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Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again
- throwthrowuknow 4y agoBut what does it taste like?
- hnmullany 4y ago"It was incredibly fragrant and super tasty." https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1165680024 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1165680024
- iExploder 4y agoprobably better than a bug sandwitch
- spywaregorilla 4y agodepends on the bug.
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoAnd the mayonnaise.
- smnrchrds 4y agoprobably better than a race condition sandwich
- danrocks 4y agoprobably sandwich race a than better
- pigsty 4y agoThere are loads of societies that eat rice and bugs together and have for centuries. It’s a well-rounded meal.
- eminence32 4y ago> They then spent years breeding for the desired traits until they landed on three new perennial varieties to test in the real world Good old-fashioned genetic engineering :)
- ccooffee 4y agoWell, they've got fancy procedures in there, too: > So what our colleague Duyan Tao did - he, at an early stage, around 10 days after the [by-human-hand] pollination, went in there and dissected out the very young embryo that was developing and put it in tissue culture and gave it nutrients to help it grow. And then he rescued one of these seedlings. And that was the beginning of it. Also, the "old-fashioned genetic engineering" of selective breeding of animals/plants is...not as old-fashioned as you may think. Animal husbandry has been around for millennia (or longer), but it was an undirected process prior to the work of Robert Bakewell in the 1700s. Thanks to his groundbreaking work (and a lot of refinements from others), humanity learned how to shape the trajectories of other species. I like this quote from Bakewell's wikipedia page[0]: > In 1700, the average weight of a bull sold for slaughter was 370 pounds (168 kg). By 1786, that weight had more than doubled to 840 pounds (381 kg). (Obviously, humanity has gone on to be much more aggressive and successful with selective breeding. Beef cattle are now usually 1200-1400 pounds at slaughter, for example. Though, personally, I'd say we've gone "too far" when you learn about the horrors of modern, industrialized animal agriculture.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bakewell_(agriculturalist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bakewell_(agriculturali...
- NikolaNovak 4y agoArr we saying that cattle today are 4 times the weight of 400yrs ago?
- ccooffee 4y agoThat's a very good point. I'm currently suspecting that the numbers quoted in Blakewell's article are the "hot carcass" weight (i.e. subtracting bone, head, and organs from the total weight). An Aurochs (wild ancestor of domesticated cattle) could reach 1300 lbs in the 1500s (and possibly in excess of 3300 lbs prior to recorded history, according to archaeological finds)[0]. If the numbers are hot-carcass weight, we would be seeing: 1700: 370 lbs, 1789: 840 lbs, 2020: 880 lbs [1] But, uhh, that doesn't feel right either. I think that wikipedia page could use some additional citations, but I'm struggling to find useful numbers with which to update. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs [1] https://beef.unl.edu/beefwatch/2020/how-many-pounds-meat-can-we-expect-beef-animal https://beef.unl.edu/beefwatch/2020/how-many-pounds-meat-can...
- barathr 4y agoThe Land Institute has been doing amazing work for decades, and it's great to see they've done it for a common grain. Their work on Kernza was fascinating but seemed unlikely to catch on. The question will always come back to yield loss (vs. annual cultivars) vs. cost savings due to perenniality.
- efields 4y agoThis is really excellent news. Annual plant cultivation at the scale we need is pretty unsustainable long term. Yes we’ve been doing it for thousands of years but only 100 or so relying on oil for our enormous yields.
- quaintdev 4y agoI have one concern though. What happens to nutrients content of this rice over time? I mean with our current practices the land gets enough time to produce quality rice for another year. If we are going perenial what happens to soil and rice quality?
- anon84873628 4y agoWell, what is the answer to that question for all the other perennial crops we eat? Tree nuts, tree fruits, coconuts, berries, asparagus, artichoke...
- giraffe_lady 4y agoAs I understand it the result of monoculture soil damage is not in detectable nutrition of the crop but less yield due to reduced hardiness, slower growing, susceptibility to pests & pathogens. I know very little about rice cultivation but the flooded fields system has very different cycles and feedback from dry land grain cultivation. It varies a lot by region but rice paddies are entire ecosystems, with specific fish & eels introduced to control pests and enrich the fields. At least for the first few years iirc rice cultivation itself actually somewhat terraforms the land, improving it for rice cultivation. I'm sure there are drawbacks, caveats, and limits on that but I don't know what they are. I suspect you'd need to be a dedicated rice crop expert to have a truly informed understanding of it.
- awesomeMilou 4y agoDo riceplants absorb nutrients only via soil? I've always thought that they get at least part of their nutrients via the water that surrounds them. In that case controlling for nutrients would be much easier.
