14 ms·

A Grain That Tastes Like Wheat, but Grows Like a Prairie Grass

189 points by stevekemp 9y ago

nimbius 9y ago
from TFA: But to make it work, you must navigate a far-reaching system of milling, processing, fermenting, and baking. as a baker, I wonder how/if this grain could perform in place of actual wheat. fermentation is a major step in almost every bread recipe.
- kevinmchugh 9y ago
  from what i've read it has more protein but less gluten than flour, so most bakers use a mix of kernza and wheat flours, though it seems you should be able to add pure gluten
stult 9y ago
>Jackson believed that his vision was possible, but he imagined it would take 50 to 100 years of plant breeding—ambitious when you consider how many millennia it took to create the grains we have now. Less ambitious when you consider that it took millennia with a far smaller number of people who had less knowledge about genetics and breeding, were capable of farming far fewer plants per year, and did not employ a systematic experimentation program to develop their crops.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Honestly, 50 to 100 years sounds like overkill. Granted, some crop plants can be tougher to engineer since many of them are excessively polyploid, but it seems like 5 years in the lab, 10 years in greenhouses, and 20 years on test plots should be more than enough. And you could probably do it with only two partner universities, four tenured doctors, eight postdoc fellows, and 32 grad students. 50 years seems more like the timeline for domesticating Vulpes vulpes, which started in 1959, and has the notable limitation that foxes can't have thousands of offspring per year, whereas cultivated plants can.
  - gwern 9y ago
    > 50 years seems more like the timeline for domesticating Vulpes vulpes, which started in 1959, and has the notable limitation that foxes can't have thousands of offspring per year, whereas cultivated plants can. A bull or stallion can't normally have thousands of offspring each year, but the miracle of modern cloning or insemination or surrogacy techniques allows it. :) The fox breeding program took as long as it did mostly because of budget limits. If they had had an unlimited budget, they could have had a much larger fox population allowing for much more extreme levels of selection each generation and used techniques like artificial insemination to make selection even more extreme, and of course today more money would also buy marker-assisted selection techniques... (I don't know if anyone has worked out insemination techniques for foxes but, well, that's probably just more money too.) If for some reason you wanted to redo the fox program now and had $1b to throw at it, I'd be surprised if it took more than 10 years (set up a population of 10k foxes, whole-genome all of them, start inseminating from the elite 1-10% for multiple assessments + GWAS, cycle as fast as they reach 1yr & sexual maturity; each generation gets you ~1SD behavioral change, 10 years get you ~10SDs). Fast, cheap, big changes, marketable on the EU/USA as 'not a GMO' - choose three.
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  >Less ambitious when you consider that it took millennia with a far smaller number of people who had less knowledge about genetics and breeding, were capable of farming far fewer plants per year, and did not employ a systematic experimentation program to develop their crops. When Jackson started out, no one had decoded a genome.
bryanlarsen 9y ago
This is awesome. Tillage is far more harmful to prairie ecosystem diversity than herbicides and pesticides are. So increasingly farmers have been using herbicides and pesticides as an alternative to tillage.
aaronmill1 9y ago
I want to try cooking with this grain! Also, Birchwood Cafe is great! Worth a visit if you are ever in the Minneapolis area!
coldcode 9y ago
If I was a wheat farmer, I'd sign up for sure to try this.
- mousa 9y ago
  >more irregular in size than wheat berries Wheat is one of those plants that humans have mastered. One person can farm thousands of acres of wheat. Generally that's only true of plants that are very uniform and that you wipe out each harvest. It would be very hard to replace it with a plant you can't use the same techniques on as the labor would be 100x probably.
  - escape_goat 9y ago
    We're on the cusp of an era with an embarrassment of labour, however. This sort of crop might not be useful yet, but heterogeny is going to be a theme when gains to date in informatics and robotics begin to be reflected in mature agricultural technologies.
  - randomdata 9y ago
    Kernza is harvested (and planted) with the same equipment that wheat is. Some irregularity isn't going to matter.
    - yxhuvud 9y ago
      As the seeds are much smaller, this may or may not be the case. The article mentions mills not being able to handle the size, but it could also affect other things.
      - randomdata 9y ago
        The seeds are huge compared to, say, quinoa, which is also harvested using a regular old combine. My comment wasn't hypothetical. That is how it is harvested already.
      - woodandsteel 9y ago
TACIXAT 9y ago
If any other celiacs clicked this out of curiosity, it contains gluten. From another article - >It has a funny cylindrical shape that defies conventional milling machines, and also contains a weird amount of gluten — too little to bake well with, too much to be marketed to people who avoid it.
- ch4s3 9y ago
  I wonder if it would be good for brewing. Irregular shape is fine, as you don't really want super fine milling, and gluten content isn't super relevant. If it has a strong flavor, it could be a neat way to add an extra dimension to beers, not to mention potentially lowering the environmental impact.
  - anfractuosity 9y ago
