Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on August 7, 2015 | 28 Comments
Time for a quick update on the issue of perennial grain crops, a recent focus of my writing, occasioned by a couple of spinoff articles I’ve recently published in The Land and Permaculture magazines, and also an interesting correspondence with Phil Grime, the plant ecologist whose work I drew on to inform my approach to the issue.
Just to provide the briefest of summaries, it would be unquestionably beneficial from an environmental point of view if our staple grain crops were perennial rather than annual in their growth habit, but yields of perennial grains currently are very much less than annual ones. That’s simply because people haven’t yet devoted enough effort to the artificial breeding of high yielding perennial varieties, according to the scientists at the Land Institute who have set themselves that task – amid considerable fanfare on their part and on the part of their admirers in the permaculture and alternative farming movements to the effect that their work will end the conflict between humanity and nature created by existing farming methods (in Land Institute founder Wes Jackson’s words, “For the first time in 10,000 years humans can now build an agriculture based on nature’s ecosystems”1). But I’m sceptical. There are, I think, strong ecological limits on plant habits which favour the couplets annual/high yield and perennial/low yield – a point I outlined in some detail in an article in the journal Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, based on Grime’s insights.
Land Institute scientists Timothy Crews and Lee DeHaan were having none of it. Grime’s analysis may hold good for wild plant ecologies, they said in a rejoinder to my article, but was of no relevance in situations of artificial breeding. They also painted my position to be that there are no major problems with annual-based agriculture, the issue really being just how to adapt European-style agriculture to local circumstances around the globe.
I hope that open-minded readers of my article will be able to see that these latter two characterizations of my analysis bear no relation to anything I actually said in it. Indeed, it seems to me that on the contrary it’s the perennial grain breeders in the semi-arid continental grasslands (such as Kansas, which the Land Institute calls home) who are messing about with European-style agriculture. As I show in my article in The Land, the people of the world are becoming increasingly reliant on grain harvests from these steppe regions at the expense of more locally adapted peasant agricultures. If it’s successful, the Land Institute programme may make steppe grain agriculture a little more sustainable, but in doing so it would further an essentially colonial, European-style agriculture which undermines local agricultures and is the very opposite of the process called for by Land Institute founder Wes Jackson in “becoming native to our places”. My analysis, incidentally, is based on correlations over time in cross-sectional FAO data, which might make Andy McGuire blanche, if he’s reading this, hot as he is on the problem of spurious correlations. Ah well, such is the lot of the unfunded independent scholar, without access to elaborate data-gathering exercises.
Perennial grain crops seem to me to figure as something of a ‘magic bullet’ solution in the alternative farming world, rather akin to the discourse around GM in conventional farming. In both cases, their proponents think the technology will abolish the contradictions and difficulties of agriculture, as in Jackson’s ‘ending 10,000 years of conflict’ comment. Back in the real world, I think the contradictions of agriculture and of human life in general are ineluctable. Better we figure out how to live with them than dream of abolishing them, as I’ve argued elsewhere2. My article in Permaculture Magazine outlines the way I try to do so as best as I can (which, I fear, is not very well) in my own farming practice, given the poor yields of perennial crops, and the poor environmental performance of annual ones.
Thus, the inferences Crews and DeHaan make about my enthusiasm for annual cropping and European agriculture really are red herrings, as I’ve shown in my two recent articles, and at some length in posts on this site, such as here. Not so their point about artificial versus natural selection. If they’re right that Grime’s analysis is irrelevant to artificial breeding, then my scepticism about the possibility of a high-yielding and environmentally-conserving perennial grain crop is significantly and perhaps fatally undermined. I don’t think they are right, though, as I argued at some length here. It seems to me far too glib to exempt artificial breeding from any of the tradeoffs that obtain in the natural world by virtue of the human agency involved, particularly when that agency is directed at replicating natural systems (Jackson calls his approach ‘natural systems agriculture’). Still, I thought it was worth contacting Professor Grime to solicit his view. His reply is available here. It makes quite interesting reading, I think, for various reasons which go beyond my specific dispute with the Land Institute. I think I’ll let it speak for itself rather than presuming to summarize it here, but I take it to be broadly supportive of my position that breeding perennial grain crops with seed yields to match annual ones while preserving the desired perennial characteristics really is a long shot.
