(Recast) Feature: Perennial crops may save human civilization

A 79-year-old man in the central U.S. small town of Salina, Kansas, has worked on the solution to global soil erosion for some 40 years. His method is crazy -- replacing annual crops with perennial ones.

Perennial crops are believed to be able not only greatly reduce the speed of global soil erosion, they can also help to deal with the climate change. They are much better in sequestering carbon than the annual ones, thus help reduce the greenhouse gas level, according to Wes Jackson, founder and president of the Land Institute in Salina.

Other advantages of planting perennial crops include minimizing the inevitable damage associated with annual crops such as tillage, using less water, fertilizers and herbicide because the roots are several times longer than annual crops.

Planting perennial crops also saves labor work and energy as farmers don't have to plant every year. The yield of a mixture of several perennial grains, oilseeds and legumes planted in a field could be higher than the combination of planting annual ones separately, which provides new prospective to secure food safety.

However, achieving these amazing results is not easy. Though Jackson has worked for the goal for nearly 40 years since he established the institute in 1976, only one perennial grain crop is in small scale of commercialized planting now in Minnesota and Iowa. They gave the crop, a perennial wheatgrass that now can have only one fourth of the yield of wheat, the trade mark of Kernza," which always reminds people this kernel comes out from Kansas, and to remember the Konza Indians and Kernel.

Several other perennial crops including wheat, sorghum, corn, silphium, and rice are under development and may reach a breakthrough any time, as the gene analysis and marking technology, "computer power" and cooperation among the Land Institute and dozens of other U.S. and foreign research organizations speed up the breeding of desirable varieties which our ancestors took several thousand years to do with annual crops.

Lee DeHaan, an applied science Ph.D. is now trying every bit of his effort to increase the yield of Kernza by breeding new varieties.

Thirty years ago when he was 12, his father, a farmer in Minnesota, told him about perennial crops after listening to a speech of Jackson.

"My father always talked about perennial crops, but I guess he probably did not imagine that I will work on it someday," DeHaan said with a smile.

His father, retired now, was excited about Kernza. DeHaan is leading the Kernza program of the institute, which was reported by several influential media.

He is one of the more than 30 staff members, including six scientists working for the institute. Beyond staff, post-doctoral scientists and graduate students work at the institute.

"The power of hope brings them to work here," said Jackson. As more people realized the potential of solving through this way those big problems, such as climate change and soil erosion, more scientists in the world are doing research on it.

More funds are coming too. The Land Institute, which was started with only 6,000 dollars, now gains several million dollars of private donations every year, which helped them do the research on this "fundamental change" of agriculture.

"We have no other choice," said Jackson who described himself as a realist. "We saw in the history that because of agriculture and soil erosion, some civilizations perished. Planting perennial crop is the only way to save our human civilization," he said.

A Newsweek article wrote in 1998 that "The first domestication of grains paved the way for 10,000 years of civilization. If Jackson can persuade the world to re-examine the way we farm, he might just buy us another millennium or two."

Global soil erosion is a big problem that worries an increasing number of people, especially in the year of 2015, which was declared by the UN General Assembly as the "International Year of Soils" to gather more attention.

It is estimated that since 1960, one-third of the world's arable land has been lost through erosion and other degradation. The problem persists, with a reported loss rate of about 10 million hectares per year. The loss rate of world's arable land is about 10 million hectares per year, the World Wildlife Foundation website said.

Listed by the Life magazine as one of the "100 most important Americans of the 20th century," Jackson knows from the beginning that in his life time, he may not be able to see the perennial crops, including wheat, rice and corn, the three major crops and about a dozen others that provide 70 percent of calories of human consumption and occupy 70 percent of our arable land, to benefit the world in large scale of planting, but he never changed his mind.

"If your life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you' re not thinking big enough," he said, looking far forward to the prairie surrounding the simple institute buildings. It is the prairie which inspired him to develop the Natural Systems Agriculture, a new way of farming with a prairie like mixture of perennial crops, oil seeds and legumes. Endite