Perennial Crops
forevergreen.umn.edu
forevergreen.umn.edu
Minnesota has 27 million acres of farmland, occupying nearly half the 55.6 million acres in the state. Two highly productive and profitable crops, corn (8.7 million acres planted in Minnesota in 2012) and soybean (7.1 million acres) are the foundation of our agriculture, along with other important production systems such as animal agriculture, small grains, horticultural crops and others. The proposed initiative aims to build on these strengths by adding to the productivity and profitability of our current agriculture.
Most of our current crops are ‘summer-annuals’ that are grown during the summer. By selectively adding winter-annual and perennial crops to our agricultural landscapes to create new crop production systems, we can enhance the prosperity of Minnesota agriculture, support rural communities, and provide major benefits to all Minnesotans. A strong base of evidence indicates that these new production systems will enhance yields of our summer-annual crops, enable production of new commodities, enhance our soils and wildlife, and improve our water resources. All of these benefits are possible because perennial and winter-annual crops are active during a large portion of each year, including many periods in fall, winter and spring when summer crops are absent.
For this reason, perennial and winter-annual crops—working in tandem with summer annuals—can capture solar energy, water and nutrients with very high efficiency.
There is a litany of problems with annuals.
The need to constantly replant every year
Leading to soil erosion.
Need for herbicides to control weeds.
Continual harvesting results in depleted soil.
Requiring fertilizer.
Short roots means low drought tolerance
Need for irrigation.
irrigation --> salinization
I like the first principles approach it takes.
I scanned a color yesterday, it said, perennial color (I just wanted to determine if it was green or yellow). Googling it did not make it much clearer but I now know it has to do with plant colors :)
That's unfortunately not correct. A "perennial" plant grows back every year and does not need to be planted again. An "annual" plant needs to be planted every year.
The word "perennial" comes from the Latin "per annum", meaning "through the year", in the sense that the plant does not die part-way through. The word "annual" also comes from the Latin "annum", in this case meaning that it needs to be re-planted "annually", i.e. "yearly".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/perennial#Adjective
As a native speaker, whenever I encounter a word I don't know, I find it helpful to look up its etymology, which helps me remember what it means: https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=perennial
in the end, I settled on green :)
As a native English speaker, I have no idea what "perennial" means as a color. I think maybe the program you are using to scan the color is meant for matching paint colors? Because of the large number of different shades of paint available, and the smaller number of color names that have meaning in English, paint colors have to be given made-up names that don't mean anything outside the context of the naming scheme used by a particular paint company. When a company sells eighty different kinds of green, they have to be creative to think up enough names. I'm sure they picked "perennial" because most plants are green and perennial is a word related to plants. There's no other relationship between "perennial" and a color.
> Silphium integrifolium—rosinweed—is in the early stages of domestication to become a part of diverse, sustainable, and productive cropping systems that will protect Minnesota soil and water resources by providing continual cover of the landscape. Silphium is a relative of annual sunflower and is a native forb in the tallgrass prairie region of the U.S.
It’s seems like crops that better perversive the balance of our planet will have a huge impact on the longevity of our tenure here on earth
Consider - any plant which died after three months without reproducing is pretty improbably as far as evolution is concerned. And yet, there are millions of naturally occurring annuals.
That is because naturally occurring annuals are "perpetual annuals" - annuals which reproduce within that three month period, but effectively lie dormant in seed form until the next time the climate is beneficial.
In nature, these are plants which have evolved to thrive in a specific climactic condition. They optimize _hard_ for those conditions, to grow fast, to make babies (seeds), then self seed either in-situ or far and wide. Then they die off to improve the available nutrition in the soil (ready for the seeds to sprout next year) rather than burn up a whole lot of energy just keeping themselves alive through the rest of the year. It's highly efficient. A single corn plant can produce potentially dozens of new corn plants in a subsequent year - one plant per kernel. These are the "perpetual annuals" - technically annuals, but self managing so that they continue to produce every year.
Perpetual annuals are highly resilient. Their short reproductive life cycle makes them very quick to adapt to local conditions. The same physical space can be productive for much longer periods of time, with spring plants dying down to make way for summer plants, then for autumn plants, then a winter where the land lies fallow, building up rich sediment to feed the next year's crops. They also make polycultures very practical: smart sequential plantings can mean that, say, a nitrogen hogging plant like a broccoli can be sequentially planted after a nitrogen _fixing_ plant like a pea, so that plants aren't always sucking up the same type of nutrient and effectively wasting the rest.
Unfortunately though, many modern annuals are not actually _perpetual_ annuals. And it is precisely our genetic modification that has made them into problems. We have selectively bred these plants to the point where they produce seeds which are infertile, because that makes it possible for the breeders/suppliers to keep selling seed year after year (rather than selling seed once, knowing that farmers can then propagate themselves in perpetuity). In particularly extreme cases, we've bred plants that _literally have no reproductive organs at all_ - seedless watermelons and seedless grapes, for example. With these plants, the "annual" life cycle is genuinely plant, grow, die. End of the line. Start again from scratch.
Planting hybrid perennials is definitely better in terms of human labour, in that you will get multiple harvests from the same plant. They're also good for the environment, because they provide stability to soil. However, in the grand scheme of things, the best option is a blend of _both_ perennials _and_ perpetual annuals. Ideally while allowing the plants to reproduce naturally, rather than trying to optimize genetics for short term commercial traits.