- seifertca 4y agoPerennials are such an intuitively appealing idea but a plant expends a lot of energy ensuring it can make it through the fallow/winter season successfully. Thus perennial cereals only make sense where the cost of seed and planting exceeds the impact on yield. My understanding is even at the theoretical minimum energy needed for most cereals in most growing regions to have a 90% chance of surviving perennially you need a huge cash subsidy for lost grain yield or for seed and planting costs to rise many-fold. More likely to work in rice than wheat/kernza but never likely to work at all unless we as a species change how we think of the objectives of agriculture. Happy to be proven wrong though.
- nn3 4y agoThey explain in the interview that the rice is still sub tropical, so this only works in places without significant winters. With that the investment of the plant is likely much lower.
- colechristensen 4y agoIt’s hard to generalize but seed costs in the ballpark of 20% of revenue. That’s not counting tillage in preparation for planting, the cost of planting, or weed management which will be more difficult without established crops. In other words you can take a significant hit to yields and still come out ahead.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoWithout yearly tillage (or herbicide spray in case of no-till), weed mgmt is going to be tricky for perennial cash crops. It's certainly tricky for e.g. vineyards and orchards. I suppose with rice (or kernza wheat) you could use a selective broadleaf herbicide. Doesn't help with invasive grasses.
- colechristensen 4y agoHerbicides are all generally sprayed when the crop is alive and growing anyway, there’s really no new challenge there
- chris_va 4y ago(disclaimer that I manage a climate group, but not a rice expert) They touch on, but don't get into the details on one of the more interesting aspects of perennial rice. Rice fields are actually a huge emitter of methane. Depending on the accounting, they contribute as much to global warming as the aviation sector. The fields emit methane when flooded, the stagnant water gets oxygen depleted, and the biomass in the soil degrades. This flooding is mostly used to control for weeds, but weeds have a much more difficult time competing when a perennial canopy already exists. So, perennial rice may end up reduce GHG emissions substantially.
- melling 4y agoThe aviation sector is about 2%. Sounds like another premature optimization problem, as applied to climate change. “Premature optimization is the root of all evil“ https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization= https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization= What about coal? What about coal?
- insane_dreamer 4y agoThe need to eliminate coal emissions does not preclude the need to eliminate emissions from other sources.
- melling 4y agoI suppose if we didn’t wait decades to eliminate the big problems, we’d have more time to worry about the smaller problems. A 100 years of coal emissions is 1000 years of rice.
- lkbm 4y agoDid the people working on rice hamper the work on coal? Or is the issue that they're wasting their time by doing anything but trying to get rid of coal? As best I can tell, neither you nor I are working on coal either.
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoWon't yields go down eventually as the soil becomes more and more degraded as the same nutrients are extracted? I'm assuming you need to find a way to make up for that. Something that's hard to do if you think about how grain is planted. Can't really drive over it with a tractor once it has a certain height. Even if you take off only the parts you need and leave the rest in place.
- hnmullany 4y agoYou still need to add fertilizers that's not what this is about. (And you absolutely drive over crops with tractors)
- tfourb 4y agoPerennial plants are much more effective at extracting nutrients because of more established root systems. Not tilling the field also allows for complex plant/fungi communities to develop which will increase moisture and nutrient levels in the soil. Put simply: you don’t need to fertilize a forest or other naturally occurring ecosystems and those are built around perennial plants. The closer you get back to a functioning ecosystem, the less reliant you’ll be on external inputs.
- hnmullany 4y agoAbstract from the Nature Sustainability paper: From a single planting, irrigated perennial rice produced grain for eight consecutive harvests over four years, averaging 6.8 Mg ha−1 harvest−1 versus the 6.7 Mg of replanted annual rice, which required additional labour and seed. Four years of cropping with perennial rice resulted in soils accumulating 0.95 Mg ha–1 yr–1 organic carbon and 0.11 Mg ha−1 yr−1 nitrogen, along with increases in soil pH (0.3–0.4) and plant-available water capacity (7.2 mm). Perennial cultivars are strongly preferred by farmers; growing them saves 58.1% of labour and 49.2% of input costs in each regrowth cycle. In 2021, perennial rice was grown on 15,333 ha by 44,752 smallholder farmers in southern China. Suited to a broad range of frost-free environments between 40° N and 40° S, perennial rice is a step change with potential to improve livelihoods, enhance soil quality and inspire research on other perennial grains.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago> accumulating 0.95 Mg ha–1 yr–1 organic carbon and 0.11 Mg ha−1 yr−1 nitrogen importantly, this should reduce the need for fertilizer to replenish soil nitrogen
- twawaaay 4y agoI know Chinese harvest their rice up to three times a year. I don't see how perennial rice could compete. Harvesting normal rice is just grabbing entire plants, as many as you can grab at a time. I may know nothing about how harvesting perennial rice is supposed to work, but I grew up as a farmer and I have imagination. You have to leave some part of the plant for it to keep growing crop which means you can't just grab it all. And I think this is a deal breaker. It just does not make sense to get even more labour intensive plant at a time where labour in all parts of the world that grow rice becomes suddenly so much more expensive. So until they figure out to build robots that can individually pick rice grains off of a tiny, fragile rice plant, I am not seeing any future for perennial rice.