    Yup it sounds like someone is making beer with it, it says "A local microbrewery called Bang now makes a Kernza beer named Gold". I'm curious what it tastes like too! I haven't read the article in depth, but I wonder if like wheat when using large quantities of wheat in mash, if you need to add rice hulls to prevent a stuck sparge, not that, that is a big issue though.
    - ch4s3 9y ago
      From the article, describing its use in pastry > tasted like nuts and crackers, coffee and grass I imagine you could make a killer amber or brown ale.
      - anfractuosity 9y ago
        Ooh neat, yeah I bet that could be awesome in a brown ale. Rather off topic, but you might be interested in this: https://www.sprowtlabs.com/2017/02/23/how-to-malt-at-home/ https://www.sprowtlabs.com/2017/02/23/how-to-malt-at-home/ (One day I'd like to try it, although first, to improve my basic beers :) Not sure how easy it is to get this grain though... ;)
24gttghh 9y ago
If they can engineer it to have a higher gluten content I'd be interested! Until then it is no wheat-replacement by any stretch from my perspective as a baker. Another grain to add to the arsenal for sure, but in terms of baking it's just another low-gluten flour like buckwheat, amaranth, rice flour, etc, which certainly have their places. I'd try it steamed up with some couscous and veggies as a side-dish for sure. They seem to tout it's no-tillage aspect, but there are already methods of planting wheat without tilling. For instance, the no-till drill[0] One can also plant wheat with low-cover crops like clover to help prevent the inevitable weeds that try to take over in the absence of tillage[1]. But hey if it means farmers grow less corn then I'm all for it! [0]https://www.deere.com/en/seeding-equipment/1590-no-till-drill/ https://www.deere.com/en/seeding-equipment/1590-no-till-dril... [1]http://www.mofga.org/Publications/MaineOrganicFarmerGardener/Summer2016/BanatkaWheat/tabid/3171/Default.aspx http://www.mofga.org/Publications/MaineOrganicFarmerGardener...
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  As someone who's fairly unfamiliar with farming - do weeds not tend to pop up in tilled soil? I figured weed seeds would still land and sprout. (Or do most weeds reproduce via underground roots?) Does clover just crowd the weeds out, denying them sunlight? And why are weeds harmful to crops, while clover isn't? Sorry for asking basic 101 questions, but I'm not sure I even know enough to Google around effectively, and don't want to take a random walk wikidive.
  - 24gttghh 9y ago
    Well, I only have experience with about an 18m^2 garden, so I'll copy an excerpt from my MOFGA link: > Dutch white [clover] forms a low, dense understory that controls weeds, fixes nitrogen in the soil and remains as a cover crop after the grain harvest. So the clover doesn't compete directly with the wheat, which grows much taller, and it also fixes beneficial nitrogen in the soil for future growth, and the clover helps to prevent other weeds which will compete with the wheat. That's my understanding at least. As for tillage, I believe it levels the playing field, giving one's desired seeded crop an advantage over any established weeds. This PennState article has a good overview: https://extension.psu.edu/an-introduction-to-weed-management-for-conservation-tillage-systems https://extension.psu.edu/an-introduction-to-weed-management...
peterwwillis 9y ago
Technology and increased profit have pushed the production of wheat as far as possible without regard to the impact on the environment. If we find a more profitable way to produce this new grain that causes harm, we will pursue it. Just because it doesn't involve tilling [now] doesn't mean it won't be used in an exploitative way later.
vanderZwan 9y ago
> (About 40 percent of American-grown corn in 2016 was turned into ethanol; 37 percent was used to fatten livestock or ended up damaged or miscounted; and a minuscule fraction entered the human diet, mostly as corn syrup.) It's just a tiny aside in the article, but this makes me wonder just how much energy and resources are being wasted in agriculture. Especially since that sentence construction implies that the 40% ethanol is meant not for human consumption, which leads me to think it's inefficient biofuel.
- autarch 9y ago
  Corn ethanol _is_ an inefficient biofuel. It uses more energy to produce than it generates, but thanks to the federal government there's a mandate to include it in gasoline, so we keep producing it.
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    Yeah, I still remember the basic laws of thermodynamics ;). If only they taught those in high school too. Aside: sometimes I wonder if spending some time to teach more advanced concepts of science in more "conceptual" ways wouldn't be a lot more useful for the general public than the current style of education. You can get a perfectly fine intuition and "first-principle" understanding of laws of nature running the world around you, without ever worrying about calculus, and it's quite useful.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      What do the basic laws of thermodynamics and intuition do to inform you about the EROI of biofuels?
      - vanderZwan 9y ago
        That growing corn and then turning it into ethanol to burn in your cars is unlikely to be sustainable or more energy-efficient than extracting fossil fuels. Basic matter of thinking in terms of conversion losses. It probably helps to know that currently every calorie produced by Western agriculture costs about ten calories worth of fossil fuels, but still. EDIT: I realised just now that I took Michael Pollan's word on that 10:1 number without checking it, mea culpa. Quick search on the web gives me this though: http://people.uwplatt.edu/~dalecki/newperspectives.pdf http://people.uwplatt.edu/~dalecki/newperspectives.pdf and that graph on the sixth page (or "page 184") does look pretty damning on ethanol as a fuel (I'm making no statements on its qualities as an oxidizer).
bitL 9y ago
