A Grain That Tastes Like Wheat, but Grows Like a Prairie Grass
thenation.com
thenation.com
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.
As someone who hates mowing lawns, this is really interesting.
Why would you find mills in a library? What else do they have..
You might be surprised by what's available at your local library these days.
Tools. There's a library-affiliated technology library[0] in the city I live now that has almost anything someone who is a 'maker' could want. And many large town (25-60k towns) libraries have similar, smaller scale departments.
"So far, among the many things Dahlke has found: Ninety percent of her floodwaters reach the groundwater table; in the right soil, alfalfa can handle the equivalent of 26 feet of rain; and pecan trees, which, she says, “naturally grow in riparian [riverbank] soils, are well-adapted to having wet feet in winter.”"
https://www.popsci.com/how-california-is-saving-rainwater-fo...
"wheat comes in at about 4 million calories per acre, soy at 6 million"
What else would you have them feed their animals? Calories per acre matters when there are a limited number of acres of arable land.
Unless you are advocating vegetarianism. Which is a valid point as far as the environment goes. But farmers produce what the market demands.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-defense-of-...
And I hear you about ethanol production. I for one can't wait for our new renewable energy sources.
"Corn is a particularly water thirsty crop, which while delicious is over produced"
Sweet corn, which we eat; and field corn are different things. According to the washington post article I posted earlier, there isn't that much sweet corn produced.
"Calories per acre is important but for the Ogalalla Aquifer calories per gallon-water is more important"
Yeah, but people want food today... Desalination, and other water related technologies can't come soon enough :(
I did a bit of hunting and wasn't able to find it available for purchase but when it is, would love to replace a chunk of the frontyard.
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-dril...
[1]http://www.mofga.org/Publications/MaineOrganicFarmerGardener...
I keep hearing that - least in the US - this is more of a problem with subsidies and perverse incentives, is that true? Sincere question from a naive non-economist outsider here.
edit: ethanol is hygroscopic; meaning it attracts and collects water
I'm pretty sure that these are economic benefits.
It's another massive subsidy to the farming/fertilizer industry.
The EREOI of Corn as a fuel is pretty bad.
If all this subsidy money were used to instead move to EVs, it'd be better spent.
Later it was noticed that the US biodiesel program had had a substantial impact on global corn prices, which probably causes deaths in developing countries[1].
I think it's widely considered to be a bad idea at this point, but as late as 2009 I can find reference to expansions in the program[2].
Completely agree that redirecting our subsidy dollars into modern tech would be a much better investment; the default should be no subsidies, and we should pick strategic investments to ensure our relevance in the coming decades.
[1]: https://www.treehugger.com/cars/us-doctors-say-biofuels-coul... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofuel_in_the_United_States#R...
Corn isn't used to make biodiesel. Also biodiesel allowed usage of existing waste product (e.g. sludge from a McDonalds) would work with biodiesel converted engines.
Luckily hybrids and EVs entered the scene and now we have zero-emission vehicles that are far more sustainable than ones using any liquid fuels.
There is no reason to push for anything but EVs and hybridized fleets everywhere. EVs are faster, less maintenance and the range issue is pretty much resolved for the vast majority of use cases. I'm frustrated when I have to drive an ICE vehicle - pickup is slow and no regenerative charging means it stops slowly as well.
[1] http://www.differencebetween.net/science/difference-between-...
I've only been gardening a season but I've already come to the same conclusion. The corn stalks were the divas of the bed, wilting days before anything else and underproducing. Especially compared to the squash plants.
I always have some tomato cages ready as backup, because even if the corn is big enough to support the beans, a gust of wind can blow it all over.
Also, deer eat corn shoots. Damn you, deer. Damn you.
There's a farm somewhere south of London which does pick-your-own pattypans, and apparently at harvest time is overrun with South Africans, who evidently feel very strongly about them.
And the mills smell awful. Like someone took a paper mill, and took out the sour part of the smell and replaced it with moldy gym socks.
Have you been to the Midwest? There are places where you can drive hundreds of miles and see almost nothing but corn and a bit of soy.
If you take the backroads you’ll find pigs, cows, a bit of alfalfa and hay, sweet corn and the odd field of popcorn. But along the interstates it’s corn, soy and more corn to the horizon.
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.
> 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...
I've got some clover that would give wheat a good run for its money on plant height. However, normally you broadcast the clover well after the wheat has been planted so that it is just starting to establish itself during wheat harvest. There is little to no competition between the crops due to timing their growth phases.
So far as weeds go - if you think of tillage, it will incorporate all vegetative matter back into the soil and you end up with a clean dirt surface to plant in. Tillage in particular is useful for two reasons here - tilling is a method of quickly incorporating amendments into the root zone of plants - those amendments may be a green manure cover crop, animal manure, lime, etc. Tilling also increases new surface area of soil to air, resulting in a massive kill of soil bacteria. This "bloom" of bacteria increases nitrogen availability.