- eYrKEC2 4y agoGrain combines chop the heads off the wheat plant and leave stubble. If it can survive that.
- hosh 4y agoAccording to this quote: > Perennial cultivars are strongly preferred by farmers; growing them saves 58.1% of labour and 49.2% of input costs in each regrowth cycle. In 2021, perennial rice was grown on 15,333 ha by 44,752 smallholder farmers in southern China. Seems like it makes sense to them. The increased labor in harvest is probably offset by the decrease in labor for planting.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago>> In 2021, perennial rice was grown on 15,333 ha by 44,752 smallholder farmers in southern China. > Seems like it makes sense to them. ...that's not the conclusion I would have drawn. 45,000 farmers and 60 square miles are both pitifully small numbers.
- Pigalowda 4y agoIn 2022, the acreage of rice plantations in China amounted to around 29.45 million hectares. You are right.
- efitz 4y agoMy wife is from Thailand. My father in law is a rice farmer. I’m unclear about the definition of “subsistence”, because you need more than rice to live, but he grows more than they need to eat and sells the rest to eke out a living. The questions in my mind are: 1. How expensive would these perennial rice strains be (patents)? The cost would have to be ridiculously low by western standards for rural Thai farmers to afford this. 2. How sustainable is it from the standpoint of soil nutrients? Would farmers have to fertilize since they usually plow under after harvest and let the field lie fallow for 6 months? Fertilizer would likely be a show stopper.
- anthomtb 4y ago> 1. How expensive would these perennial rice strains be (patents)? The cost would have to be ridiculously low by western standards for rural Thai farmers to afford this. The perennial rice strain in question is developed by a non-profit: https://landinstitute.org/ https://landinstitute.org/. Near as I can tell, they do not patent their crops for revenue. According to https://landinstitute.org/learn/frequently-asked-questions/ https://landinstitute.org/learn/frequently-asked-questions/, they do have one of their grains trademarked and extract fees from those who use the trademark. Which strikes me as a fair play but others opinions may differ.
- jamiek88 4y agoIt actually helps retains soil nutrient including nitrogen. >accumulating 0.95 Mg ha–1 yr–1 organic carbon and 0.11 Mg ha−1 yr−1 nitrogen
- CuriouslyC 4y agoYou can plant the rice along with nitrogen fixers. Perennial plants get old and should be replanted periodically, so you can have a fallow period where the land is grazed to really improve fertility.
- onemiketwelve 4y agothere's this perennial green onion mutant that I found out about from people growing it in China. Usually if you want scallions you have to harvest them very quickly, then the plant is kinda useless. But these ones, instead of flowering, they immediately offshoot new plants from where the flower would have been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_onion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_onion
- doodlebugging 4y agoI found these walking onions a couple years ago planted a bunch of them along a hugelkulture berm that I constructed from downed tree trunks, decomposed wood chips, grass cuttings, compost and topsoil. They are definitely planted in the absolute worst spot right at the base of the berm instead of on it where the best nutrients should be. In spite of that I have seen them thrive in the poor soil. They do indeed form small onions at the tips of the stalks and those do tip over and root forming new plants. The whole thing is edible from the tiny onions at the top to the onion at the root. They also taste great so they have that going for them. If they can grow in the Texas heat with someone like myself tending them whenever he thinks about it then I think they will survive anywhere. I fully expected all of them to burn up in the heat but they have done quite well.
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- giantg2 4y agoWould love to have perennial corn or wheat. I think someone is working on wheat, but I don't remember.
- Cerium 4y agoWheat: https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-crops/perennial-wheat/ https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-crops/perennial...
- giantg2 4y agoThanks! Looks like perrenial corn exists too. https://sites.psu.edu/futureoffood/2016/02/21/annual-to-perennial-corn/ https://sites.psu.edu/futureoffood/2016/02/21/annual-to-pere...
- realworldperson 4y ago[dead]
- whyenot 4y agoSome of the wild corn (maize) relatives are also perennial, for example Zea diploperennis. I wonder if there are efforts to also create perennial corn. I'm not sure how advantageous perennial corn would really be because of increased pest and disease problems.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoWe should do the same with corn
- tastyfreeze 4y agoNot all rice needs to be grown in paddies. Paddies are primarily used for weed control as rice, as a water side plant, can tolerate root submersion where the competition can't. Some varieties do better than others as "dry land" rice. A perennial dry land rice would be a boon for small holders. A lawn could become a perennial food source. I am currently working to adapt rice varieties to my temperate environment in a raised bed setting. Not having to use some of my harvested seed to replant would be awesome. The downside is you lose the ability to select for traits without ripping up your current plot.