Can't wait for unintended consequences, like more dead insects or only aggressive crazy ones remaining, depleted soil, new long-term diseases, changing ecotypes etc. We are simply one big lab these days... Even if we aren't living in a simulation, we are run like a simulation.
- criddell 9y ago
  The intended consequences seem pretty good though. I think Kernza is worth experimenting with.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  Well... yes, that could happen. That's why you start small and scale your way up. On the other hand, we've already got the unintended consequences of what we're doing, and they aren't all that benign...
russnewcomer 9y ago
One of the other important things about Kernza that the article doesn't talk about much is hardiness and drought-resistance. Kernza's yield at its best is lower than modern seed at an average year, but during a drought year, their yields are a probably lot closer. (They haven't been able to do extensive enough tests to confirm this, if I remember correctly) That's a huge win, especially because of potential problems with the Ogalalla Aquifer in the coming years. Another advantage, unmentioned in the article, is that it is easily possible to grow Kernza in a backyard with little intervention, and have enough grain to make a loaf of bread a week, or a couple pizza crusts. You need a mill, sure, but hand powered mills are pretty cheap ($50 for one that will work for the amount of Kernza you'll probably grow in your backyard), and in the midwest, your local library might have one to borrow. You might need a specialty mill, I'm not sure, my dad bought one of the heavy $500 hand mills when I was a kid and it had no problem with some Kernza. I grew up in Salina, where the Land Institute is headquartered, and tangentially know some of the people mentioned in the article, so while I'm not an expert, I am a semi-interested lay person.
- afarrell 9y ago
  > it is easily possible to grow Kernza in a backyard with little intervention As someone who hates mowing lawns, this is really interesting.
  - staticautomatic 9y ago
    On the other hand, you could eat your lawn if you were inclined to mow it.
- setr 9y ago
  >your local library might have one to borrow. Why would you find mills in a library? What else do they have..
  - netghost 9y ago
    A lot of libraries don't just share books. For instance some let you check out laptops, wifi devices, etc. There are also tool libraries, and even seed libraries. You might be surprised by what's available at your local library these days.
njarboe 9y ago
I found it interesting that 40% of the corn crop goes to produce ethanol. According to the article, that works out to 91*0.40= 36.4 million acres. This is about the same as all the farmland in Iowa (32 million acres). The average power output of this land by ethanol production is about 40 Gigawatts [(13.2 billion gallons of ethanol per year) X (89 million Joules/gallon) / 3.154e+7 seconds per year/1e9]. With the advent of electric cars, taking into consideration the energy used in producing the ethanol and the lower efficiency of internal combustion power, you could probably replace that farmland energy output with ten 2 Gigawatt nuclear power plants. It would be cool if the environmentalists and the farmers on the marginal areas of the great plains could get together and work on opening up a huge prairie preserve while building a dozen nuclear power plants to replace the lost energy. Bring back the huge herds of Bison. After all, as said elsewhere in this thread, the Ogalalla Aquifer is starting to run dry.
mythrwy 9y ago
This is really cool. What I'd also like to see is cattle in the US moved off alfalfa and out of feedlots and returned to the range of the buffalo. Migrate a giant herd of cattle across this grass (selectively or early enough it still produces grain) and rebuild the soils of the midwest the way they originally were built. Perennial grass with migratory bovines.
aaroninsf 9y ago
How nutritious is it relative to "the big three"? I scanned through the article and could find no comparison...
terravion 9y ago
I don't understand how taking 25M acres of wheat production and turning that into 75M acres of Kernza produces a net environmental benefit. Which 50M acres of native habitat are we going to cut down? That's the size of a North Eastern state... we should be going the other direction and increasing yield and decreasing total acres if we want to restore native habitats. There's no way that the lower inputs (and wheat doesn't take much) of Kernza justify destroying the native habitat of an entire state.
- beambot 9y ago
  Or get people to eat less meat. It's something like 30:1 ratio for beef -- ie. one calorie of beef is equivalent to 30 calories from other vegetal sources, not to mention other knock on environmental impacts.
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  But the yield is increasing rapidly, and there is far less energy use, fertilizer which pollutes streams and the ocean, pesticides, and tillage which causes soil loss and releases co2 into the atmosphere. I don't think there is any doubt this is the direction we need to go. Unless, of course, you are interested in maximizing the profits of certain corporations.
  - terravion 9y ago
    Actually, there is great doubt. Many environmental campaigners are coming around to intensification broadly as the path out of our current environmental problems. Check out http://www.ecomodernism.org/ http://www.ecomodernism.org/ a bunch of ex-greenpeace types that are concerned with practical solutions. Tripling yield takes a long time and wheat, and especially corn, is on an exponential improvement curve. https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtrends.html https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtren...
- tengbretson 9y ago
  I guess I don't understand how it's become a forgone conclusion that it is a bad thing to make land productive to humans.

