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Comment by ortusdux | Hacker News Reader

This impending disaster has got me thinking about Salish Blue, a newly developed perennial 'wheat'. The plant last ~5 years and sends out deep roots, so they require less fertilizer and water. I don't know if it ready for primetime yet, but the beer I had that was brewed with it was indistinguishable from any other beer.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-self-sustainin...

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It may be useful in some areas, but other areas increase the yield using double cropping, the idea is to grow each year a second crop after the harvest of the first one. For example see the figure 7.1.4 in https://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/teaching_materials/food_... or the figure 1 in http://blog.umd.edu/agronomynews/2019/09/06/interseeding-cov...

I've talked with several soil scientists that are concerned that we may have another dust bowl. Odds are we are going to see more and more severe droughts, and our standard corn and wheat farming practices leave the soil in a wind susceptible condition during the wrong times of the year. We just don't put enough organic matter back into the soil each rotation, so we need to fertilize to offset the nutrient loss, and we end up with terrible sand-like soil that can blow away and take all the nutrients with it.

IIRC, this was the issue that Salish Blue was engineered to address. I know about double cropping, but I fear that doubling down on our current practices for short-term gain might put us in a worse place 10+ years down the road.

On a separate note, we really need to stop subsidizing corn production for fuel. 40% of our annual yields goes to ethanol.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-the-climate-warms-could-th...

https://www.science.org/content/article/dust-bowl-20-rising-...

I had too search dust bowl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

I think here in Argentina we are using a lot of cover crop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_crop and no-till farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming to avoid that problem, but I live in the city, so I'm not sure.

> On a separate note, we really need to stop subsidizing corn production for fuel. 40% of our annual yields goes to ethanol.

I agree. Agriculture subsidies are a big problem for all the other countries, it's like dumping.

Anyway, ethanol from corn is not a bad idea. Imagine the corn fields like a giant carbon capture facility. The carbon is not captured, but it's more efficient than digging a hole to extract oil to produce energy and then using more energy to store carbon in another hole.

We use(used?) ethanol from sugar cane, but corn is also a C4 plant that make photosynthesis more efficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation.

Cool. Sounds ideal for garden production too. I would love a perennial patch of that. And yes, I would malt it for beer too.

Wouldn't you need quite a large patch (by garden standards) even just for a single home brew? I'm no expert but it seems to me cereals only really work at scale.

My experience growing small patches of grain is that migrating sparrows and sleeping deer will mostly wipe you out. These are relatively insignificant depradations for large fields, but if you only have 40 square meters they can destroy it all.

Depends on what you mean by "Garden standards". No, a single plant isn't worth harvesting by itself, and one square foot would be barely enough for a single serving, but a typical 1 acre lawn, imagine a square that's just ~200 feet/60 meters on a side, is 43 THOUSAND + 560 square feet. The linear/square relationship can be really surprising.

Wheat yields like 50 bushels/acre, if I seeded my lawn in wheat I'd have 3,000 pounds, more than I could possibly hope to brew or drink. If I instead grew sweet corn, I'd have something like 15,000 ears. That's a lot of corn on the cob, and you've got to eat it within 24 hours of harvest for best flavor, and the harvest window is only a few weeks in early August.

No, you're not going to want to grow cereals one stalk at a time in a raised bed, nor grow it like a little potted oregano on your kitchen window sill. But it doesn't take that much cultivation - say, 10 rows of sweet corn along the edge of the lawn - to get more than you can hope to consume.

>typical 1 acre law

That's not typical anywhere I've lived.

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