Grains Across America
If there’s a lesson we can learn from America’s native prairie, it’s to plant a diversity of grains, for our health and the health of our land.
July 22, 2009
By Scott Russell Sanders
Just beyond Wes Jackson’s office at The Land Institute, a 370-acre research farm in Salina, Kan., stretch remnants of the prairie. Unlike the farmland that has gradually eaten away at it, America’s native prairie requires no pesticides, no plowing, no irrigation, no oil or gas. It runs entirely on sunlight, rain, snow, air and minerals from the soil, all the while producing food and building fertility. And it has been doing so for thousands of years. On the wild prairie many species of plants grow side by side, some of them legumes that draw nitrogen from the air, 80 percent of them perennials with deep roots that hold the soil in place, conserve water and make efficient use of nutrients. This diversity provides natural resistance to pests and diseases, as well as rich habitat for wildlife. The prairie, Jackson believes, is a model that could revolutionize how we grow grains.
RELATED CONTENT
The benefits of whole grain foods, including sponge and dough bread recipes....
Growing, harvesting, milling and using amaranth, corn, wheat, oats, rye and triticale....
Holiday recipes for julekage, nutty and fruity granola and gingerbread cookies....
YOU CAN RAISE GRAINS ... RIGHT IN YOUR OWN GARDEN! January/February 1978
by GENE LOG...
This spring, across hundreds of millions of acres that were once prairie, American farmers are plowing their fields and planting the grain crops — primarily wheat and corn — that we and much of the rest of the world will be eating in months to come. The scale of this planting has increased dramatically in recent decades, and so has the use of pesticides and artificial fertilizers. But otherwise we grow our grains much as our ancestors have been growing them for thousands of years.
A number of scientists now believe that if we are to grow food sustainably for a burgeoning population we must radically change how we farm. Chief among those visionaries is Jackson — plant geneticist, MacArthur Fellow and president of The Land Institute.
"If we want to create a sustainable agriculture," says Jackson, "then out here on the Great Plains we need to study the prairie, and what we learn is that nature favors mixtures of perennial plants." The mission of the Institute is to find an ecological solution to the problems caused by America’s increasing dedication to vast monoculture, a sustainable approach to growing grains that Jackson calls "perennial polyculture." What’s wrong with our conventional method of agriculture, according to Jackson, is that it relies on annual crops grown one species to a field. Anyone who flies across the Midwest has seen vast rectangles planted in corn or soybeans, and out on the Great Plains enormous circles of irrigated wheat or oats. To grow annual crops, farmers till the soil each spring, exposing it to erosion by water and wind. To protect these single-species plantings from insects and disease, most American farmers spray their fields with herbicides and pesticides, and to replace the natural fertility destroyed by pesticides and erosion they apply fertilizers made from natural gas. The runoff then pollutes rivers and feeds excess nitrogen and phosphorus into coastal waters, creating oxygen-starved regions where no fish can survive, including a dead zone the size of New Jersey at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
