The Land Institute’s Recipe for Sustainable Agriculture

This paper is an overview of an important and practical step in green development, and that is a way to make agriculture sustainable. To address this question, I describe the work of the Land Institute, founded in Salina, Kansas, by Wes and Dana Jackson in 1976.

First, I confess that I am not a farmer nor an agricultural scientist. Although I have lived in rural towns for half of my life, I have not spent that time on farms or agricultural research, but rather in small liberal arts colleges as a professor of ethics, philosophy, and religious thought. My knowledge of the Land Institute came about when I began teaching at Kansas Wesleyan University in 1988. There I met Wes Jackson, then the president of the Land Institute (which I will simply call “the Land” in the rest of this paper),who had once been a student and a professor at Kansas Wesleyan. Since that time, I have been a follower and supporter of the Land’s work, because I could see then, and even more now, that its vision of agriculture is an important part of how we will solve the challenge of sustainably feeding people in the future.

My description of the work of the Land uses the metaphor of a recipe. A recipe is a set of ingredients and procedures that helps a cook produce something to eat. The work of the Land is a “recipe” insofar as it is a set of ingredients and directions for producing food to eat for a sustainable future. Moreover, I believe the Land’s “recipe” can be useful for working with and inspiring other agriculturalists to create their own recipes for a sustainable food supply in the future.

As one can see in my title, the main ingredients of the Land’s recipe are “traditional wisdom,” “science,” and “creativity.”Let’s consider the first ingredient of the Land’s recipe: traditional wisdom. Like many good recipes, the main ingredients have their subtleties and complexities. The ingredient of traditional wisdom encompasses the wisdom of nature (i.e., the land, flora, fauna, and climate) as well as the wisdom of early human inhabitants, such as the Native Americans 1 and traditional Amish fafarmrmeersrs 2 who once occupied the prairie where the Land was founded.I focus here on the wisdom of nature. The Land’s mission statement states that it aims at ecological sustainability by “consulting nature.” 3 This wisdom of nature tells us that, “Natural ecological systems are self-sustaining.” 4 Although relatively young in geological time, the Kansas prairie’s natural ecosystem had once been a self-sustaining, dynamic, and flexible ecosystem that thrived and created a fertile topsoil in the Great Plains’ semi-arid climate. With the advent of corporate farming and deep-till planting, that topsoil has been severely depleted and badly eroded. What was once the "breadbasket of the world" is rushing toward catastrophic collapse that will likely contribute to serious food shortages. Wes Jackson and his fellow scientists turned to the wisdom of the prairie in search of an alternative. They recognized that the prairie ecosystem was capable of sustaining itself when it was a poly culture of perennial plants rather than a monoculture of one crop typical of today’s Kansas farms. As a poly culture, the system was able to enrich the nutrients of the soil more than it consumed them (e.g., nitrogen-fixing legumes provide fertilizer for grasses and grains), as well as to provide natural pest resistance. Perennial plants provide year-round ground cover, thus preventing soil erosion and loss of moisture. Moreover, because perennial plants do not have to be planted every year, there is less need for fossil fuel energy that powers most modern farm equipment.

Of course, Wes Jackson and his colleagues know that the wisdom of the prairie does not provide simple or complete answers to the problem of sustainable agriculture. The perennial grains native to prairie ecosystems do not produce nearly as much grain as annual grains because most of the energy produced by perennials goes to their root systems rather than to their seeds. This is where the next ingredient of the recipe comes in: two parts science.

The Land has always known that the path from the wisdom of the nature to sustainable agriculture requires science. Its founder, Wes Jackson, is by training is a biologist with a Ph.D. in plant genetics. Also, early in his academic career, he established and served as chair of one of the United States’ first environmental studies programs at California State University-Sacramento. 5 His background reflects two of the scientific areas (but not the only two) that have characterized the work of the Land: Genetics and Ecology. To produce perennial grains, the Land has modified and developed new techniques of hybridization. Using a method called “wide hybridization,” for example, certain annual wheat varieties have been crossed with perennial wheatgrass, to produce lines of perennial wheat that can now yield about 50-70% of the grain produced by traditional annual wheat lines. One line of perennial wheat has even been trademarked under the name Kernza® (combining the term “kernel” with the “Kanza,” the Native American name for Kansas).

The Land’s commitment to ecological science is represented in its experimentation with planting crops in poly cultures (called ecological intensification). This method further preserves soil, contributes to soil fertility without fertilizers, and naturally enhances protection against pests and disease, Interestingly, the Land has avoided the path taken by controversial GMO methods that use genetic engineering or transgenic technologies. 6 Some corporate-centered scientists might be critical of the Land, arguing that the Land could speed up the production of perennial crops by using GMO techniques. For the Land, however, ecological sustainability respects both the environment and creating crops whose genes are not owned by corporations that are more interested in profit than in genuine sustainability that is biological, ecological, and economically just.

Finally, the last part of the Land’s recipe is its base of creativity. The vision and science of the Land are themselves examples of creativity, but the creativity found at the Land is more expansive. If one attends a workshop at the Land, one is likely to hear from a poet or musician, or two. The Land’s Annual Prairie Festival is a mix of entertainment, dancing, discussions, agricultural demonstrations, lectures, and poetry. The work of the Land is a reminder that an ecological civilization needs to be both ecological and civilized. Even on the business front, the Land demonstrates a creative approach to marketing its first fruits of over 40 years of experimentation, the Kernza® perennial grain I mentioned earlier. The Land is working with partner organizations and family farmers to find profitable markets to sell their grain to, and thus attract new growers. As a result, gourmet bakers, a breakfast cereal company (Cascadian Farm’s Kernza® Honey Roasted Cereal), and even craft beer brewers (Patagonia’s Long Root Beer and Ale) are now producing Kernza® consumer products-one might say, the Land is providing a little taste of the future!

The Land’s use of the traditional wisdom of nature, genetic and ecological science, mixed together in a base of creativity offers a wholesome recipe that can be developed, refined, and adapted into new ways of producing the meals of a sustainable ecological civilization. Indeed, similar work began in the 1990s in China, by Dr. Tao Dayun of Yunnan Academy who, with other international partners, has been developing perennial rice. The future of Sustainable Agriculture is promising!