Destructive Agriculture is Solvable

[MUSIC] >> Pushkin. >> This is an I Heart podcast. [MUSIC] >> I'm Jonathan Goldstein and on the new season of Heavyweight. >> And so I pointed the gun at him and said this isn't a joke. >> A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. >> And a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago. >> How can a 101 year old woman fall in love again? >> Listen to Heavyweight wherever you get your podcast. [MUSIC] >> This is Solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg. >> People often vacation to the beach and they talk about the ocean as this great vista. With all of the life teaming under the surface. And my father uses the same metaphor for the prairie. >> Rachel Strohr grew up in Kansas among prairie grasses and fields of waving wheat. Across the world, wheat production and other annual grains account for 70% of the land used for agricultural purposes. >> Monoculture crops like wheat are often grown in enormous single species plots and provide sustenance for millions of people. But they also lead to problems. >> The problems in agriculture are nitrate leaching, soil erosion, farmer debt, loss of soil organic matter, herbicide resistance, overproduction, pesticide poisoning, and the list goes on. >> Strohr is the acting president of the Kansas based land institute. Her organization works to promote regenerative agriculture. A rejection of monoculture farming in favor of investing in seeds that come back year after year and a reduced dependence on chemical fertilizer. The land institute itself breeds new varieties of perennial seeds. One called hernza is something they hope will replace traditional wheat in everything from cereals to crackers to beer and bread. All the while helping to restore nutrient balances in the soil and clean the air we breathe. And so what we want to do is solve the problem of agriculture, which means to create an agriculture that is as regenerative as the natural systems that built the soil upon which our food systems depend. >> My cohost, Ann Applebaum, spoke with Strohr about regenerative agriculture and what it can do to help solve the problems faced by farmers and consumers alike. Here's their conversation. >> Rachel, can you start by explaining to me what exactly is wrong with the crops that we're growing? >> Our agriculture system is extractive. You can think of this as like a bank account. Our agriculture takes more out of the resource bank account, which is soil, water, nutrients. So I like to say our food system is sort of a terminal feedback loop of extraction. >> So you're talking about essentially reversing the course of agricultural development as it's gone over the last 10,000 years and changing it to make it something more natural and more reflective of the natural world. >> Yes, and at the Land Institute specifically, we are developing perennial grain crops with the intent to grow them in agricultural systems in diverse mixtures so that there are multiple species growing in one field. >> Perennial crop sounds very specific. What's the difference between planting an annual crop and a perennial crop, and why is that so important for the environment? >> An annual crop is tilled up every year, so the soil is disturbed on an annual basis. And what we've done over time and in particular in the last 100 to 200 years is we have accommodated for the destruction that we create in tilling by using chemical input. And so the perennial grain grows back year after year and produces a harvestable food crop on a perennial basis so that we don't have to till and therefore don't have to use as much or any of the chemical inputs that we use today. >> What's the relationship of this idea, this form of regenerative agriculture, to the problem of carbon emissions? Will this reduce carbon? Is that one of the goals of this change? >> It not only does it draw down the carbon that was released over the last 10,000 years, but it sustained that much of that carbon in the soil over the long term, year after year as the roots stay in the ground year after year. So we believe that we can re-sequester much of what has been lost in both the soil carbon as well as the plant matter of a perennial stand of grain production. >> In the system that you're talking about, presumably it's more expensive, it produces less output. I mean, I'm wondering, you know, if this is the better way to do it, how, why did humanity, you know, stumble upon this completely different method pursuing it with great energy ever since? I mean, there must be a reason why we shifted to this monoculture extractive method in the first place. >> Yes, there's a lot of different theories about why we didn't develop perennials at the beginning of agriculture. One is that when our ancestors looked for food in the wild, they noticed that they happened upon annuals that actually had larger seeds than the perennials. And so they selected the annual plants not because of their annual tendency necessarily, but because of what they were producing. And then secondly, there was this sort of natural selection that happened on those annuals as they began to be cultivated that caused them, even without intentional breeding, to become even more suited and yield higher input. There's also the benefit that the annual dies every year, that it cannot survive. So you can always replace your stand in the next year with the best seed from the last year, and perennials are very hard to kill. So we can breed perennials more easily now because we have knowledge of plant breeding and sort of computational skill that allow us to move more quickly. And we also have large machinery and ways of killing a perennial or transitioning it out so that we can breed it in a more conventional and in a similar way that we breed annuals in half over the last couple hundred years. And that's not more expensive. It's not prohibitive in some other way. I don't believe that breeding perennials is more expensive than breeding annuals today. However, it takes time. It's taken an intensified 150 years to get the high yielding grain crops, a handful of grain crops that we have today. And in just about 20 years of intensive breeding on Kernza perennial grain, for instance, it is showing signs of being able to live up to its annual wheat substitute in the next 10 or 20 years. Tell me about Kernza. It's one of the grains that you've promoted, and I've read a little bit about it. It's been grown in several places around the country, but it's not on the market yet. Tell us about this particular grain and why you're working on it. So Kernza is one of five crops that we're developing at the Land Institute. Five perennial grain crops were developing at the Land Institute. It