Food Fight

by Mckay Jenkins

  “Let’s take the big picture for a moment,” Jackson told me. “This GMO thing prevents real thought. It’s worse than a digression. It’s a distraction. We are really interested in social justice and reducing greenhouse gases and reducing poverty. How do we meet a bona fide human need—like reducing poverty as we reduce fossil fuel use—how do we meet that need in a way that goes beyond GMOs? This pipsqueak thing of GMOs enters into the arena and tries to create balloons that fill the whole arena—that’s the problem. They de facto baited us to be pulled into a distraction, and we’ve taken the bait. Our role is to make the subject as complicated as it actually is.”

  The Promise of Perennials

  When he and his family started The Land Institute in 1976, Jackson saw in the Kansas landscape both a great problem and a great solution. By the 1970s, despite great federal conservation efforts and federal financing, the soil on monoculture farms was still eroding at about the same rate it had during the dust bowl of the 1930s. By dramatic contrast, Kansas’s native prairies—the few that had not been plowed under for crops—were gems of sustainable growth.

  Instead of the ecological desert of the monoculture farm, prairies were “perennial polycultures”: gorgeous, diverse tapestries of soil, plants, insects, animals, and birds that worked in a rich balance that kept the entire system healthy. Prairies did not require annual planting because the plants were virtually all perennials. They didn’t require excess petrochemical fertilizers—they just soaked up energy from the sun and nutrients from the soil. Plants that needed soil nitrogen, like wild grasses, were helped by legumes that provided it, like bundleflower. Prairies are not generally plagued by weeds, because their perennial leaf canopies and roots outcompete invasive species. Prairie soils do not wash away in the rain, because perennial plants have far more extensive and woven year-round root structures. Because they have evolved to survive for multiple years, they have developed better disease resistance and can withstand stress (like drought). And because they have evolved diverse relationships with both plants and animals around them, prairie perennials tend to survive (as a system) even if a single species declines.

  So Jackson had an idea: Why couldn’t a farm—or even an entire country’s farmland—function more like a prairie? Would agricultural “biomimicry” work?

  The idea seemed so obvious, Jackson couldn’t believe no one had tried it before. If farms—even large-scale farms—mirrored prairies, they would solve a wide variety of intractable problems in industrial agriculture. Because they have permanent root systems, they could eliminate more than half the soil erosion in the United States, saving $9 billion worth of fuel for tilling equipment every year. They would also save nearly $20 billion worth of soil—though how one puts a price on an essential, nonrenewable resource is a bit of a parlor game.

  Deep roots would also mean the efficient use of both water and soil nutrients, especially nitrogen—which could radically cut back on the need for both irrigation and fossil fuels, especially synthetic fertilizers. Because perennials outcompete weeds, they would not require herbicides. Because they would not have to be torn up and planted every year, they would improve the land’s biodiversity, both underground (in terms of microorganisms in the soil) and aboveground (in terms of food and habitat for everything from bees and monarch butterflies to migratory birds).

  With so many obvious advantages, why hadn’t farmers been planting perennials for 10,000 years? To Jackson’s scientific mind, the answer lay in the way perennials are built. Because perennials must store energy in their roots to survive year after year, they cannot afford to put all their energy into producing seeds, as annuals do. On the other hand, perennials make up for some of this because they enjoy a much longer growing season.

  So for Jackson’s team at The Land Institute, the trick has been trying to figure out how to take the best traits from a perennial plant (deep roots) and combine them with the best traits of an annual (big seeds). How do you take a 10-foot-tall perennial grass and domesticate it to create bigger seeds and higher yields? How do you get wild plants to accept uniform planting and efficient harvesting?

  The work has been slow and laborious. Jackson’s scientists, who have been working on this for thirty years, say their work is “like scratching off lottery tickets.” But if they can figure it out, they might actually alter the course of agriculture that has been in place for 10,000 years.

