with the best seed from the last year. And

perennials are very hard to kill. So we can breed perennials more easily now because we have knowledge of plant breeding and sort of computational skill that allow us to move more quickly, and we also have large machinery and ways of killing a perennial, you know, or transitioning it out, so that we can breed it in a more conventional and you in a similar way that we breed annuals and half over the last couple hundred years. And that's not more expensive, it's not prohibitive in some other way.

I don't I don't believe that that breeding perennials is more expensive than breeding annuals. Today. However, it takes time. You know, it's taken an intensified one hundred and fifty years to get the high yielding grain crops. You know, handful of grain crops that we have today, and in just about twenty years of intensive breeding on Karnsa perennial grain, for instance, it is showing signs of being able to live up to its annual wheat substitute in the next

ten or twenty years. Tell me about Kurnza. It's one of the grains that you've promoted, and I've I've read a little bit about it. It's being grown by several in several places around the country, but it's not on the market yet. Tell us about this particular grain and why you're working on it. So, Karnsa is one of five crops that we're developing at the Land Institute. Five perennial grain crops were developing at the Land Institute. It is a nuttier version of wheat. Really, it's from the

plant called intermediate wheat grass. So it looks like wheat in a field, but the seed is much smaller. It is longer than a wheat berry, which is pretty plump and short. Brands like General Mills started using it and it is growing on about two thousand acres in the United States and also in Sweden and France, and we already have over fifty collaborators on six continents. I think fifteen countries are represented working in this realm collaborating with

the Land Institute. There's work in Canada, in Argentina. So we're really trying to in the next few years solidify that international work because what we're trying to accommodate is the seventy percent of ag lands covered in annuals, and we're trying to create perennials for all of the grain

producing regions of the world. Hearing you talk about it reminds me of the story of Keenowa, which was also a grain that was you know, widely used in Peru and was important to the United States and became very fashionable. What are the chances that that kurnza could become fashionable too? Is there a have you all thought about that? Have

you tried to promote it? We actually hope that it doesn't remain a sort of specialty crop like kin wat is that is produced on a more mass scale and become sort of a regular ingredient in common everyday products like cheerios or in your local bakery would have a regular run of kerns of bread or the regular beer run from the from the local brewery. We can't have the impacts that we want to have on the soils of the world if it's limited to sort of a

specialty crop niche market. What if kurnza was to become widespread and available everywhere and how would that change the world? I mean, how would that change the atmosph fear? What would the impact of that be huge? We will be seeing more carbon sequestration, will be seeing less toxic chemical inputs, will be feeding the regions around production as well as

the global food supply chain. Regenera of agriculture is one of the few areas that can potentially solve ten percent of climate change, and perennial grains specifically on the landscape offer one of the most promising avenues for carbon sequestration

on Earth to date. So I envision that when kurnza and other perennial grains like it find their way onto the annual production grain production lands of today, which is about seventy percent of our total agricultural lands, will also be stewarding the livelihoods of farmers and farm workers because that we're not requiring the sort of them to maintain the economic readmill of farming, which is leading to all

kinds of consolidation and other issues. So it's a pretty utopian vision in my mind if we can get perennials on the landscape broadly and globally. Rachel, let me back up a little and ask you something a little more basic, namely, what drew you to this story, to this issue, why perennial crops. How did you originally get interested in farming? I mean, was it through a love of food? Was

it through was it through the landscape? I was born and raised in central Kansas, and my father was sort of a novice environmentalist and had a prairie land that I helped him restore when I was young, So I always had a sort of environmental ethic, and I grew up in the prairie among these perennial grasslands. People often vacation to the beach, and they talk about the ocean as the rape vista with all of the life teeming

under the surface. And my father uses the same metaphor for the prairie, which has been described more often as sort of a barren wasteland. But he is of the mind, and I think it's relevant to this regenerative agriculture soil story that there's so much life on the prairie especially, and even in the winter, you just can't see it because it's below ground. And so you have these waves of prairie grasses blowing like waves on the ocean, and

below them is teeming with life. So I do remember as a kid walking and the grasses are quite tall, and walking and feeling that the grasses kind of have a feathery tip, which is nice, a nice tactile sort of connection to that deep underground as you walk, walk, or hike through the prairie. People listening to you don't work at the Land Institute, they might not live in Kansas. What can they do, nevertheless, to support this vision, this idea of regenerative agriculture, an idea that you know, we

can have a more natural form of food production. What can ordinary people do to support that? Simply learning and then advocating for what you learn is a great way to participate. Go to the Land Institute's website read more. There's all kinds of book projects. Draw Down has all kinds of information about what's called carbon farming. Eat perennially. There are perennial things that you could eat now, can

you name a few for us? Almonds, tree crops. There are some perennial vegetables, avocados, asparagus, and the list goes on. This idea of diverse perennial grain production is the best technology we know of today to get our agricultural production functioning as close as possible to the natural systems that came before it and built the soil upon which we eat. One final question, you know, I understand why this is ecologically more sustainable. Is it economically sustainable? Should there be

subsidies for this kind of agriculture? Do you need them in the near term? I think that our entire agricultural subsidies program should turn towards more regenerative practices to incentivize as a sort of turning of the Titanic from facing an annual paradigm to facing a perennial one. My vision of the future over the long term, we will not need to subsidize agriculture because it will be self sustaining in a really beautiful and ecological way. Rachel Strower is

acting President of the Land Institute. Be sure to check out our show notes to learn more about regenerative agriculture and here it's Solvable. We're wishing you a restorative and regenerative holiday season. We'll be back with more in the new y year. Until then, if you had a favorite episode this past season, consider sharing it with a friend. Solvable is produced by Camille Baptista and this is Camille's last week was Solvable. We'll miss your terrific work, Camille.

The senior producer of Solvable is Jocelyn Frank. Katherine Girardeau is our managing producer. Mia Lobell is our executive producer. We're also saying goodbye this week to our research intern, Kobe Guildford. Kobe, it's been great to have your help this semester special thanks to Carly Migliori, Kadija Holland, Eric Sandler, and Heather Fame. I'm Jacob Weisberg.