Various other people who are better grounded in this sort of thing than me, like Ford Denison and Clem Weidenbenner, have hinted in their responses that while broadly supportive of my arguments I may be slightly overdoing the strength of the tradeoff between perenniality and seed yield. Perhaps that’s so. Still, I feel reasonably happy that my analysis is sound in its main details. I’m also a bit disappointed that Crews and DeHaan were unwilling to make any concessions whatsoever to its plausibility. David Van Tassel, another Land Institute scientist, wrote a blog post asking for responses to help him identify his blind spots. Well, I think my article identifies quite a number of blind spots in the Land Institute’s general position. But there you go – I guess I’m old enough to know that disputing somebody’s position sometimes only entrenches it, and I daresay I’m guilty of that myself often enough. Ah well, I’m glad to have been able to look into the issues, answer them to my own satisfaction at least and to make my answer sufficiently plausible for it to pass muster in a respected academic journal. My interest was originally piqued by a one-sided paean to perennial crops on a permaculture website, which was to some extent informed by the Land Institute’s overblown “ending 10,000 years of conflict” trope. I’d like to think that the Land Institute might at least rein in on that kind of rhetoric a little so as not to over-stimulate the excitable imaginations of another generation of permaculturists, but perhaps that’s too much to hope.
Notes
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Chris, I always read your posts, and I did not blanche, but the idea that we have mimic the local ecosystem is an interesting one, perhaps for another post?
For what my opinion is worth, Chris, I find your ruminations on this topic very interesting. As someone who has been involved in sustainability for a long time I’m very wary of silver bullet solutions that are proselytised as easily and neatly remediating significant problems … once they are realised. With a bit more funding …. And a bit more time …
All very well but there’s problems to deal with now.
An interesting point that perhaps Clem might comment on is what is the current opinion plant held by breeders regarding potential limits of how much available resources common grain plants can devote to the extra demands of being a perennial while still maintaining grain production, the capability to stay upright, mount some kind of defence against pests and pathogens (assuming plants such as wheat do this; I’m more familiar with what trees do in this area) and other partitioning decisions.
David:
I hope I can earn the regard you’ve insinuated above.
On the potential future plants might offer us if modified genetically (and if properly husbanded)… I consider it such a blue sky future I need to be careful to keep my enthusiasm bounded by what I’m capable of describing to general audiences. Those reading here seem fairly familiar with the notion that tradeoffs are important and in some means tradeoffs can put an outer bounds on how much increase might be possible. But the opportunity to increase the total size of the plant biomass pie does yield a like opportunity for pushing back the boundaries imposed by tradeoffs.
Transgressive segregation is a marvel – overly simplified – TS is the genetic mechanism by which offspring of a particular mating can be found that exceed the mid-parent metric for a particular trait. Thus if our parents are A and B, and these parents have a metric value of 40 and 50 respectively… and one aspires to increase the metric (more is better) then it is TS which accounts for the existence of offspring with metric values greater than 45 (the midparent mean). But as parent B is already at 50, 45 is not so interesting. TS gets interesting when one realizes that offspring can be found with values greater than the high parent… and thus an offspring with a value of 53 or more is what excites. Sure, there may be some other aspect this said offspring has ‘traded’ in order to post such an impressive result. But again, if the metric in question is total plant biomass given the same set of inputs (water, light, fertilizer) then a larger pie has been made and trading isn’t necessarily a zero sum game.
There is evidence of such improvements being made through plant breeding (and likewise some credit needs to be recognized for the husbanding end of modern agriculture as well).
Specific details can be provided for the curious if these broad brush ideas are unimpressive.
Thanks, Clem.
I guess one question might be does it need to be done via GM techniques? I’ve had some exposure to good old-fashioned economic breeding value improvement through various rural activities and by plying my skills in high-performance computing, such as they are, with some very clever geneticists doing Bayesian and other statistical analysis between genome and phenotype. They are doing much of their work with dairy cows (see for example this paper in Nature Genetics http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v46/n8/abs/ng.3034.html on which, cue fist-pump, I was a co-author) with which species as I understand it they are very keen to maintain traits such as vigour, fertility etc as well as increase milk production. And this is all being done by conventional breeding techniques with an overlay of more recent science and lashings of computational power.
