To maintain annual agriculture, we wipe out perennial vegetation and effectively destroy everything on the landscape in order to plant crops every year. The negative consequences of this ecological disaster include soil erosion, loss of organic matter, and loss of nutrients. What if we shifted to a perennial crop system that regrows from year to year without having to be reseeded? And what impact would perennialization have on reversing climate change?
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, it’s Ross from Reversing Climate Change. I wanted to let you know that we have a new podcast called Carbon Removal Newsroom. It’s short form, it’s timely, and it’s all about carbon removal. Whenever we see a good news story about carbon removal, or that should be about carbon removal, we’re going to record a short episode about it with a rotating cast of guests. So please subscribe to Carbon Removal Newsroom, check it out in your podcast app of choice, and thank you so much for your support.
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. I am Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe. I know Paul, again, we’re traveling alone in Kansas with an old buddy of mine. We’ve been cruising through Kansas. It is starkly beautiful here. The grays, the browns, the trees without their leaves. It’s unlike Seattle. Seattle, you know, evergreen. So it’s been a new experience for us. It’s really beautiful out here on the plains. I’ve been enjoying it.
Christophe Jospe: Me too. We caught a beautiful sunset up at Coronado Heights yesterday. Had an amazing farm tour from the Peterson Farm Bros. Also, if you don’t know of them, check out their YouTube page. They are quite musical.
Ross Kenyon: They do parody. We have two guests, which is super exciting, and we will do our best to...
Christophe Jospe: I’ll be able to amplify both of their perspectives, both of which I think are very important. Sitting across from us, we’ve got Fred Utsi, he’s the president and CEO of the Land Institute, and Tim Cruz, who is the director of research and ecologist at the Land Institute. And Fred and Tim, we like to start with people’s stories, the origin of how they got to where they are and sort of why it is that they’re working on the things they are today. And so let’s start with you, Fred. How did it all get going for you?
Fred Iutzi: First of all, welcome here to the Land Institute. I have been president of this organization for about two and a half years at this point. My first visit here to Salina, Kansas, to this very building that we’re in, I was about, oh, 21 years old, and I had heard a little bit, I’d read a little bit about the work of this crazy geneticist, Wes Jackson, who’d Founded an organization out on the Kansas prairies to completely transform agriculture, to perennialize it. And stopped in and was given a warm welcome and have been hooked ever since.
Part of the writings of Wes Jackson and others in this movement have laid down, have included an emphasis on homecoming and on bringing kind of a restoring an agrarian sensibility to And so I was motivated by some of that writing actually to move back to the family farm in West Central Illinois, where my brother and I are the eighth generation. My kids later were the ninth generation to live in that rural area. And then so it was sort of ironic that having moved home to Illinois because of the Land Institute, 11 years after that move, I moved away.
Ross Kenyon: Have you been able to become native to this place?
Fred Iutzi: Well, you’ll see on my Twitter profile, it says, first generation Kansan, eighth generation Illinois.
Unknown speaker: I saw that.
Fred Iutzi: It’s another multi-threaded thing.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And why don’t we introduce you, Tim?
Tim Crews: Tell us about your backstory. Right. Well, I stopped by at about the same age that Fred did, but I’m a little older than Fred. I was around 21 when I stopped by back in 1980, 81. And I’d read New Roots for Agriculture in an agroecology class, Steve Gleesman’s class at UC Santa Cruz. And that set the stage for a lifelong interest. I went to graduate school at Cornell and Laura Jackson, Wes Jackson’s daughter, was in my department. And we interacted a fair amount and talked about the Land Institute there. I taught at Prescott College in Northern Arizona for 18 years in an agroecology program before coming to the Land Institute in 2012.
And I’d bring students out here and... Participate in the Graduate Fellows Program over the years that Fred was a part of. At a certain point, though, I just realized that this was the transformative work that superseded all other, in my opinion. I mean, I looked at a lot of things going on in sustainable agriculture, and there’s a lot of good stuff out there. But nothing was as transformative as the work that the Land Institute is going after from my perspective. And so I moved here and I’m enjoying it.
Ross Kenyon: What is the mandate of the Land Institute? I’ve read a fair amount of Wes Jackson, and I know Wendell pops his head in from time to time and has been affiliated in some capacity, too. What are you working on? I know you’ve dropped a couple hints there about perennializing agriculture. We want to get into that. I know there’s also a social mission, too. What’s that? No, it’s just we love defining terms.