189 points by stevekemp 9y ago

from TFA: But to make it work, you must navigate a far-reaching system of milling, processing, fermenting, and baking. as a baker, I wonder how/if this grain could perform in place of actual wheat. fermentation is a major step in almost every bread recipe.

kevinmchugh 9y ago
from what i've read it has more protein but less gluten than flour, so most bakers use a mix of kernza and wheat flours, though it seems you should be able to add pure gluten

stult 9y ago

>Jackson believed that his vision was possible, but he imagined it would take 50 to 100 years of plant breeding—ambitious when you consider how many millennia it took to create the grains we have now. Less ambitious when you consider that it took millennia with a far smaller number of people who had less knowledge about genetics and breeding, were capable of farming far fewer plants per year, and did not employ a systematic experimentation program to develop their crops.

logfromblammo 9y ago
Honestly, 50 to 100 years sounds like overkill. Granted, some crop plants can be tougher to engineer since many of them are excessively polyploid, but it seems like 5 years in the lab, 10 years in greenhouses, and 20 years on test plots should be more than enough. And you could probably do it with only two partner universities, four tenured doctors, eight postdoc fellows, and 32 grad students. 50 years seems more like the timeline for domesticating Vulpes vulpes, which started in 1959, and has the notable limitation that foxes can't have thousands of offspring per year, whereas cultivated plants can.
- gwern 9y ago
  > 50 years seems more like the timeline for domesticating Vulpes vulpes, which started in 1959, and has the notable limitation that foxes can't have thousands of offspring per year, whereas cultivated plants can. A bull or stallion can't normally have thousands of offspring each year, but the miracle of modern cloning or insemination or surrogacy techniques allows it. :) The fox breeding program took as long as it did mostly because of budget limits. If they had had an unlimited budget, they could have had a much larger fox population allowing for much more extreme levels of selection each generation and used techniques like artificial insemination to make selection even more extreme, and of course today more money would also buy marker-assisted selection techniques... (I don't know if anyone has worked out insemination techniques for foxes but, well, that's probably just more money too.) If for some reason you wanted to redo the fox program now and had $1b to throw at it, I'd be surprised if it took more than 10 years (set up a population of 10k foxes, whole-genome all of them, start inseminating from the elite 1-10% for multiple assessments + GWAS, cycle as fast as they reach 1yr & sexual maturity; each generation gets you ~1SD behavioral change, 10 years get you ~10SDs). Fast, cheap, big changes, marketable on the EU/USA as 'not a GMO' - choose three.
woodandsteel 9y ago
>Less ambitious when you consider that it took millennia with a far smaller number of people who had less knowledge about genetics and breeding, were capable of farming far fewer plants per year, and did not employ a systematic experimentation program to develop their crops. When Jackson started out, no one had decoded a genome.

