|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
SALINA, Kan. – In 1976, Wes and Dana Jackson launched The Land Institute as a nonprofit school to teach a small group of students ways to grow food that respected nature, conserved energy and water, and managed wastes.
As one of the nation’s first regional nonprofit environmental and farm research organizations devoted to land stewardship, the Institute set sail in the powerful current of alternative ideas and new organizations in that era that were determined to change how America operated. You recall that only six years prior 20 million Americans held public demonstrations in support of the first Earth Day.
In 1978, though, just two years after it opened, Wes Jackson, a plant geneticist, dramatically shifted the Institute’s work to basic science and plant research devoted to accomplishing an immense feat. He sought to completely overturn the 10,000-year-old system of grain production.
Instead of plowing and seeding and harvesting annually, practices that depleted the soil, and wasted water and energy, Jackson proposed developing crops that were planted once, developed deep roots, grew back year after year like perennial flowers or apple trees, and were much less vulnerable to insects, diseases, and droughts.
His idea was inspired by the tallgrass prairie of his native Kansas – a landscape decorated with big bluestem, Indiangrass, switchgrass, and little bluestem. Jackson began hiring top plant scientists to develop the new crops and gave the Institute 50 to 100 years to prove that a “perennial” grain production system was achievable.
That improbable merger of instinct, vision, and science gradually evolved and eventually yielded a breakthrough of stunning global achievement that 1,000 people celebrated here in late September at the Prairie Festival, marking The Land Institute’s 50th year.
Ninety years old now, Jackson is in good health and has lived long enough to see his idea taking real root in American farming and crop science. Under his tutelage Institute plant breeders turned wheatgrass into Kernza, the first perennial grain available for commercial sale and used to brew beer, distill vodka and bourbon, make cereal, pasta, and baked goods. Over 4,000 acres are cultivated in 15 states led by Minnesota, Kansas, and Montana.
The Institute, now a respected research organization with a $12 million budget and 55 staff members, works with Chinese breeders to develop perennial rice. They crossed Johnsongrass with sorghum to develop perennial sorghum that is being tested in Africa. Perennial varieties of wheat, legumes, and sunflowers also are in development.
The promising results have coaxed major American agricultural universities to collaborate with Institute researchers, supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Plant scientists in 24 other countries are developing perennial food crops.
In other words, what was started as an adventurous idea far outside the agricultural mainstream is steadily making its way closer to the center of farm science and grain production. Those measures of success and several others were cheered by supporters from all over the country who gathered under a big white tent amid rolling fields to be inspired by powerful oratory and enjoy great food and music.
Perhaps most significantly in this time of worry and disruption The Prairie Festival served as a rare safe space to talk about hopeful things. Like expanding the cultural and ethical movement to reduce the human damage to land. Like the need to be much more forthright in driving ecology and nature to the center of how we grow food.
“Wes Jackson and Dana Jackson put roots, both physically and metaphorically, into this place and into the organization I now lead,” Rachel Stroer, The Land Institute’s president, told a big crowd at the festival’s start. “They inspired a global movement of humans, now co-designing a livable future for all, starting with food and agriculture. These two, and thousands who have related to, influenced, and been influenced by the Land Institute, dared to courageously dig into both practicality of place and to dream radically about the future.”
In her festival address Dana Jackson, who left the Institute in the early 1990s, added this: “Today’s Land Institute is encouraging cooperation among organizations, just as it did years ago through what we called the Alternatives Network. This should be carried forward into the next 50 years. In the 1970s and the early 1980s, we described the mission of the Land Institute as a search for sustainable alternatives in agriculture, energy, shelter, and waste. We were motivated by the first Earth Day in 1970, and two gasoline shortages later that decade, which raised widespread fear that we would run out of oil and other non-renewable resources. So we needed to consume less and find substitutes.
“Now, in 2026, we understand that climate change is the biggest threat to the future, and the Land Institute’s mission is extremely important to human survival. We must build strong coalitions and achieve public policies to run our world on renewable energy and perennial plant-based foods.”
The call to develop a more sustainable food production system, uttered in so many ways over the weekend, comes as industrial agriculture has emerged as one of the most hazardous industries in the U.S. and globally. Production practices that use toxic chemicals and polluting nutrients in place of nurturing soil health are the largest sources of water contamination, and linked to rising cancer incidence and other health damage in the central U.S., where they are applied most heavily.
The system, supported by government subsidies, and driven by the pursuit of higher yields and greater efficiency, has driven up production costs, lowered margins, and led to concentration of production and food processing in ever larger and fewer hands. Some 635,000 family farms have been pushed out of business since 1976, a 25 percent decline. Across the farm states of the Midwest hundreds of rural towns are dead or dying. Open doorways lead to empty main street businesses and windowless homes.
The conversation that flourished across three days at the Prairie Festival engaged a different means for raising food, and a more graceful way to build community that participants viewed as not only essential, but inevitable. Contemporary agriculture is causing too much environmental damage, and wasting so much energy, water, and money, that its operating horizon is limited.
In the era of serious climate havoc and mishandled government policy, contemporary farming is more vulnerable than ever to devastating disruption. Evidence of that weakness is emerging right now in the Midwest where soaring diesel prices and labor shortages caused by the federal deportation program are causing severe disruption in the harvest of corn, the country’s largest field crop. Thousands more farms are likely to fail.
My connection to the Jacksons and The Land Institute is long. In 1988, during the deep Great Plains drought that year, I was the first New York Times correspondent to visit the group and interview Jackson. Much later I camped for several days with my wife, Gabrielle, in their barn outside Salina.
I’ve come to know Wes Jackson pretty well. During the Prairie Festival he took me aside to explain how much of the cause of the troubling events seen this harvest season on the surface of the Midwest can be solved by elevating to much greater salience the biological activity occurring underneath the surface, in the soil of the prairie.
That’s what he recognized and pursued in developing perennial crops. Native prairie holds soil and stays fertile with no plowing, no fertilizer, resists pests and diseases, and stores water and carbon. It does so because prairie plants are diverse, develop deep roots, build soil fertility, and naturally cycle nutrients.
Jackson also noted that prairies are a useful model for human communities. They thrive on connection, collaboration, and sharing available resources. Cultures that embrace those same principles will develop farm systems that fit into nature, respect the land, and do not beat it into submission.
The future of mankind, Jackson told me, depends on making perennial farming the predominant form of agriculture by the time The Land Institute is 100 years old.
“I don’t think we have what I would call intelligent engagement of our world,” he said. “We don’t know where the hell we are. I ask that question now. Who are we? What kind of a thing are we? What do we need?
“And once you start those questions, you ask this question: What is to become of us? And that is a different kind of discussion. What is to become of us?”
Lead image: The Kansas Prairie Festival. Photo: © Keith Schneider/Circle of Blue