Christophe Jospe: What does perennializing mean?
Fred Iutzi: Yeah, maybe that’s a good place to start. Right. Well, we’ll start with maybe the literal and the proximate that a perennial plant is one that regrows from year to year without needing to be reseeded, which is a stark difference in life history strategy from the grain crops. A little bit, yeah. On this difference, civilizations have risen and fallen over the millennia, right? That perennial vegetation is what has covered the earth for the vast majority of the history of higher life forms on this planet. Perennial vegetation. Like prairies, like forests, is what has over the course of time gradually built up our rich soils.
It’s what has given us this bequest of clean water that we have to use or spoil. Basically what has built this amazingly fertile planet that we’re on. Annuals have, relatively speaking, have a bit part on the ecological stage coming in after disturbance, after the volcano erupts or whatnot. And here we have over 10,000 years gone and decided to base our agriculture on Just on those, which has a variety of negative consequences for soil and the rest of the ecosphere. And so that’s sort of the literal. The more figurative, I think, is that we need to aim for a culture that rather than luring us away from decisions that are respectful and regenerative for the planet and respectful and regenerative for each other, Rather than having a culture that draws us away from that to sort of convenience and short term thinking, we need to have the kind of culture, the kind of institutions that draw us back to what is sustainable and just, right?
So that’s maybe a figurative.
Ross Kenyon: I think we’ll save for the more social, the life of rural communities, going back to the land, that whole thing for a bit later. But digging in farther into this perennial agriculture, why hasn’t this happened? Why were annuals selected for agriculture thousands and thousands of years ago? How did we get to this point?
Tim Crews: Well, it’s a good question. And I think it’s important to point out that to maintain annual agriculture, until relatively recently, we have had to disturb the soil tremendously every year. We plow, we cultivate. We need to wipe out all of the what is typically perennial vegetation that was in place in order to plant our annual crops. And then the cousins of our annual crops, which are called weeds, come in and they are very happy. And so we wipe them out too. And so this killing everything on the landscape on an annual basis is the ecological disaster of annual agriculture.
And with it comes soil erosion, loss of organic matter, loss of nutrients. Weeds, you know, all of these issues that are individually dealt with in sustainable agriculture programs around the world, but they happen to be kind of derivatives of this one choice. And so the question is, why? Why did we do that? And we have folks here that have thought long and hard about that question. And there’s many answers. And we’ve written papers. If people are interested in going on our website, they can download those. They’re fairly scientific. But there’s some real basic reasons.
There are some differences between perennials and annuals in that, for example, young perennials Tend to take a little bit longer to establish and their seedlings are typically not quite as competitive initially.
Ross Kenyon: So like an annual has to get there real quick as a small window.
Tim Crews: Yeah. And you plant a wheat seed and it pops up and it puts out a big, you know, cotyledon or initial leaf and can grow fairly quickly. And perennials tend to be a little bit slower to establish. Okay. And if you think about it, if there There were perennials that were producing seed 8,000 years ago and some Neolithic farmers looked at that plant. They would know that it regrows year after year. They were undoubtedly keen natural historians paying attention to what was growing. They did not have to replant that plant.
And they didn’t know that, in fact, the act of replanting, killing it, which is hard, and then replanting it would select for certain traits that They wouldn’t know that, right? And so why kill it and replant it if it’s regrowing? And it was the actual act of harvesting annual seeds, replanting them, harvesting them again, replanting them, that, for example, selected on the trait of what we call non-shattering. You get plants that used to drop most of their seed at the end of the growing season, which is what wild plants tend to do.
And just the act of harvesting Collecting and resewing and collecting and resewing will select for non-shattering traits. So it’s a little bit tricky to think about, but just the act of doing it developed a crop and you would never have done that with a perennial.
Ross Kenyon: Is it just because with annuals, there are so many generations, it’s one per year, it’s just faster to be selected, various traits?
Tim Crews: Correct. And if there was a perennial that produced some seed that was harvested, you just wouldn’t be making that selection, taking the same perennial plant year after year.
Ross Kenyon: That makes sense. And then so we’ve just become path dependent. We’ve started down this road and then you have much larger seeds for grains and it’s just easier just to go with annuals at that point.