  Perennial Calories

  One of the perennial plants Jackson and his team are betting on is a wild relative of wheat from Persia known as intermediate wheatgrass, which produces a (trademarked) grain called Kernza. If it strikes you as odd that the savior of American agriculture might come from Iran, consider that all American wheat—all those “amber waves of grain”—comes from Central Asia and the Middle East, where it has been grown for at least 7,000 years.

  In the early 1900s, immigrant farmers like Central European Mennonites brought wheat seed and planted it across the middle and upper Midwest, initially for cattle forage. Now, the Midwest is blanketed with more than 60 million acres of wheat: hard winter wheat blankets Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and North Texas; spring wheat covers North and South Dakota, and eastern and central Montana.

  Replacing 60 million acres of annual grain with perennial grains would be an ecological coup of historic proportions. But this is hardly the limit of Jackson’s imagination. Intermediate wheatgrass can also be used as a biofuel, which means it could replace some of the 40 million acres of corn American farmers currently grow not for food but for ethanol. (Claims from industrial corn companies that ethanol is a “green” substitute for petroleum have long since been discredited; they offer virtually no benefit in terms of reducing carbon emissions. And consider that Brazil is cutting down a million acres of rainforest a year to plant biofuel corn, then ships half of this fuel to Europe. The net effect of this transfer is 50 percent more carbon emissions than gasoline.)

  So, just for starters (and not even counting the perennial rice the Land Institute’s colleagues are developing in Asia or the perennial sorghum they are working on in the United States and Africa, or the perennial silphium, a sunflower relative that can be used for oilseed), that’s 100 million acres of Walmart parking lot that could be turned into highly productive, ecologically diverse, carbon-sinking perennial polyculture.

  Given the state of our food system, and the state of the climate, the stakes are high. “The world is not going to be fine waiting around for thirty more years for crops that could be sequestering carbon,” Tim Crews told me. “It’s not as though there’s nothing to lose here.”

  With world-changing ambitions resting on just a couple of plants, the trick for scientists like Crews and his colleague Shuwen Wang is to take a wild plant (like intermediate wheatgrass) and persuade it to mate with a domestic plant (like wheat) to produce food and fuel that people will like so much they’ll be willing to shift their entire approach to the way their land is planted. As is, the grain can be ground up and mixed with regular flour for things that don’t need a big rise, like pancakes or cookies. It can be used to make beer. But so far intermediate wheatgrass produces less than half the yield of wheat and (left to itself) doesn’t create enough gluten to make bread. One gold ring for The Land Institute’s plant scientists is clearly a marriage between the perennial hardiness of intermediate wheatgrass and the big seeds, high yields, and gluten of wheat.

  Just as it does for genetic engineers, the secret to this marriage lies in the mysteries of genetics; the team at the Land Institute can’t wait 7,000 years (the time it took domestic wheat) for intermediate wheatgrass to produce big, plentiful seeds that release easily during threshing.

  “There’s still a lot of things we don’t know yet, and yields and seed size are still not where we want them,” Lee DeHaan told me. “But we thought it would take a hundred years to get domestication, and we have been surprised at how fast it’s been coming along.”

 
DeHaan, who grew up on a farm in Minnesota, came to The Land Institute in 2001, armed with a PhD in agronomy and agroecology. He and his team are using two approaches to solve the domestication problem. The first is hybridizing wheat and intermediate wheatgrass to genetically nudge their offspring to express the best traits of both. The second is growing (and selectively breeding) enough generations of wild wheatgrass to get it to perform more like wheat. The goal is essentially the same: Create a plant that makes big, plentiful, easily harvested seeds and also comes equipped with deep roots—and will come back year after year. They are doing this work without engineering any genes, which, especially compared with the relative glitz of engineering powerhouses like the Danforth Center, makes work at the Land Institute both slow and “unglamorous,” DeHaan said.