bryanlarsen 9y ago

This is awesome. Tillage is far more harmful to prairie ecosystem diversity than herbicides and pesticides are. So increasingly farmers have been using herbicides and pesticides as an alternative to tillage.

aaronmill1 9y ago

I want to try cooking with this grain! Also, Birchwood Cafe is great! Worth a visit if you are ever in the Minneapolis area!

coldcode 9y ago

If I was a wheat farmer, I'd sign up for sure to try this.

mousa 9y ago
>more irregular in size than wheat berries Wheat is one of those plants that humans have mastered. One person can farm thousands of acres of wheat. Generally that's only true of plants that are very uniform and that you wipe out each harvest. It would be very hard to replace it with a plant you can't use the same techniques on as the labor would be 100x probably.
- escape_goat 9y ago
  We're on the cusp of an era with an embarrassment of labour, however. This sort of crop might not be useful yet, but heterogeny is going to be a theme when gains to date in informatics and robotics begin to be reflected in mature agricultural technologies.
- randomdata 9y ago
  Kernza is harvested (and planted) with the same equipment that wheat is. Some irregularity isn't going to matter.
  - yxhuvud 9y ago
    As the seeds are much smaller, this may or may not be the case. The article mentions mills not being able to handle the size, but it could also affect other things.
    - randomdata 9y ago
      The seeds are huge compared to, say, quinoa, which is also harvested using a regular old combine. My comment wasn't hypothetical. That is how it is harvested already.
    - woodandsteel 9y ago

TACIXAT 9y ago

If any other celiacs clicked this out of curiosity, it contains gluten. From another article - >It has a funny cylindrical shape that defies conventional milling machines, and also contains a weird amount of gluten — too little to bake well with, too much to be marketed to people who avoid it.

ch4s3 9y ago
I wonder if it would be good for brewing. Irregular shape is fine, as you don't really want super fine milling, and gluten content isn't super relevant. If it has a strong flavor, it could be a neat way to add an extra dimension to beers, not to mention potentially lowering the environmental impact.
- anfractuosity 9y ago
  Yup it sounds like someone is making beer with it, it says "A local microbrewery called Bang now makes a Kernza beer named Gold". I'm curious what it tastes like too! I haven't read the article in depth, but I wonder if like wheat when using large quantities of wheat in mash, if you need to add rice hulls to prevent a stuck sparge, not that, that is a big issue though.
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    From the article, describing its use in pastry > tasted like nuts and crackers, coffee and grass I imagine you could make a killer amber or brown ale.
    - anfractuosity 9y ago
      Ooh neat, yeah I bet that could be awesome in a brown ale. Rather off topic, but you might be interested in this: https://www.sprowtlabs.com/2017/02/23/how-to-malt-at-home/ https://www.sprowtlabs.com/2017/02/23/how-to-malt-at-home/ (One day I'd like to try it, although first, to improve my basic beers :) Not sure how easy it is to get this grain though... ;)

24gttghh 9y ago

If they can engineer it to have a higher gluten content I'd be interested! Until then it is no wheat-replacement by any stretch from my perspective as a baker. Another grain to add to the arsenal for sure, but in terms of baking it's just another low-gluten flour like buckwheat, amaranth, rice flour, etc, which certainly have their places. I'd try it steamed up with some couscous and veggies as a side-dish for sure. They seem to tout it's no-tillage aspect, but there are already methods of planting wheat without tilling. For instance, the no-till drill[0] One can also plant wheat with low-cover crops like clover to help prevent the inevitable weeds that try to take over in the absence of tillage[1]. But hey if it means farmers grow less corn then I'm all for it! [0]https://www.deere.com/en/seeding-equipment/1590-no-till-drill/ https://www.deere.com/en/seeding-equipment/1590-no-till-dril... [1]http://www.mofga.org/Publications/MaineOrganicFarmerGardener/Summer2016/BanatkaWheat/tabid/3171/Default.aspx http://www.mofga.org/Publications/MaineOrganicFarmerGardener...