Tim Crews: Well, once annual crops were developed, for example, for non shattering, which is a huge deal you would get. Say you went from 10% of the plants that don’t drop their seed at the end of the year to 90% of the plants that don’t drop their seed at the end of the year. You’ve done nothing to increase yield. You’ve done nothing to change the plant other than it holds onto its seed. But your food value of the work that you put in to grow those plants, it’s gone up tremendously to go out and collect that seed.
And once you got that energy in that grain, you have all sorts of people who are dependent on it. You’ve gone down that road and there’s no turning back.
Christophe Jospe: So you guys have given so much juicy bait here. I can’t contain the metaphors that I want to just do.
Ross Kenyon: Christophe is master of the Malifor.
Christophe Jospe: I mean, it’s kind of like, Fred, you were an Illinois seed that flew through the wind and then laid your roots here and became a perennial at the Land Institute. But you guys are talking about a lot of the science around perennials and also bring up some of the social elements that you need to change. And I want to really get back to And I kind of want to color this with something, a comment that was made yesterday on the farm tour around weeds, which is a thing of pride. Like farmers don’t want weeds in their field, not necessarily because the weeds are bad, but because it looks bad and you don’t want people speaking poorly about weeds.
Fred Iutzi: Well, the Land Institute was started in 1976 with a dream and not a whole lot else. There was a lot of passion from our founders, Wes and Dana Jackson, and the first few people. Sort of fell in alongside them. And things have kind of gone from there. This was a big crazy dream. Well, it’s still a big crazy dream. It was a sort of the voice in the wilderness kind of crazy dream for decades. But the Land Institute doggedly ignored the idea that a little nonprofit in a little known part of a Midwestern state Couldn’t challenge the dominant paradigm, ignored that idea, ignored the idea that you can’t do agricultural research without massive resources, and ignored the idea that you can’t bring in the best scientific talent.
Thank you. Resources to where what we’re doing is recognizable as an agricultural research facility to people. And we’ve gotten to proof of concept with this idea. Today, there are two different perennial grain crops that have been part of our efforts that are in kind of a really early beta test kind of a stage in very limited scale commercial production. So part of this story is kind of building up From just this tiny germ to a situation where we’ve achieved something. Now, on the other hand, when we look at how agricultural research is done, if you tally up all of the money that’s spent annually around the world on Plant breeding on genetic crop improvement for annual grain crops, it’s $10 billion a year, very roughly, billion with a B.
If you look at all of the funds that are spent on perennial grain crop breeding, not annual, but perennial grain crop breeding, That’s still not 10 million quite yet with an M. And so on the other hand, the work that we’ve done here in some ways represents the initial kind of inventor laboring in the garage kind of phase, right? And so now we’ve taken the world by storm with these kind of prototypes. Perennial grain crops in terms of capturing people’s attention. And now is the time for the work to really branch out.
When I first visited here almost 20 years ago, the circle of research collaborators that the Land Institute had certainly could be counted on two hands. You might not get very far into the second hand worth of fingers. Today, we have over 40 research collaborators around the world on six continents, growing interest from other research entities, gradually growing funding base. What we need to do Is to keep kind of riding this, you know, this trend line up so that we can actually as a society, as a civilization, actually invest, you know, this grand perennial grand project as if the future of the species depends on it, which of course we certainly think over the long haul it does.
So that’s, you know, that’s a little bit of the trajectory here.
Ross Kenyon: And you are trying to do this and you drop some terms here about what exactly these fields might look like. And driving across Kansas, we came from Kansas City is where we flew in from. I didn’t see much of the native prairie. I didn’t see much of the tall grass that is sort of famous from the Frontier days, it seems like it’s mostly taken up by annuals. A lot of corn and bean rotations seem pretty common out there. You have this picture on the front of Wes Jackson’s Nature as Measure, and then I also saw it in the office.
But the root depth of annuals is quite small, and perennials is quite deep, which is important for a number of reasons. But the overall thinking of the Land Institute is that We should be using nature as the measure of how to farm. We should be emulating how nature covers the soil and leaves the soil covered. And our agriculture sort of has sidestepped that. And over time, the consequences have become more and more severe. And so you’ve been trying to create commercially viable methods of perennial grain production that can stand on its own merits, not for someone who just cares about the earth, but this actually might be a profitable way to do business.
