The Seeds of Change
Born and raised on a Kansas farm, Wes Jackson grew up to help establish one of the first environmental studies programs in the country at California State University-Sacramento. But during a leave of absence, the plant geneticist began to ask himself whether being a tenured professor was where he could do the most good. He answered by chucking the academic life and returning to his Kansas roots. Jackson started a nonprofit organization, The Land Institute, which has been rethinking how humans grow and cultivate food for more than three decades now. As part of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Visionary Speaker Series, Jackson discussed his revolutionary thinking on agriculture. He spoke to journalist Michael O. Allen.
What does The Land Institute do?
We are perennializing major crops. What farmers do today, and have been doing since agriculture began 10,000 to 13,000 years ago, is plant annual crops. That is just not natural. By subduing or ignoring nature, we're saying we've got to destroy the ecosystem in order to eat. In the wild, nature features perennials and mixtures. That's all we're trying to do at the Land Institute, bring the processes of the wild to the farm.
With perennials, we don't have to tear the ground up every year. Perennial seeds have these extensive root systems that grow deeper into the ground. The roots then manage nutrients and water and microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, even the worms. Perennials are also going to capture sunlight over a larger percentage of the year than annuals do because, with annuals, you've got to wait until the seeds come up and for it to spread and form a canopy to capture sunlight.
How are you bringing the processes of the wild to the farm?
Through plant breeding. We are crossing annual crops with their perennial relatives. We are also domesticating wild perennials that are promising. If we succeed, we'll have a mixture of grain-producing crops grown by farmers who have a 19th century British naturalist way of thinking. It'll be people managing a domestic ecosystem that has signatures of the ways of the wild.
Don't big agricultural companies grow most of our food now?
Yes, but that will end because it is dependent on burning a lot of fossil fuel. How are you going to carry on with industrialized agriculture if you don't have a lot of fossil carbon to run it? There's only so much oil. What makes anybody think that it's going to go on and on and on? We're showing signs of desperation already, including our presence in the Middle East. Our leaders understand that if we don't have that portable liquid fuel, we're going to have widespread social upheaval.
A 10-year-old has lived through a quarter of all the oil ever burned, and a 22-year-old, 54 percent. The scaffolding of modern industrial society is dependent upon highly dense, ancient, energy-rich carbon. So, when you start losing that, you start doing crazy things, like more offshore drilling, which means more ecological accidents like the one we just had in the Gulf. It's just sort of a downward spiral toward a desecrated planet.
What are the forces you have to overcome to change agriculture as we know it?
The big chunk of money made in agriculture is for the suppliers of fertilizers, the insecticides people, and the seed houses. If the plant keeps coming up every year, you don't need to buy seeds. Look at a native prairie, those root systems, that whole underground activity there is very efficient in the management of nutrients and water. We just want to bring so much of what the prairie is all about to our agricultural fields, but the first requirement is to have the perennials. When that happens, the reward runs primarily to the farmer and the landscape and you're going to have less need for nitrogen. About 50 percent of the nitrogen that's applied to fields in the form of fertilizer isn't taken up by the crops, and it leaks into our streams.
How big a challenge do you face?
Huge. I mean, partly, because people have left the farms and they don't have a connection to the land. So, now, here they are, living in suburbia or cities with little appreciation of the source. Aldo Leopold long ago said that there are two spiritual dangers that come from not owning a farm. One is the belief that heat comes from the stove, and the other is belief that food comes from a grocery store. We've got these disconnects. I suspect something will have to happen to make people focus, to get them to make the connection.
You are 74 years old this year. Do you have a sense that you're running out of time?
We've got a motto around The Land Institute: If you're working on something that you can finish in your lifetime, you are not thinking big enough.
Read interviews with more NRDC visionary speakers.