  “It’s hard to attract scholars, students, and funding. It looks so tedious and boring,” he said. “There’s something about lab work that seems so much more attractive and prestigious. The excitement always is for what’s new. Funders love that because it’s always about what we couldn’t do in the past, now we can do. You have all these expensive machines, data being calculated on computers—all that versus slogging it out in the field.”

  While DeHaan remains suspicious of the industrial-scale ends to which most GM technology is used, his goal is sustainability, not purity. He’s looking for clues to what makes a domesticated plant’s seeds nonshattering (meaning the seeds stay in the plant’s seed head, rather than blow to the winds, as they do in wild plants) and also free threshing, which means they are easily separated from the chaff during harvesting. His work has long been fully engaged with the techniques of molecular biology—gene sequencing, molecular marking, chromosome staining—that help him figure out a plant’s genetic structure. He’s just not taking genes from one plant and putting them in another.

  “If DNA is a book, we just want to read it. We’re not cutting pages from other books and inserting them into this book,” DeHaan said. “Without molecular tools, perennial wheat will never be a reality. If you find a unique marker associated with something like free threshing, you can generate thousands of different segments and see where they lead. This is not GMO, just the ability to sequence genes, to stain chromosomes, track molecular markers, figure out the function of genes. Because these tools are relatively cheap, it doesn’t make sense not to use them.”

  Besides his work with wheatgrass, DeHaan and his Land Institute colleagues are also working with scientists in China to develop perennial rice, and with scientists from Africa on perennial sorghum. The day of my visit, he was pawing through a patch of sorghum plants, their seed heads drawn together inside slender paper bags. DeHaan was rather urgently asking the plants to mate.

  Sorghum looks and acts a bit like corn: it is a large grass plant, with energy-rich seeds that can be used for food, forage, or fuel. Like corn, it has also become one of the world’s most important crops; the world currently produces about 70 million tons a year, ranking behind only wheat, corn, barley, and rice. In the United States, 7 million acres of sorghum are planted yearly, mostly for animal feed and to produce biofuels. In Africa, however, sorghum is a critical source of calories on a continent with exhausted soil and the constant threat of drought. After a few weeks without rain, corn will shrivel up and collapse. Sorghum will just stand there and take it. When the rains return, sorghum will start growing again.

  At a nearby lab table, Pheonah Nabukalu, a Land Institute scientist from Uganda, was measuring out sorghum seeds on a small scale and entering data into a computer. Around her, on the table, on nearby racks, were scores of brown paper lunch bags filled with seeds. She was poring over some 500 different experimental lines, all bred in temperate conditions, trying to decipher which plants have the highest yields, and selecting those that have perennial rhizomes. Even if she finds a promising candidate, there remains the challenge of getting a temperate-raised seed to grow in a tropical place like Uganda—or the other places she thinks might benefit, like Mali, Ethiopia, and South Africa.

  Armed with a plant breeding PhD from Louisiana State, Nabukalu has been working on developing high-yield grains that are also resistant to pests, diseases, and drought. One project involves American seeds that have already been crossed with perennials, and then crossing these with varieties native to Africa. Using local seed lines has its benefits, since local seeds have already been bred to resist local pests and diseases. But regional specificity is also critical for developing crops that will fit well into the local environment. At field stations in Uganda, she is helping oversee experimental crops in arid, semi-arid, and rainy locations. And she is doing this work slowly, and without GM technology or corporate influence.

  “Companies always want to do it fast because of the money,” she said. “The seed companies working in Uganda are mainly working with Monsanto and with corn. Corn is not even native to Africa. It’s a colonial import from Mexico, and it’s only been in Africa for a hundred years.”

  She is also suspicious of GM cassava—the kind Nigel Taylor is growing at the Danforth Center—but not for the usual reasons.

  “I’ve never seen orange cassava,” she said. “Our sweet potato is also white fleshed. We cook it for three to four hours, but it holds up nicely. When you cook orange flesh for three hours, it breaks down. Making farmers switch is very hard. Taste is tradition.”