Is that broadly correct?
Fred Iutzi: Yeah, when this work comes to full fruition in time, that’s definitely the aim. We want to do nothing short of transforming global grain crop agriculture into a perennial endeavor. We want perennial grain crops to displace annual grain crops over the long haul. Now, there are many, many steps to go in that process. As I said, we have achieved proof of concept here. We have a couple... Perennial grain crops that are in really small scale, kind of a beta test, commercial production. We’ve got several other perennial grain crops following behind them in the pipeline.
This is the point where the work needs to scale up. We don’t need a couple perennial grain crops. We need ultimately a dozen or more globally. We don’t need these crop yields that are high enough that Now they represent crops, but still very low in every other respect. We need decent, substantial yield, and we need productive stand life as a perennial, and we need ability to be intercropped with other perennial crops. And so that’s why it’s so very important that we keep this ball rolling, that we keep this sort of snowball effect going of picking up kind of more and more I think we’ve had some, right?
Ross Kenyon: Kernza is an example of this. And we had some Kernza beer at the Perennial in San Francisco. It was pretty delicious. Yeah, I remember drinking that most of the evening.
Tim Crews: Long root ale. Long root ale, yeah. That’s roughly named. And I just wanted to dovetail on what Fred was saying there in terms of how we even think about the development of these perennial crops. Perennial crops are not the end goal of the Land Institute. They are the hardware, the new hardware, if you will, from which we will now put together functional agroecosystems. And in doing that, we will try to achieve what’s often referred to as ecological intensification. So much of our agriculture today has been successful because of input intensification.
We’ve figured out how to capture nitrogen out of the air using lots of fossil fuels to do it, but it’s highly effective. To get synthetic urea and ammonia and put it on the crops and they grow beautifully. And so how do we reincorporate biological nitrogen fixation back into these cropping arrangements? And so while people think of the Land Institute as being all about developing perennial grains, and a tremendous amount of our resources are going into that because they don’t really exist yet, and that’s the work that hasn’t been done. And yet it really is the first step towards Getting what we need then to put together really interesting agroecosystems that achieve a lot of the functions that our inputs achieve today, like fertilizers and herbicides and things like that.
Christophe Jospe: So I’m really glad that you used the term proof of concept, Fred. And I think it’s interesting when you actually take a proof of concept through what is referred to as the technological S-curve. And oftentimes in technology from software or startups, people talk about the valley of death, right? You have this eureka moment. Aha, I figured it out. And Then you need to prove it. And then you need to figure out how to take it to market. And it goes through all of these steps. And I find it fascinating. And I’ve been sort of stewing on this since coming to Kansas and thinking about demonstration test plots and all of these sort of large scale efforts.
And in reading some of your papers, Tim, it’s interesting to think you need these side by side experiments to prove a certain concept. But then it’s like, but then what? How do you scale it up? This is a multi-layered question, but could you talk a little bit about test plots and how that works? And then some of the challenges of taking a proof of concept to the scale of your ambitions, which is ultimately kind of the world, I think. To put one more layer on the question, some of the pitfalls that ideas might face along the way from idea to full scale, where in a San Francisco restaurant drinking long root ale...
Fred Iutzi: Yeah, well, let me, I’ll take a piece of this and then Tim can layer on. So the sort of the valley of death for this work would be any sense that people have that, okay, so we’ve got this crop Kernza, it’s in a few products nationally and, you know, a few specialized grocery stores. Okay, now we can declare victory. You know, now this, the work of the Land Institute, the grand vision of West Jackson is complete. Really it’s the opposite. Now the real work actually starts, right? Now that we’ve sort of validated That it’s possible for such a thing as a perennial grain crop to exist in the world.
Now we need to go the rest of the distance and breed perennial crops that have the yield and the other characteristics and do the ecological research to develop the highly biodiverse cropping systems that will provide all of the ecological functionality we need and will also be viable for farmers to raise, viable to go into the food system. And so this is the moment where society really needs to double down on this vision. And so we have to tread carefully to, on the one hand, not to undersell the dramatic nature of the progress that’s been made in the milestones that we’ve achieved.
On the other hand, not to oversell the concept that, hey, all we need to do now is to scale the production. We don’t need to scale the production right now. We need to scale the research, need to scale the R&D to get to the point where it’s time to scale production.