This also churns up all of the weed seeds that were buried in the soil, and you will quickly get weeds in a tilled surface as they now have ideal growing conditions, where before they were buried in the dirt too deeply.
So you still get weeds with tillage. The reason Roundup resistant crops were developed, is to allow the farmer to spray glycophosphate broadly, and kill off these weeds without killing the desired crop.
That's pretty fast for traditional selective breeding techniques. It would be interesting what kind of progress could be made with genetic engineering. Seems like they're trying to avoid the GMO label, so I would guess it's another 15-20 years before Kernza will be ready for widespread agricultural use.
I wouldn't be surprised those techniques have seen a lot of improvements in recent years too. I mean, surely genetic engineering coming onto the scene doesn't mean everyone just dropped the other methods? There must be a lot of complementary techniques there - I'm sure a lot of modern advances in biology are helpful there as well.
EDIT: Heh, I just got to the part of the article where it explicitly describes this:
> Kernza’s DNA has never been genetically engineered; its genes get reshuffled via the scattering of pollen, from the male parts of flowers onto the feathery, sticky female parts. But advances in genomics—the -sequencing of DNA—over the last 15 years have made it far easier to tweak Kernza. Almost all of the grain’s genome has now been mapped. Once breeders have a genetic blueprint, they can track down the genes that control particular traits and select individuals with genetic stock that codes for, say, fat seeds or resistance to disease.
I hope they're smart enough to keep some kind of "unselected seed bank" to keep a source of higher genetic diversity for quick adaptation.
If you want to introgress a particular trait into a useful background, it's going to take ~5 generations to do it adequately. That generally means 5 years, or sometimes you can squeeze in a winter nursery in the southern hemisphere.
Proper QTL analysis requires making suitable inbreds (several generations of selfing), creation of the RILs (another several generations of selfing after the making the F2s), and finally a couple years for gathering trait data. Oh, and this all requires generation of proper markers and so forth. Starting from scratch, this is a decade-long process if everything goes well.
As for diversity, you collect wild accessions and those are generally maintained by a seed co-op, often something associated with a university.
It is billed as a wheat replacement. It may erode wheat acres in the future, but is unlikely to touch the corn acres. People would already be growing more wheat and less corn if the profitability was there. But it isn't. There's a reason why farmers have nicknamed wheat "poverty grass".
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.
>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.
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.
> tasted like nuts and crackers, coffee and grass
I imagine you could make a killer amber or brown ale.
Rather off topic, but you might be interested in this: 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... ;)
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.
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.
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.
When Jackson started out, no one had decoded a genome.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
While it is true that Western agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels, that isn't necessarily the case for all possible models of agriculture.
Plants get their energy from the sun. They don't drink it from a gas pump.
Yeah, there'll be "conversion losses" (i.e., less energy will show up in the plant than was produced by fusion in the core of the sun), but it's hard to see why that matters in any realistic sense.
No, but then we change the discussion: we were talking about the (in)efficiencies of corn ethanol. Hence my Western agriculture qualifier, because that is the context in which it is generated as a biofuel.
If we look more broadly, then a whole lot of alternatives look a lot better obviously.
> [If we compare] the thermal efficiencies from modern cooking stoves with those from stoves used in poorer households, we see that the improved biomass stoves in developing countries beat our "high-tech" cooking technology with a factor of two to three (graphic below).
> The main discrepancy with these figures is caused when one doesn't take into account that electricity first needs to be produced in power plants which sometimes convert less than a third of the primary energy into electricity. This is not an issue with gas or biomass stoves, where a primary fuel is directly converted into heat for cooking.
> Evidently, there is something wrong with the western approach to sustainability. Converting heat into electricity which is then converted back into heat, at 20-40% efficiency, is similar to building a Rube Goldberg machine; it's a needlessly complex operation compared to simply converting the primary fuel into heat to boil water. Essentially, any electric cooking device is an insult to the science of thermodynamics.
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/06/thermal-efficiency-co...
... huh, I guess that's last sentence where I got my thermodynamics remark from.
Not when it comes to the fusion reactions occurring in the sun.
Cooking stoves aren't really relevant here at all, but of course the reason we use these so-called "Rube Goldberg" methods is so that we don't have to go chop wood and then attempt to regulate the temperature of a wood-burning range. If you haven't done that, you (and the author of your linked article) should try it sometime. Hint: it's not easy. Both of my great-grandmothers could bake fancy cakes in a wood-burning oven, to take just one example, but that's a skill I will never have.