  Could Perennials Be GMO?

  DeHaan’s and Nabukalu’s ambivalence about biotechnology—interested in some techniques, suspicious of others—is shared by other scientists at The Land Institute. At one level, they can see the benefits: surely it might be easier (and faster) to nudge wheatgrass toward bigger seeds by stitching in a few genes from a wheat plant. And what if you could engineer a plant (like corn) to fix its own nitrogen, like a legume? Think how much petroleum-based fertilizers would no longer have to be applied to tens of millions of acres of nitrogen-fixing corn.

  “The anti-GMO side is too fearful,” Wes Jackson told me. “It reminds me of something kids used to say on the playground: ‘When in worry, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.’ It’s okay with me to look at sequenced gene segments, to help speed up the research process. The term ‘GMO’ is a generic—to come out against them is not to consider the specifics.”

  The anti-GMO movement “sucks way too much bandwidth away from many other aspects of sustainable agriculture,” Tim Crews said. “If we somehow got rid of all GMOs—if sustainable agriculture somehow reared up and achieved this Herculean feat—we would still be back in 1990 with the same list of profound shortcomings in agriculture.”

  Since GM research is so capital intensive (done almost exclusively in corporate laboratories, or in university labs funded by corporations), it has become almost entirely focused on what Crews calls “patentable objectives”: crops that can make companies a lot of money.

  And it’s this dynamic—corporations getting their hands on technology, and then scaling it up—that causes deep and unpredictable problems.

  By this reckoning, GMOs are like pharmaceutical drugs: they are so expensive to design, and test, and market, that only the biggest corporations have the wherewithal to introduce them. Because of this capital investment, corporations will pursue only those crops that offer a return on their dollar.

  But GMOs are like pharmaceuticals in another way as well. In the right hands, opioid pain pills, for example, can work a kind of therapeutic magic. They have made pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars. But as they have flooded into popular use, pain pills have also caused epidemics of addiction, black markets, and misery.

  This is precisely the kind of “cascading” consequence that worries Crews about GMOs. Let’s say scientists can figure out how to increase a plant’s photosynthetic efficiency. What could go wrong by increasing a plant’s energy production? Wouldn’t that just make food crops that much more productive?

  “If they could raise that ceiling—that�
�s the Holy Grail,” Crews said. “So then what? All of the other resources that are synched up in that ecosystem—all of those things will get out of whack.”

  Taking his cue from the Italian researcher Mario Giampietro, Crews offers a dark example: Consider a spider that can suddenly make a bigger web to catch more insects. Suddenly all spiders are doing this, making bigger webs and catching more insects, until the population of the insects crashes, which leads to a crash in spiders as well. Or consider the burning of fossil fuels: great power, great convenience—and then the countless cascading effects of climate change. Entire natural systems get thrown out of balance.

  “Right now, we have ecosystems that have evolved to be in sync with resources that are available through natural processes over the course of a year,” Crews said. “Cacti are in sync with the rain available in a desert, redwoods are in sync with the rain on the coast. When you tweak a plant’s genes to make them more productive, you can stress the larger processes—both the plant and its surrounding ecosystem.

  “Let’s say you take a grass like oats and make it more photosynthetically efficient. All of a sudden the plant needs all its nutrients in much greater quantities. Which leads to a dynamic like we had during the Green Revolution: all this new productivity requires a huge new increase in nitrogen or phosphorous fertilizer. All of a sudden these nutrients—especially phosphorous—become taxed, or even tapped out, or, if we’re talking about nitrogen, require a massive increase in petrochemicals.

  “Then, if those genes get out into the world through cross-pollination with wild plants, the same would be true for natural systems,” Crews said. “If the resources are there, these plants would immediately take over, becoming taller, using more resources, outcompeting other plants. Or you run into situations where an ecosystem that is already resource limited grows beyond what they had been before, and what that looks like I don’t even know, but it would be a novel situation.”