Tim Crews: Yeah. And I guess a couple of examples with Kernza of running into scaling up issues is on smaller research plots, under the eyes of the researchers, we’re able to establish Kernza pretty predictably. And yet, if you’re a grower with the equipment that you have on your farm, you’re a wheat grower, corn grower up in Minnesota, and you try to establish a field with Kernza, you’re probably going to run into some challenges that we haven’t even imagined yet. And so that’s happening. There’s been many crop failures. Lee DeHaan, the lead Kernza breeder here, predicts about 50% crop failure, but every crop has its failures.
It’s just trying to establish a perennial crop is a little more challenging for reasons I spoke of earlier. With the seedling vigor, it tends not to be as robust. Some of the people that have grown Kearns are the best are folks up in Minnesota who specialize in growing perennial grass seed. So that was It was a great group to contract with initially to produce kerns of seed. Similarly, in developing an intercrop system with alfalfa, we have done it on small plots. We have interns that go in and cut those alfalfa strips on those small plots, but we now have a 16-acre field in Lawrence, Kansas, with an intercrop kerns alfalfa.
And we had to have a piece of equipment custom produced in Canada to mow that alfalfa in between those kerns of rows. And we’re about to have growers in Kansas, Wisconsin, and Minnesota plant intercrop fields. And honestly, we don’t know how that legume is going to be managed in between those. And that’s part of what the ambitious experiment is. This is a SARA research grant from We’re going to try to solicit farmer know-how in figuring out how to deal with that intercropped legume and maximize its nitrogen contribution to the system.
But these are challenges in scaling up from what are very successful little 20 by 20 research plots.
Fred Iutzi: And it should be noted, of course, the farmers involved in the initiative that Tim was talking about and the farmers who are doing commercial production so far, these are people who are going into this clear eye. They’re, in some cases, are collaborators in a specific research project. In other cases, they’re using a minority of their farming acres to grow this because they see themselves as doing a public service in helping this transition happen. Or because they simply, they want to be well positioned when some years down the line, kerns and other perennial grain crops are actually truly ready for production.
You know, they want to be the people who experience already in growing them. So it’s definitely not a situation where, you know, where we want or farmers should go out and think they should be planting the whole farm to this stuff because this is still, this is the bleeding edge and it’s, you know, it’s for people who want to be in on that at this stage.
Ross Kenyon: You wouldn’t bet the farm on it, you could say.
Fred Iutzi: You might to use a turn of phrase. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I’m curious how this works with if you have a diverse field where you have many things growing at the same time. I see conventional like monoculture agriculture as being similar to James C. Scott’s criticism of modernism as being this like able to be viewed from the center. How do you harvest that in a way that’s legible? It seems much more cognitively difficult to manage this. How does this work? Or am I overthinking that a little bit?
Tim Crews: Well, there’s no question that the monocrop landscapes that we see today are that way to a significant degree because they are easy to harvest and easy to manage with mechanization. And so there will need to be some information. New equipment develop, but we don’t see that as being a challenge at all, really. I mean, the technology already exists to sort seeds of different sizes and colors in ways that did not exist 20 years ago. So there’s a technological component, but there’s also a cropping systems component as well. And so designing cropping systems where you either have seeds maturing at almost exactly the same time versus at really different times in the growing season, these are challenges that the agroecologists are going to have.
Down the stretch. But it is useful to point out that most grain agricultural systems, not all, but most pre-industrial times were quite diverse. And so diverse agroecosystems have been around. They just weren’t perennial. And so we have some new challenges for sure. But...
Fred Iutzi: So one might say that if there are any types of problems that we have excellent capacity to solve in our society, it’s designing new products with a clever combination of steel and plastic and micro-products. To achieve uncanny feats of handling materials and information, right? Which is to say that the harvesting equipment challenge is actually relatively modest compared to the biological endeavor of coming up with these systems. We have a pretty good sense that our really, really large and well-funded and innovative agricultural machinery sector in this country and in the world is up to the challenge of figuring out How to harvest this stuff.
The other thing that could be said is that while we’re on the road to kind of prairie-like polycultures that we ultimately aspire to, there are other kind of intermediate biodiversity steps to use on the way, like having alternating strips of several different crops, right? Get some good effects out of that, but still be compatible with equipment that currently exists.
