Wanted: Crops that Plant, Cultivate, and Harvest Themselves

NextBigFuture
Humans have always dreamed of a Garden of Eden where they could pick their food fresh from the vine every day, without want or toil. One possible step in that direction is the development of perennial grain crops, which survive to grow in the same soil year after year.

Perennial grains would be one of the largest innovations in the 10,000 year history of agriculture, and could arrive even sooner with the right breeding programs, said John Reganold, a Washington State University Regents professor of soil science and lead author of the paper with Jerry Glover, a WSU-trained soil scientist now at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.

“It really depends on the breakthroughs,” said Reganold. “The more people involved in this, the more it cuts down the time.”

Published in Science’s influential policy forum, the paper is a call to action as half the world’s growing population lives off marginal land at risk of being degraded by annual grain production. Perennial grains, say the paper’s authors, expand farmers’ ability to sustain the ecological underpinnings of their crops.

“People talk about food security,” said Reganold. “That’s only half the issue. We need to talk about both food and ecosystem security.”

Perennial grains, say the authors, have longer growing seasons than annual crops and deeper roots that let the plants take greater advantage of precipitation. Their larger roots, which can reach ten to 12 feet down, reduce erosion, build soil and sequester carbon from the atmosphere. They require fewer passes of farm equipment and less herbicide, key features in less developed regions.

By contrast, annual grains can lose five times as much water as perennial crops and 35 times as much nitrate, a valuable plant nutrient that can migrate from fields to pollute drinking water and create “dead zones” in surface waters.

“Developing perennial versions of our major grain crops would address many of the environmental limitations of annuals while helping to feed an increasingly hungry planet,” said Reganold.

Perennial grain research is underway in Argentina, Australia, China, India, Sweden and the United States. Washington State University has more than a decade of work on perennial wheat led by Stephen Jones, director WSU’s Mount Vernon Research Center. Jones is also a contributor to the Science paper, which has more than two dozen authors, mostly plant breeders and geneticists. _WSUNews_via_BrianWang

NextBigFutureOriginal study in Science (via Brian Wang)

Al Fin would prefer that more effort go into the development of a perennial barley -- rather than wheat. Beer made from barley is infinitely better than beer from wheat, and who has ever heard of a single-wheat Scotch? No, the best whisky is single malt, the malt being made from barley.

We are in the midst of a biological revolution. That revolution will certainly spread to agriculture, and everything else that biology touches. Fuels, chemicals, animal feeds, plastics, and more.

Expect conventional food crops and innocuous ornamentals and wild forage to be modified to produce virtually any chemical, any compound. I think you can see with a little imagination, that things are already well out of hand and soon to be completely out of control. Try to use your brain, because by the time the reality of tomorrow's harvest hits the mainstream, it will already be too late for the dull majority.

Cross-posted at abu al-fin