pavel_lishin 9y ago
As someone who's fairly unfamiliar with farming - do weeds not tend to pop up in tilled soil? I figured weed seeds would still land and sprout. (Or do most weeds reproduce via underground roots?) Does clover just crowd the weeds out, denying them sunlight? And why are weeds harmful to crops, while clover isn't? Sorry for asking basic 101 questions, but I'm not sure I even know enough to Google around effectively, and don't want to take a random walk wikidive.
- 24gttghh 9y ago
  Well, I only have experience with about an 18m^2 garden, so I'll copy an excerpt from my MOFGA link: > Dutch white [clover] forms a low, dense understory that controls weeds, fixes nitrogen in the soil and remains as a cover crop after the grain harvest. So the clover doesn't compete directly with the wheat, which grows much taller, and it also fixes beneficial nitrogen in the soil for future growth, and the clover helps to prevent other weeds which will compete with the wheat. That's my understanding at least. As for tillage, I believe it levels the playing field, giving one's desired seeded crop an advantage over any established weeds. This PennState article has a good overview: https://extension.psu.edu/an-introduction-to-weed-management-for-conservation-tillage-systems https://extension.psu.edu/an-introduction-to-weed-management...

peterwwillis 9y ago

Technology and increased profit have pushed the production of wheat as far as possible without regard to the impact on the environment. If we find a more profitable way to produce this new grain that causes harm, we will pursue it. Just because it doesn't involve tilling [now] doesn't mean it won't be used in an exploitative way later.

vanderZwan 9y ago

> (About 40 percent of American-grown corn in 2016 was turned into ethanol; 37 percent was used to fatten livestock or ended up damaged or miscounted; and a minuscule fraction entered the human diet, mostly as corn syrup.) It's just a tiny aside in the article, but this makes me wonder just how much energy and resources are being wasted in agriculture. Especially since that sentence construction implies that the 40% ethanol is meant not for human consumption, which leads me to think it's inefficient biofuel.

autarch 9y ago
Corn ethanol _is_ an inefficient biofuel. It uses more energy to produce than it generates, but thanks to the federal government there's a mandate to include it in gasoline, so we keep producing it.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  Yeah, I still remember the basic laws of thermodynamics ;). If only they taught those in high school too. Aside: sometimes I wonder if spending some time to teach more advanced concepts of science in more "conceptual" ways wouldn't be a lot more useful for the general public than the current style of education. You can get a perfectly fine intuition and "first-principle" understanding of laws of nature running the world around you, without ever worrying about calculus, and it's quite useful.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    What do the basic laws of thermodynamics and intuition do to inform you about the EROI of biofuels?
    - vanderZwan 9y ago
      That growing corn and then turning it into ethanol to burn in your cars is unlikely to be sustainable or more energy-efficient than extracting fossil fuels. Basic matter of thinking in terms of conversion losses. It probably helps to know that currently every calorie produced by Western agriculture costs about ten calories worth of fossil fuels, but still. EDIT: I realised just now that I took Michael Pollan's word on that 10:1 number without checking it, mea culpa. Quick search on the web gives me this though: http://people.uwplatt.edu/~dalecki/newperspectives.pdf http://people.uwplatt.edu/~dalecki/newperspectives.pdf and that graph on the sixth page (or "page 184") does look pretty damning on ethanol as a fuel (I'm making no statements on its qualities as an oxidizer).

bitL 9y ago

Can't wait for unintended consequences, like more dead insects or only aggressive crazy ones remaining, depleted soil, new long-term diseases, changing ecotypes etc. We are simply one big lab these days... Even if we aren't living in a simulation, we are run like a simulation.

criddell 9y ago
The intended consequences seem pretty good though. I think Kernza is worth experimenting with.
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
Well... yes, that could happen. That's why you start small and scale your way up. On the other hand, we've already got the unintended consequences of what we're doing, and they aren't all that benign...