Ross Kenyon: I’m satisfied with that. I wanted to move us to a bit on climate change because we are the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m contractually obligated to bring it back to that topic whenever possible. Where do perennial crops fit into climate change? How might they affect one another? No small questions here.
Tim Crews: Yeah, well, thanks for asking that because it is something that we think a lot about and actually have a fair amount of confidence that as perennial grain crops come into production, they will have a better chance of replacing the soil carbon that was lost when the prairie or the forest or the savannah or whatever ecosystem was converted to annual agriculture lost in the conversion. It helps to think a little bit about why agriculture has lost so much soil organic matter. Soil organic matter is really a balance, an equilibrium that is not static.
It’s a balance between inputs through plant productivity and the death of the crop, the residue that goes into the soil on the one hand. And then the microbes that eat those residues and breathe out CO2, they respire out that carbon. And so you have losses because of microbial respiration and you have gains because of plant productivity, right? So when we converted the, say the prairie, which is overwhelmingly perennial, has all these deep roots that put tremendous amount of carbons directly into the soil. So high inputs. When we killed off the prairie and we plowed the soil...
We greatly reduced the amount of carbon going into the soil by roots. And roots are particularly important when it comes to building stable soil organic matter. So we replaced plants that put some 40% to 60% of their energy or their carbon into the soil, perennials, with annual crops that put maybe 15% to 25% of their energy into the soil as carbon. So we have reduced inputs with that conversion from perennial to annual. Meanwhile, we go and we disturb the soil with tillage by plowing it and cultivating it. That breaks up these aggregates that protect soil organic matter in the soil.
And when you break those up and all this oxygen and moisture pours in and the organic matter is not as protected by clay minerals, microbes just go nuts. And you have... Incredible rates of microbial consumption of organic matter after tillage. And you can see it these days with modern carbon monitoring equipment. If you convert a prairie and measure the carbon dioxide coming off that field, it’s incredible. It’s a huge pulse. And that’s carbon loss. So by converting the prairie to annual agriculture, you reduce the inputs of carbon and you increase the losses.
That’s pretty much the state of that ecosystem as long as you keep it in annual crop production and you keep tilling it every year. You’re going to hit a new low of soil organic matter in that ecosystem because of that conversion. So, if you plant cover crops in an organic system and you insert a crop, In the winter where there was not one before, you’ve just increased the amount of carbon being added to that ecosystem. So you’re likely to get a little bump in soil organic matter because you’re improving or if you add manure or something, then you’re bolstering the carbon input.
Meanwhile, if you do no-till, then you’ve actually reduced the respiration losses because you’re keeping those soil aggregates intact. You’re not disturbing the soil. So the microbes are not quite as happy as they are when you till, and therefore they’re not respiring as much. In perennial agriculture, and arguably almost only in perennial agriculture, we’re trying to remake the ecosystem that was there that built that soil organic matter in the first place. And so by going from an annual crop that allocates relatively small amounts of carbon below ground to a perennial crop – You improve the inputs and you decrease the losses because of microbial respiration since you’re not disturbing the soil.
And it’s because of that this approach to recapturing soil organic matter holds incredible promise.
Christophe Jospe: So you’ve talked about soil organic matter. We’re thinking at Nori a lot about soil organic carbon. I know that when they both go up, it’s a good sort of proxy, but what’s the difference?
Tim Crews: Well, I use them almost entirely interchangeable. Soil organic matter is of greater interest to farmers because the other parts of organic matter that are not carbon matter a lot, like nitrogen and phosphorus and all this other good stuff. But essentially, soil organic matter is about 58% carbon. And so when you’re capturing soil organic matter, you’re actually also capturing soil organic carbon. It’s useful to note that it requires a lot of nitrogen, though. And I mean, that soil organic matter is made up of nitrogen, too, because in order to build stable soil organic matter, you need nitrogen.
And that’s often that can be a limiting factor in terms of how much soil carbon you can accumulate, because in order to build soil organic carbon, you have to also have nitrogen going in and being locked away in that total soil organic matter pool.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think the annual cropping system has served rural communities and small towns well? Do you think this might be a way to improve what seems to be a dying culture? What do we do about the state of rural America?
Unknown speaker: You’re really priming there, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve read enough to prime a little bit. Yeah.