So just increasing the biomass might be attractive – it certainly is in some bioenergy applications – but if that leaves a tree or grain plant that can’t stand up or defend itself or in the case of grain doesn’t have at least the same grain production per hectare and ideally a commensurate increase in grain production then that’s not a good outcome. (Although it might make for a lot more straw which is a problem with the short stem varieties popularised over the last few decades.) Re bioenergy there was a lot of work done in the US on algal biodiesel around the time of the first and second oil shocks. While the selectively bred organisms were producing truly prodigious quantities of lipids they also had drastically decreased capability to compete with wild strains in open ponds. And another issue was their tendency to produce a spread of lipids with various economic impacts.
So I was curious to see what plant breeders have published and/or discuss over a beverage or two at conferences re what are the potential production limits for perennialising grains while maintaining other desirable traits.
David:
Sorry for the slow reply – on holiday last week.
Thanks for the link to the dairy bull research. This is strikingly similar to research being done with elite corn and soybean (annuals) populations. I’m not nearly as familiar with perennials, though I gather some of your colleagues are particularly familiar with rye grass breeding in Australia.
You wondered whether GM is needed to make the sort of progress I discussed above, and it is not. GM technology offers another path and can help some projects come to fruition on shorter timescales, but it’s not absolutely required.
You point to some specific situations where trade-off consequences appear to matter and this is precisely where better R&D efforts are focused. Context is crucial – traits that show impressive gains in one environment are not always useful in another. I’ve not read the whole paper you’ve pointed to (behind paywall)… but I did dig up a paper by some of your colleagues (Gautier et al., Genetics 172: 425-436 (2006) – which Didier Boichard is a co-author. In this latter paper they are looking at a couple genes that appear to segregate within Holstein cattle and not within a couple other dairy breeds (Montbeliarde and Normande). Before we go too far off into the weeds I mention this because it makes me wonder if this variation within Holsteins is novel or whether it existed historically and was lost from the two other breeds (or was simply missed in sampling). The significance of the distinction, new vs. old variation, is very important.
So GM can make incredible contributions to breeding efforts, but Mother Nature still has contributions on offer. Computer modeling, statistics, and good old fashioned phenotyping all put together are important to making progress on many fronts. The costs associated with bringing all these technologies together are significant. So for my money an area where small farm infrastructure in the future makes sense is where environmental peculiarities push interactions (tradeoffs) beyond simple wide area application. In such context sensitive environments participatory breeding may become more important. And properly trained small farm participants will make all the difference.
Very interesting reply, Clem. To some extent what you say about small farm breeding contributions is what landraces have always been about. So I guess the interesting question might be where these local breeding efforts fit into the current picture and how things might be down the track. Received wisdom as I understand it is that we have lost a lot of fruit tree varieties in the last 100 years.
On a more personal note, we’re having some success with a landrace silverbeet that is showing some degree of successful perennial habit 🙂
http://pragmaticsustainability.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/coppicing-silverbeet.html
We also had a hybrid lettuce variety that bred up from some varieties we grew for a few years. The hybrid enthusiastically colonised the backyard. The bees appeared to like the flowers but we found the leaf taste quite repulsive. From memory, even the micro-economic livestock (AKA the voracious South American rodents or guinea-pigs) weren’t keen. Took some effort to eradicate the hybrid lettuce. Substantial hybrid vigour.
I think your beet should be biennial and not a true perennial, though it may go to seed in your garden and return in years to come. If yours is truly a perennial you might have something worth showing to a botanist.
As for landraces… a fair comparison on some levels, but participatory breeding can be much more. Heirloom variety loss can start debates that in my experience quickly run amok. Best we raise what we want (an eat what you kill concept) and want what we raise. Be good stewards, and help those coming along behind us to have an opportunity to live a good life.
Have you ever eaten guinea-pig?
Thanks for the debate, gentlemen. You’re touching on a critical point which I raised in my article, and which Crews & DeHaan haven’t answered to my satisfaction, namely – yes the plant may accumulate enough resource to fund both seed production and perennation, but will it actually do so successfully given the physiological and ecological constraints it faces, particularly in stressful agronomic situations where we’re banking on those perennial traits. As I said in my original article, the Land Institute’s model of tradeoff seems to me to be essentially economic, and not ecological or evolutionary as it should be.
And thanks for commenting Andy – yes perhaps I’ll come back to that point about local ecosystem mimicry. Not sure where you’d place my arguments vis-a-vis the Land Institute’s on that front.