- ed25519FUUU 4y agoIf people want to grow food in lawn there are so many easier options than rice, such as a few large fruit trees. It’s a cultural problem that lawns are just green spaces sprayed with 2,4-d, not a technological one.
- tastyfreeze 4y agoRice, like most grains, is a grass. Replace lawn grass with grain grass and plant fruit trees. Growing food isn't a one size fits all solution. Grow what you can with the least amount of effort. Lawns as green space will last as long as food is plentiful. Changing a lawn to food production is the first step people will take if food is not available. The culture is already changing. https://www.foodnotlawns.com/ https://www.foodnotlawns.com/
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoThere are a surprising number of perennial food plants. Not just bushes and trees; vegetable crops too! I recently saw a Gardeners' World episode which showcased a lady with 220+ perennial vegetables in her garden. Including a variety of broccoli, and one of chard! A surprise to me. A benefit to her is, she could have all that without dealing with every plant, every year. But she had plenty of rain and land. Not everybody would find that solution beneficial.
- tfourb 4y agoWell-designed food forests and agroforestry systems can exceed the calorie production per acre of heavily mechanized and fertilized annual crops like corn, while providing tons more actual nutrition and additional services like wood, good quality soil, etc. with little or no fossil-fuel-based inputs. Check out i.e. Mark Shepard (New Forest Farm) and Martin Crawford (Agroforestry Research Trust) for examples.
- seunosewa 4y agoIf this was true, commercial farmers would probably be doing it already. They tend to rapidly adopt anything that improves yield.
- fogzen 4y agoThey have little incentive since non-financial externalities are not accounted for in commercial agriculture. In other words, we aren’t accounting for the costs of topsoil and ecosystem destruction, or greenhouse gases from fertilizer and pesticide production. Industrial agriculture has increased yield mostly via unsustainable external inputs: fertilizer, pesticides, and motorized machines (oil, oil, and more oil).
- efields 4y agoCertain crops we grow annually will perennialuse just fine in the right environment. We bought a perennial kale last year only to have it completely die, meanwhile a kale I didn’t pull at the end of the fall is shooting new leaves. Right plant, right place. We’re still working on it, thousands of years later.
- Lunatic666 4y agoWith perennial rice you lose the option to use the field for something else. Also timing the sowing with the rain is important. (Source: my wife's family are rice farmers in the Northeast of Thailand)
- gus_massa 4y agoHere in Argentina I think we plant in the same spot soy and corn, or soy and sunflower, or other combinations. Each crop is better for the temperatures and rain of each season. So I also guess it's more effective to use a annual crop (that is actually only a few months in the field, not the whole year).
- maerF0x0 4y agoPlant once, it will replicated forever.. What could go wrong?
- sampo 4y agoIn one of his videos in Youtube, permaculture farmer Richard Perkins said that mankind has 6000 years of agriculture, but has mostly concentrated plant breeding efforts to annual plants. We mostly eat annuals. (Plants that grow and die in one year.) But, he said, imagine what kind of perennial (plants that live multiple years) food plants we could have, if we invested similar 6000 years of effort to perfecting perennial food plants. Like fruit trees and nut trees and whatever. The benefits of perennials being, you don't need to plat then anew every year. And because the plants and especially their root systems are not killed off at the end of every summer, the soil is not vulnerable to erosion, because the plant roots stay in the soil and hold it together.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> But, he said, imagine what kind of perennial (plants that live multiple years) food plants we could have, if we invested similar 6000 years of effort to perfecting perennial food plants. Like fruit trees and nut trees and whatever. Well, that's something we've already done. So I'd say we'd end up with the fruits and nuts that we have right now. What are we supposed to be imagining?
- Sebguer 4y agoThis is an obtuse read of the author's point, which is apply what we've done to fruit trees and nut trees to perennial staple foods.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoThe author is saying we should apply the techniques we've used on grains to fruit trees. That is ridiculous, because, obviously, we already do that. We always have.
- lkbm 4y agoI was recently thinking about the possibility of GMOing/selectively breeding better hardwood. (Turns out we have done this with walnut.) I believe the main issue is that the lifecycle of tree is much longer. Each year I can select the best corn from last harvest and plant it for this harvest. Trees generally take several years to start producing, so iterating through generations is slow.
- LoveMortuus 4y agoAre the seeds for perennial rice available anywhere to buy? Or are they still under testing and only given to select farmers? The article states that some 45,000 farmers already have them, but I was unable to find where I could buy some.
- wanderingmind 4y agoHow will it affect the top soil nutrients? I used to be told about crop rotation and resting by farmers in south Asian countries for the soil to regain the nutrients, doesn't having rice grow year after year destroy the top soil and result in poor productivity?