Fred Iutzi: Right, right. So I’ll go back to this metaphor here. So we work with literal perennials. We would literally want crops to be perennials. Metaphorically, we want to have perennial community life. We want to have communities, neighborhoods, institutions that are self-perpetuating, self-sustaining, self-correcting over time. And what we have seen And this is around the world, but it’s especially vivid here in North America because history of our current dominant culture is so short in this place. We have seen boom and bust in rural and urban areas alike that is only correctable where we intervene drastically with some kind of government program, some kind of private reinvestment scheme.
To bring population back, to bolster communities. And when we can correct something, it only sticks for a while. And then we have another cycle of decline and chaos until the next correction. And so in that way, our community life is kind of like our agriculture, right? It’s based fundamentally on disturbance and intervention. Something concrete to put to that would be the county that I grew up in, in rural Illinois. The story of kind of rural decline that’s told there about rural areas is well illustrated that my home county has lost population in every U.
S. census since 1910. So you can map to that. Well, there’s modern agriculture and privatization, corporatization of agriculture. Taking rural areas down. If you expand your scope a little bit, you can see that county gained population in every U. S. Census up until 1910, right? So it’s not like we ever had a stable equilibrium in terms of population. In terms of community life, in terms of local economies, we have a boom and a bust cycle. And much like we need a new agriculture to take us out of the endless exploitation and depletion of soils cycle, we need a new sensibility around culture and economics to take us out of this boom and bust cycle of people.
So we think these things, this new agriculture and this new Agriculture are interrelated not only conceptually, but they’re also interdependent in terms of implementation. That if we can come up with the perfect hardware and software for a new agriculture and sort of lay them on society’s doorstep with a pretty bow on top, there’s little expectation that anything good or anything in terms of full adoption will ever be made of that. At the same time, if we achieve the ultimate just equitable society and we’re still steadily losing our soil a little bit at a time every year, the outcome is going to be bad no matter how right we are with each other.
These concerns are intertwined pretty heavily.
Ross Kenyon: Definitely. One of the things that I think about when I think about diverse cropping and diverse agriculture in the context of climate change is also there’s a resiliency if you’re not betting every season on one or two main staple commodity crops. If you have many different things going on, some things might not do that well that year, but some other ones do. And being resilient is part of the advantage of this way of going about things. Yeah.
Fred Iutzi: That’s right. And the ecological benefits of intercropping are a way to add extra attraction, extra value to diversifying cropping systems and kind of re-diversifying from an economic standpoint what individual regions are doing rather than having agricultural production be very specialized to different parts of the country or the world.
Ross Kenyon: As we start to wrap up, what might be something that people can do to get involved with the Land Institute to learn more? Where might you send them these days?
Fred Iutzi: Yeah. So I would send them to our website, landinstitute.org. They can then be guided through to social media, to videos, to our popular and scientific format papers. What I would especially encourage people to do, and this is where this diverges a little bit from kind of the standard sustainable ag interview, you know, normally we’re, you know, we’d be saying things like, well, you really need to go buy this, right? You need to go buy certified organic products in your local grocery store or look for this on the label. What we, with this kind of long-range transformative view to perennialize agriculture, to radically diversify agriculture, what we need to do is for people to talk, to use this great ability of speech and conversation that distinguishes us for good or ill from all of the other species on the planet.
If anybody here thinks that this is an important vision for the future of the planet, They need to spread the word about what they think, whether it’s their neighbors, whether it’s their legislators, whether it’s their colleagues at work. We need a broad-based movement around perennializing agriculture, around society making a commitment to resourcing this most important project since the one 10,000 years ago that created agriculture. We are a highly interconnected community. And so even if any one individual person may not think of themselves as somebody who’s a huge leverager of resources and action, everybody is within a few degrees of somebody who is a huge leverager of resources and action.
So talk about what your dreams are for the future. And if they include perennializing agriculture, make sure to say so.
Ross Kenyon: Well, hopefully that becomes the dream of at least a few listeners here. Thank you both so much for being with us. If you enjoy the show, please give us a good review on your podcast app. Tell your friends also. Share the dreams of Nori as well. We want to reverse climate change. We want to perennialize agriculture. All great things to be doing. And thank you for listening. All right. Thanks for coming to Salina. We’ll be back. Yeah, we’ll be back.
