A little good news out of my home state

[Roger Feeley]

The Land Institute in Salina KS is working on perennial grains.

currently, grains like wheat and oats are annuals that have to be planted very year. But they are essentially grasses so why not just let them grow and “mow the lawn” from time to time? The environmental benefits are huge. So far, all you and I can buy is a wheatish grain called Kernza. You can mix it with flour about q part Kernza to 3 parts wheat.

The scientists are hard at work. The holy grail, I should think, is rice.

[roger wiegand]

A wonderful idea, but really hard to bring to fruition. Compared to annuals, perennial grasses tend to have small seeds, are prone to lodging (falling over when the wind blows), and are subject to much reduced yields as the plants begin to crowd each other-- much of the improvement in grain yield in the last century has been due to higher planting densities, and the perennials haven't yet responded to the same kind of selection. The Soviets put a lot of effort into this nearly a century ago, there have been sporadic efforts since then, with fairly concerted efforts in the last 20 years with the advent of gene manipulation approaches and using DNA markers to guide traditional breeding. The advantages of using a deep-rooted plant are tremendous for soil conservation and drought tolerance.

I suspect the approaches of crossing wild perennial wheatgrasses with cultivated wheat are the most likely short term route to success. As I recall the perennial rice varieties aren't particularly robust, so that will take a lot of work.

It's a problem well worth working on.

[Curt Harms]

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I suspect the approaches of crossing wild perennial wheatgrasses with cultivated wheat are the most likely short term route to success. As I recall the perennial rice varieties aren't particularly robust, so that will take a lot of work.

It's a problem well worth working on.

I'm not sure how wild rice growing cycles compare to what most of us know as rice but wild rice is a perennial and I imagine Indian tribes of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota might have some insight. I would wonder about the ripening speed of perennial cereal grains. I would think with annuals the ripening process is pretty uniform so it's all ready to harvest at the same time, I don't know about perennials.

[Steve Demuth]

Researchers from China and Australia reported earlier this month on progress in producing a commercially viable perennial rice. Rice is in many ways an ideal candidate for perennial production, because it's already a very high yielding grain, and botanically naturally lives through multiple growing seasons, and produces multiple seed sets over its life, even though it is grown as a single-crop annual.

From Nature Sustainability:

"Performance of PR lines under irrigation was comparable with that of their annual counterparts, with up to eight crops over four years (Fig. 1a (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-01002-7#Fig1)). Input costs were halved during regrowth seasons, mainly owing to labour savings, and soil organic carbon, total nitrogen and plant-available soil water capacity improved under PR cultivation over four years. PR23, PR25 and PR107 lines, with high and stable yield, were made available to farmers in southern China, and PR107, with resistance to rice yellow mottle virus, was made available in Uganda. Adoption by farmers increased fourfold in 2021. "

[Frederick Skelly]

It is good news. I hope someone succeeds.

[roger wiegand]

I'm not sure how wild rice growing cycles compare to what most of us know as rice but wild rice is a perennial and I imagine Indian tribes of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota might have some insight. I would wonder about the ripening speed of perennial cereal grains. I would think with annuals the ripening process is pretty uniform so it's all ready to harvest at the same time, I don't know about perennials.

AFAIK north American wild rice (genus Zizania) won't naturally interbreed with cultivated rice (genus Oryzae), they're pretty far apart evolutionarily, though in the same family. Traits might be brought in by genetic engineering, but I don't think traditional breeding approaches are possible. The wild rices I referred to are Oryzae species found in Asia.

[Keegan Shields]

Yikes, the wire worm pressure after a few years of perennial wheat would be insane, adding to further yield loss.

I run an Agtech startup, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned - changing one variable in ag often creates a bunch of secondary problems that then have to be solved as well.

It’s an interesting concept though. Not sure that seed companies have much incentive to make this a reality.

[Steve Demuth]

It's an interesting approach, to go after grasses as perennials. We have perennial crops that outperform most grass crops, and compare favorably to even maize, at least as measured by calories per acre. Apples in particular produce easily double the calories per acre as wheat. And I wonder about nuts - hazelnuts can produce over a ton of edible nut per acre, and at 3000 caloriers per pound, that puts them in league with wheat as means of producing staple calories.

[Perry Hilbert Jr]

Yeah, that and the frost resistant tomatoes, and frost resistant strawberries, the GM sheep as big as cows and the cloning of wooly mammoths. We have indeed opened a strange chapter.

The northern plains Indians grew over 20 varieties of corn for different purposes. Some with such short growing seasons (50 days for one) that hybridization has been unable to match. A couple farmers here started growing Tef. Which grows 8 to 10 ft a years, but must be replanted every year. Heck, I have banana trees growing in my yard in central PA. Who would have thought that would be possible. Heard a fellow has a small olive orchard just 50 miles south of here. And he harvests olives.

[Roger Feeley]

Yeah, that and the frost resistant tomatoes, and frost resistant strawberries, the GM sheep as big as cows and the cloning of wooly mammoths. We have indeed opened a strange chapter.

The northern plains Indians grew over 20 varieties of corn for different purposes. Some with such short growing seasons (50 days for one) that hybridization has been unable to match. A couple farmers here started growing Tef. Which grows 8 to 10 ft a years, but must be replanted every year. Heck, I have banana trees growing in my yard in central PA. Who would have thought that would be possible. Heard a fellow has a small olive orchard just 50 miles south of here. And he harvests olives.

Not to hijack my own thread, but there’s a decent chance that a blight resistant American Chestnut will be generally available sometime in 2023. I joined the NY chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation in hopes of snagging a sapling early. The candidate most likely to be approved is the Darling 58, a GMO created at NYU.

[George Yetka]

Curious, doesnt knocking down and putting the scraps back in the soil keep the soil nutrient rich? wouldnt this pull the nutrients out of the soil until it would be barren unless replaced somehow?

[Steve Demuth]

Curious, doesnt knocking down and putting the scraps back in the soil keep the soil nutrient rich? wouldnt this pull the nutrients out of the soil until it would be barren unless replaced somehow?

It doesn't make much difference whether the grain is annual or perennial in that sense, at least as it concerns soil macro and micro nutrients. If you have a perennial grass and harvest the seeds (grain), you're still ""only hauling the macronutrients in the grain away - all the stems, leaves and roots go right back on, and then into the soil. That is, after all, how the deep rich black earth soils of the prairies were made. (I put "only" in scare quotes, because, of course, with modern agriculture, you're hauling off an awful lot of soil nutrients. There is a reason farmers in Iowa dump hundreds of pounds per acre of Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium onto their fields every year. Nitrogen can be made up literally from air in a perennial system if you include Nitrogen fixing crops in the mix, but the P and K you haul off can't. They only come from slow weathering of the soil substrate, or artificial replenishment). But perennialization makes a huge difference with respect to carbon (humus, broadly speaking), because when you till the crop refuse back in, you aerate the soil and accelerate decomposition of the carbohydrates in the refuse into atmospheric CO2. It also make a huge difference in erosion = tilled soil being many times more vulnerable to both wind and soil erosion than sod.

[Maurice Mcmurry]

Having glyphsate in the food chain is creating humans who are unable to eat wheat. We have started buying organic food. Unfortunately most of the world cannot afford organic grocery's. The long term effect of genetically modified foods is unknown. I am worried about the way things are going.