When it comes to growing corn: of all the sunlight that comes in, how much of that is converted into potential energy by growing corn? How much external energy and resources does it cost to grow corn otherwise? How much energy and resources does it cost to turn that corn into biofuel?
By comparison, how much sunlight can be converted to electricity by photovoltaics? How much of that energy is lost when getting that electricity into an electric vehicle? How much extra overhead do the batteries have compared to fossil fuels due to extra weight, given their lower energy density?
Those are all questions of conversion losses. If you honestly want to say that they are not, or that they don't matter, I would like to know why. Because I do not understand what the comparison with the Sun's generated energy has to do with anything.
No, I'm pointing out that:
1) "Efficiency" isn't the only goal in life. It would be more "efficient" for the entire population to live in barracks and eat some kind of nutritional gruel for every meal, but few would choose to live that way. We do things "inefficiently" for our convenience and pleasure all the time, and there is nothing wrong with that. For instance, I'll bet you have your own computer rather than using a shared computer at the public library, even though that would be more "efficient".
2) It doesn't really matter how "efficient" the conversion of solar energy to carbohydrate is, because it's free. That matters for other energy inputs in the process (e.g., the gas burned in running tractors) but not the sun itself.
It is when we are discussing the limits of sustainability and growth, and to deny that is the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand.
If you prefer to not think about that and on a personal level keep up the American tradition of wasting tenfold more resources than the rest of the developed world for practically zero gain in quality of life, be my guest, but stay out of conversations about what method of energy production is and isn't sustainable
> It doesn't really matter how "efficient" the conversion of solar energy to carbohydrate is, because it's free.
You are so incredibly blatantly wrong here. It might be free in the sense that nobody owns the sun. It's not free in the sense that we have a limitless supply of it.
In the latter sense, the thermodynamic sense[0], we have a limited amount of solar power to go around. Unless we ever figure out how to build Dyson spheres or something.
Last century's advances are largely built on spending fossil fuels that were basically millions of years worth of stored solar energy, we can't keep wasting more of it forever.
We're on a finite planet, with finite resources, including energy, and an increasing amount of people.
We aren't anywhere near the "limits of sustainability and growth".
"It might be free in the sense that nobody owns the sun. It's not free in the sense that we have a limitless supply of it."
The sun puts out about 1.2×10^34 joules each year. The Earth's total energy production is about 5x10^20 joules. In other words, the sun puts out 24,000,000,000,000 times our total energy production from all sources.
"Limitless"? No. Effectively limitless for practical purposes? Yes.
"We're on a finite planet, with finite resources, including energy, and an increasing amount of people."
1) We're not limited to one planet.
2) Population growth has slowed or stopped in many countries. The "Soylent Green" fears of the 1970s turned out to be utterly baseless, and there is no evidence that they will ever come to pass.
It's probably not an energy loss though:
http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2016/02/23/a-critical-rev...
(But still not enough of an energy gain to be acting like it is a good energy source)
Ethanol is C2H6O. Two carbons, six hydrogens, one oxygen. Not a lot of oxygen in that molecule. Calling it an oxidizer akin to LOX or N2H4O3 is unusual.
Fossil fuels on the other end take carbon that was sleeping in the ground and leave it in the atmosphere after combustion.
At least that's what I hear over here in Europe, maybe motivations are different in the US.
The real reason corn-based ethanol is politically supported in the US is because of an artifact of the US federal political process. Iowa is the first state to hold caucuses [1], to a first approximation explanation. This exerts an effect similar to first mover advantage: their outcomes have a disproportionate effect upon other states' primaries [2] (linked article gives a better, more nuanced explanation than a glib "they're first"). Not coincidentally for this topic, Iowa grows a lot of corn [3], the most of any state in the US, and more than all of Mexico combined.
The two major parties are terrified of pissing off Iowa voters who personally depend upon the corn economy in Iowa. So corn-based ethanol stays encrusted into the US federal political landscape, until an Alexander-like politician cuts it in half, Gordian Knot-mythos-like [4]. Either that, or until Iowa's shortsighted monocropping causes them to irretrievably lose their topsoil, and they can't grow anything at scale, and removing the subsidies becomes moot; at the macro scale, they're eroding their topsoil with no end in sight. I SWAG a few more decades before we reach an inflection point, where input costs to prop up poor topsoil corn growing start to negate the subsidies' artificial boost. That's going to really suck for our food supply system, if it comes down to that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucuses
[2] https://people.howstuffworks.com/iowa-caucus.htm
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...
Also, Birchwood Cafe is great! Worth a visit if you are ever in the Minneapolis area!
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.
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.
Is backyard production of quinoa driving its popularity?
I scanned through the article and could find no comparison...
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.
On the other hand, we've already got the unintended consequences of what we're doing, and they aren't all that benign...