The Land Institute

Many of the shortcomings and failures of today’s agriculture relate to annual crop monocultures and our dependence on high volumes at low cost. Four crops – soybean, wheat, rice, and maize – occupy almost half of the world’s entire agricultural lands. The annual cultivation calendar repeatedly disrupts the soil’s natural processes, including its methods of regenerating and rebuilding its defenses and nutrients. We tend to compensate for this by using fertilizers, pesticides, and fossil-fuel-wasting machinery. We till, sow, plant, and harvest in repetitive patterns – over time linearly rather than circularly – consuming, polluting, degrading, and depleting ever more resources. By repeating this process over and over again, we are turning the soils dysfunctional, unfertile – empty.

We are losing fertile soils at a rate of 24 billion tons a year, according to the UN’s Global Land Outlook. Soil health has come into focus as the very foundation of our food system – the key to food security and food safety as well. Soil produces 95% of our food and holds nearly a quarter of the planet’s species – a complex web of life forms. It is also a significant carbon sink, potentially the most effective medium to sequester C0₂. As it is now, we release soil carbon by tilling and plowing annually.

Switching to perennial crops looks increasingly like one of the most promising avenues to reverse these processes. Perennial crops are alive year-round and produce harvests multiple times before dying. They are not new to agriculture; plants such as apples and alfalfa are already commercially grown and harvested. Most farmland, however, is devoted to annual crops. Perennial crops can reduce soil disturbance, soil erosion, and nutrient leakage.

Extensive use of perennial crops would be a total game-changer for today’s agricultural practices. More perennial species are needed to create diverse agroecosystems adapted to local environments and economies worldwide, and they have to prove their commercial advantage to farmers, not only long-term.

The Initiative: perennial polycultures, a collaborative approach to soil

The Land Institute is creating a radical agricultural system that recreates natural cycles and processes, consisting of a wide variety of well-adapted perennial crop species – cereals, legumes, oilseeds, fibers – grown together in scientifically derived polyculture configurations that maximize water uptake, nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, solar capture, and natural pest suppression.

The benefits are manifold: biodiversity is increased from soil microbes to farms to landscapes; soils are enriched not mined (nearly zero erosion and leaching); weeds are suppressed not killed; pests are avoided not fought with agrochemicals; cropping systems are vernacular rather than standardized; and farmers are able to break out of the agricultural treadmill and improve their economic viability. Additionally, more energy is harvested than used to grow the food. Perennial crops could also reduce land degradation and loss of soil carbon, it could make production more climate resilient and could conceivably mitigate climate change.

The Land Institute works on the development and outreach of new perennial versions of existing crops (rice, wheat and sorghum). New crop domestications (Kernza®, silphium, sainfoin) for human consumption are well underway.

Their international network of collaborating researchers is used for sharing and evolving research strategies, technical and fundraising expertise, and socio-cultural engagement. Online infrastructure for storing and sharing data will be developed to secure storage in seed banks to preserve and share genetic material for perennial crop development. They will also establish a competitive seed grant program for perennial crop breeding, as well as agroecological research.