One of the things that we're trying to do at the Land Institute is use these natural ecosystems as our teachers in how to change agriculture in a way that provides ecosystem services rather than disservices.

So we can continue on for the next generation and the next and the next to be building up the soil as well as the food that we need to eat.

The work going on at The Land Institute is vital.

That will conserve soil, water resources, encourage biodiversity, all those sorts of things that are the basis for a reinvigorated local social community.

You cannot have healthy communities unless you have food that's grown in healthy ways, and I think they're on to something.

A lot of times I'll have like students come out here and they come back together and say, If I were thinking back in the Neolithic revolution about what to start getting a crop with.

They often bring the annual plants because they have the big seeds and the big seed heads, and which is what happened.

Almost throughout the world of the different societies that have grain crops, They're all annual plants.

We have wheat, rice and corn.

Having these relationships with annual plants is one of the reasons why our agriculture leads to a lot of land degradation.

And that wasn't what people were thinking of at the very first, they were like these plants have big seeds and they're also easy to breed and form relationships with them.

At The Land Institute, we're also looking at some of these other grains, which are their cousins and saying, What if we start the domestication process over again and bring these perennials back into the context of their annual cousins and bring some of those benefits of being in the diverse system back again?

perennial plants are slow compared to annual plants.

A lot of them take a year or even two years before they start bearing fruit and giving grain.

So having a greenhouse helps us expedite that process a little bit So yeah, let's go see what's going on in there.

I legumes are one category of the crops we're looking at.

We are looking at legumes both as becoming a perennial grain crop.

and we have one called Baki Bean that we're working on developing into a perennial grain, but we're also thinking of these legumes as being part of grain, cropping systems, Legumes have a really cool superpower of being able to fix nitrogen into the ground, which then allows whatever crop they are being planted with, to have access to that nitrogen.

in an effort to have like perennial systems that we can put as few inputs in as possible, having these perennial legumes as perennial ground covers can be a really important ingredient in that.

On the day to day, I will go through each greenhouse and inspect the facilities and make sure everything is working properly.

But I also inspect the plants pretty carefully.

I look for pests, sort of like inspect for damage all on the underside of leaves to make sure there's nothing nesting there.

The legumes program is trying out different accessions of each of these species to sort of see which varieties do the best and then breeding from those.

And so they were put into this pollination cage to be pollinated more intensely.

conventional agriculture creates a lot of greenhouse gases, whether that's just through burning fossil fuels with all the equipment, the fertilizers we put on have nitrous oxide, which actually has a significantly greater warming effect than carbon dioxide does.

perennial grains offer kind of a two sided response to that.

One is they reduce the amount of times equipment has to go out in the field because they don't have to be planting every year.

And the second is that these deep perennial roots can actually offer the service of carbon sequestration.

So since they are building these networks in the ground and they're staying there for years and years, they can store carbon there for as long as those roots are in their systems.

These really, really tall plants that we have out here are our perennial sorghum project.

which means we're taking a plant that is already a really successful food crop, which is sorghum, and we're crossing it with a perennial relative in order to bring that aspect of perenniality into this crop, plants that are being researched, they're basically clones of each other.

Each individual is genetically exactly the same.

But because of the work we're doing here, all of our individuals are genetically distinct from each other.

And you can see that in their different ways they display and the different ways they look like their two parents.

in the world right now we have enough food to feed everyone.

We don't have a supply problem, we just have a distribution problem.

And what The Land Institute is doing is we are looking ahead of time and saying, we can't rely on that always being the case.

We've come very close to not have enough food to feed people in like pretty recently thinking back to the Great Depression and leading into the post-World War two period when the Green Revolution started as a response to rising populations and not having enough food for everyone.

And that's really what we're rooted in is making sure that we can maintain a supply of healthy food But since we have the retrospective of the Green Revolution, and knowing that it caused these repercussions we're trying to build really intentionally at the Land Institute.

this is our North greenhouse, also known as our cool season.

Greenhouse this is Kernza over here in the front.

It's really pretty right now because it's flowering.

So this is what's a forage variety of intermediate wheat grass looks like.

You can see there's it's mostly hulls and inside of them are really small seeds.

Then kind of in between the process, we got something that looks a little bit like this, and this is pretty similar to what you'd find in products right now that are Kernza.

So it's like really small, definitely less hulls, these have been cleaned, and then you have the seeds that you can find in here which are really, really big.

Now these were kind of cultivated in the greenhouse, so we're not quite to being this size yet in a field for a farmer.

But you can see that we're really, really close.

annual wheat has got these really long awns on it and you'll see when we look at our perennial wheat, which is a hybrid, the different combinations even on a single plant, each of those seeds is genetically different, like it's coming from different parentage.

So keeping track of the different seed heads is important too, so you get envelopes about this small with their own labels to keep track of all the different seeds from the different heads of different plants And all of this data is going to be put into a program to help us train for selecting the next generation.

Most of our research and team is focused on creating that genetic material, not just about yield, right?

You can have a lot of it, but if it's impossible to process, that's not really useful to farmers.

So for true domestication to happen.

There are several other elements that are at play as well, like equipment.

All of this stuff was built around preexisting grain crops, around corn and wheat, and this is part of their domestication.

for some of these perennial grains to become successful, new types of technology and equipment will also have to be built.

And then the third part of domestication is cultural value.

Is developing foods and traditions around using and valuing these grains, which is another really important part of the process.

So when we're trying to answer the question of how do we get producers to farm more sustainably, we're really talking about culture change.

We're talking about changing the ways that people see.

And that is not easy.

Agriculture is--culture is in the word.

It is a set of values, of norms, of beliefs.

But usually it's the last thing people want to change because it's related to their identity, their sense of self.

And that's why it's hard.

That's also why it needs to be done not as a set of individuals, but in a community, because these farmers need others to bounce ideas off of, to help them understand their practices, to help to understand the context better.

And they're going to need support if we're going to see this generative transition scale across the landscape and not just be a bunch of separate, isolated individuals with the "right" farming practices.

there's no farmer out there who wants to degrade the soil and do things that are really bad.

But farming is just a profession that puts you in a difficult place when it comes to maintaining your property and making sure that you'll be able to provide food for the world.

reducing the pressure on farmers to engage in systems that are inherently unsustainable is definitely something we hope that perennial crops can do