is a nuttier version of wheat, really. It's from the plant called intermediate wheatgrass. So it looks like wheat in a field, but the seed is much smaller. It is longer than a wheatberry, which is pretty plump and short. Brands like General Mills started using it, and it is growing on about 2,000 acres in the United States and also in Sweden and France. And we already have over 50 collaborators on six continents. I think 15 countries are represented working in this realm, collaborating with the Land Institute. There's work in Canada, in Argentina. So we're really trying to, in the next few years, solidify that international work, because what we're trying to accommodate is the 70% of ag land covered in annuals, and we're trying to create perennials for all of the grain producing regions of the world. Hearing you talk about it reminds me of the story of quinoa, which was also a grain that was widely used in Peru and was imported to the United States and became very fashionable. What are the chances that that Kernza could become fashionable too? Have you all thought about that? Have you tried to promote it? We actually hope that it doesn't remain a sort of specialty crop, like quinoa is, that is produced on a more mass scale and become sort of a regular ingredient in common everyday products, like Cheerios or in your local bakery would have a regular run of Kernza bread or the regular beer run from the local brewery. We can't have the impact that we want to have on the soils of the world if it's limited to sort of a specialty crop niche market. What if Kernza was to become widespread and available everywhere, and how would that change the world? I mean, how would that change the atmosphere? What would the impact of that be? Huge. We will be seeing more carbon sequestration, we'll be seeing less toxic chemical inputs, we'll be feeding the regions around production as well as the global food supply chain. Regenerative agriculture is one of the few areas that can potentially solve 10% of climate change, and perennial grains specifically on the landscape offer one of the most promising avenues for carbon sequestration on Earth to date. So I envision that when Kernza and other perennial grains like it, find their way onto the annual production grain production lands of today, which is about 70% of our total agricultural land, will also be stewarding the livelihoods of farmers and farm workers because we're not requiring them to maintain the economic treadmill of farming, which is leading to all kinds of consolidation and other issues. So it's a pretty utopian vision in my mind if we can get perennials on the landscape broadly and globally. Rachel, let me back up a little and ask you something a little more basic. Namely, what drew you to this story, to this issue? Why perennial crops? How did you originally get interested in farming? I mean, was it through a love of food? Was it through the landscape? I was born and raised in central Kansas, and my father was sort of a novice environmentalist and had a prairie land that I helped him restore when I was young. So I always had a sort of environmental ethic. And I grew up in the prairie among these perennial grasslands. People often vacation to the beach, and they talk about the ocean as this great vista with all of the life teeming under the surface. And my father uses the same metaphor for the prairie, which has been described more often as sort of a barren wasteland. But he is of the mind, and I think it's relevant to this regenerative agriculture soil story, that there's so much life on the prairie, and even in the winter, you just can't see it because it's below ground. And so you have these waves of prairie grasses blowing like waves on the ocean and below them is teeming with life. So I do remember as a kid walking in the grasses are quite tall and walking and feeling that grasses kind of have a feathery tip, which is nice, a nice tactile sort of connection to that deep underground as you walk or hike through the prairie. People listening to you don't work at the Land Institute, they might not live in Kansas. What can they do nevertheless to support this vision, this idea of regenerative agriculture, an idea that we can have a more natural form of food production. What can ordinary people do to support that? Simply learning and then advocating for what you learn is a great way to participate. Go to the Land Institute's website, read more. There's all kinds of books. Project Drawdown has all kinds of information about what's called carbon farming. Eat perennially. There are perennial things that you could eat now. Can you name a few for us? Almonds, tree crops. There are some perennial vegetables, avocados, asparagus, and the list goes on. This idea of diverse perennial grain production is the best technology we know of today to get our agricultural production functioning as close as possible to the natural systems that came before it and built the soil upon which we eat. One final question. I understand why this is ecologically more sustainable. Is it economically sustainable? Should there be subsidies for this kind of agriculture? Do you need them? In the near term, I think that our entire agricultural subsidies program should turn towards more regenerative practices to incentivize sort of turning of the Titanic from facing an annual paradigm to facing a perennial one. My vision of the future over the long term, we will not need to subsidize agriculture because it will be self-sustaining in a really beautiful and ecological way. Rachel Sprower is acting president of the Land Institute. Be sure to check out our show notes to learn more about regenerative agriculture. And here at Solvable, we're wishing you a restorative and regenerative holiday season. We'll be back with more in the new year. Until then, if you had a favorite episode this past season, consider sharing it with a friend. Solvable is produced by Camille Baptista. And this is Camille's last week with Solvable. We'll miss your terrific work, Camille. The senior producer of Solvable is Jocelyn Frank. Catherine Girardot is our managing producer. Mia Lobel is our executive producer. I'm also saying goodbye this week to our research intern, Kobe Guilford. Kobe, it's been great to have your help this semester. Special thanks to Carly Migliore, Khadija Holland, Eric Sandler, and Heather Fain. I'm Jacob Weisberg. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of Heavyweight. And so I pointed the gun at him and said this isn't a joke. A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. And a centenarian rediscoverers a love lost 80 years ago. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? 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