russnewcomer 9y ago

One of the other important things about Kernza that the article doesn't talk about much is hardiness and drought-resistance. Kernza's yield at its best is lower than modern seed at an average year, but during a drought year, their yields are a probably lot closer. (They haven't been able to do extensive enough tests to confirm this, if I remember correctly) That's a huge win, especially because of potential problems with the Ogalalla Aquifer in the coming years. Another advantage, unmentioned in the article, is that it is easily possible to grow Kernza in a backyard with little intervention, and have enough grain to make a loaf of bread a week, or a couple pizza crusts. You need a mill, sure, but hand powered mills are pretty cheap ($50 for one that will work for the amount of Kernza you'll probably grow in your backyard), and in the midwest, your local library might have one to borrow. You might need a specialty mill, I'm not sure, my dad bought one of the heavy $500 hand mills when I was a kid and it had no problem with some Kernza. I grew up in Salina, where the Land Institute is headquartered, and tangentially know some of the people mentioned in the article, so while I'm not an expert, I am a semi-interested lay person.

afarrell 9y ago
> it is easily possible to grow Kernza in a backyard with little intervention As someone who hates mowing lawns, this is really interesting.
- staticautomatic 9y ago
  On the other hand, you could eat your lawn if you were inclined to mow it.
setr 9y ago
>your local library might have one to borrow. Why would you find mills in a library? What else do they have..
- netghost 9y ago
  A lot of libraries don't just share books. For instance some let you check out laptops, wifi devices, etc. There are also tool libraries, and even seed libraries. You might be surprised by what's available at your local library these days.

njarboe 9y ago

I found it interesting that 40% of the corn crop goes to produce ethanol. According to the article, that works out to 91*0.40= 36.4 million acres. This is about the same as all the farmland in Iowa (32 million acres). The average power output of this land by ethanol production is about 40 Gigawatts [(13.2 billion gallons of ethanol per year) X (89 million Joules/gallon) / 3.154e+7 seconds per year/1e9]. With the advent of electric cars, taking into consideration the energy used in producing the ethanol and the lower efficiency of internal combustion power, you could probably replace that farmland energy output with ten 2 Gigawatt nuclear power plants. It would be cool if the environmentalists and the farmers on the marginal areas of the great plains could get together and work on opening up a huge prairie preserve while building a dozen nuclear power plants to replace the lost energy. Bring back the huge herds of Bison. After all, as said elsewhere in this thread, the Ogalalla Aquifer is starting to run dry.

mythrwy 9y ago

This is really cool. What I'd also like to see is cattle in the US moved off alfalfa and out of feedlots and returned to the range of the buffalo. Migrate a giant herd of cattle across this grass (selectively or early enough it still produces grain) and rebuild the soils of the midwest the way they originally were built. Perennial grass with migratory bovines.

aaroninsf 9y ago

How nutritious is it relative to "the big three"? I scanned through the article and could find no comparison...

terravion 9y ago

I don't understand how taking 25M acres of wheat production and turning that into 75M acres of Kernza produces a net environmental benefit. Which 50M acres of native habitat are we going to cut down? That's the size of a North Eastern state... we should be going the other direction and increasing yield and decreasing total acres if we want to restore native habitats. There's no way that the lower inputs (and wheat doesn't take much) of Kernza justify destroying the native habitat of an entire state.

beambot 9y ago
Or get people to eat less meat. It's something like 30:1 ratio for beef -- ie. one calorie of beef is equivalent to 30 calories from other vegetal sources, not to mention other knock on environmental impacts.
woodandsteel 9y ago
But the yield is increasing rapidly, and there is far less energy use, fertilizer which pollutes streams and the ocean, pesticides, and tillage which causes soil loss and releases co2 into the atmosphere. I don't think there is any doubt this is the direction we need to go. Unless, of course, you are interested in maximizing the profits of certain corporations.
- terravion 9y ago
  Actually, there is great doubt. Many environmental campaigners are coming around to intensification broadly as the path out of our current environmental problems. Check out http://www.ecomodernism.org/ http://www.ecomodernism.org/ a bunch of ex-greenpeace types that are concerned with practical solutions. Tripling yield takes a long time and wheat, and especially corn, is on an exponential improvement curve. https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtrends.html https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtren...
tengbretson 9y ago
I guess I don't understand how it's become a forgone conclusion that it is a bad thing to make land productive to humans.