Meanwhile, Mrs Spudman is away so I have vegetables to tend and internet connections to worry about! But hopefully back on Wednesday with a new post…
Haven’t eaten Cavia porcellus. Ours are rescues so they’re on the pet side of human-livestock relationships as against a more functional role. My wife is a zoologist by training. She did her honors project on a native Australian rat. Cute little fellas that look like GP’s.
Incidentally, guinea-pigs are pretty much useless as pets. They are generally uninterested in human contact other than as a source of food. They must have the most incredible metabolisms given the amount they can put away.
Re the possibly anomalous silverbeet, as I understand it, typical behaviour of a true biennial is vegetative growth the first season and seed production the 2nd. And breeders have developed cultivars for some species that compress all this to one year.
Our silverbeet will generally do the pagoda thing and seed in the first season. Because after seeding they look manky, fall over and so on we tend to clean them up at that point. We have had plants resprout what are essentially new leaders from a previous year’s stem that has been left over winter. This might have happened over multiple years where we’ve left them for one reason or another. I’m not sure if the new leaders have produced seeds.
I’ll keep an eye on the “coppicing” small patch mentioned in the blog post. ‘Twill be interesting to see if they manage more than two seasons of leaf production and if they seed again.
I wonder if there is a range of behaviour within what are commonly regarded as biennials that sees some last more than two seasons in the right conditions. That might be a handy start for someone with perennialising ambitions for such a plant.
I’m betting on the reseeding angle, but do take a close look. The biology of going from biennial to perennial would be a fascinating step… different life histories evolved at one point so one could argue it can happen again. But I’m thinking the likelihood here is less than being hit by lightning.
The high school ag program here raises guinea pigs for their animal reproduction class. The ag teacher was telling me GPs are raised for their meat in some places in Africa (you can literally carry your livestock with you if you have to flee an attack or have other migratory needs). I’d eat a GP before most insects, but am content to stick with pork and poultry so long as they’re available.
I have eaten guinea pig, cuy as they called it in Ecuador, many times. Some were good, the “Peruvian” types with more meat, and then some were skinny and hardly worth the effort. Mild taste as I remember. The indigenous kept them on the floors of their dirt houses in the highlands of the Andes. I never considered how good they would be as pets, but they make interesting noises.
Great!! A report on biodiversity of guinea pigs… and in situ conservation no less. Thanks Andrew!
Wow Chris… am thinking you’d never have guessed how broadly the comments to your musings might wander. North and South America… Australia and Africa. Almost makes the planet seem smaller… small farms for a small planet. 🙂
Yep, it’s been a pleasure watching the debate unfold. Would like to add some thoughts on David’s silverbeet, but I’m a bit under the pump at the moment…Would also have loved to have continued the debate with the Land Institute, but alas I don’t think they want to engage. Oh well…history will be my judge…now who was it who said that?…oh yes, oops…
Thanks for your articles.
How about sweet chestnuts as an alternative to grain?
As suggested by Martin Crawford and Eric Toensmeier.
Yep, that’s one of the leading contenders. We planted sweet chestnut on our holding, but they died – our soil is too alkaline, I think. Simon Fairlie talks about a sweet chestnut culture in France in his ‘Meat’ book with some reservations – I guess it’s not as storable and not as appetizing as grain, but it has definite possibilities. More promising I suspect than perennial grains – but not sure how it would work on the US prairies.
They are planting American chestnuts on the wetter prairies (roughly east of Wichita). Apparently, the chestnut hybrids are more resistant now to the blight, and away from Appalachia they are starting to do well.
It’s also important to remember that perennial grasslands are often human creations to begin with: For instance, the Plains Indians used to burn huge areas of forest to make the land more consistent with what they perceived as their own needs. These actions (and their pro-grain results) are certainly subject to potential criticism from the agroecologically-minded.
I wrote a blog post recently about food grains that you might find interesting in the context of this discussion, in which I argue that fruit and tree products should play a much larger role in human nutrition. It hasn’t yet found a an appreciative audience, but I think this blog might be the right kind of soil for it to flourish:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S-B7Ifd33dVbr4yzjneiB1Vx-Lso8eL7sOXdj904iE0/pub
Thanks for the great blog, Chris!
Robert, thanks for that – a very interesting read, in which you raise a few issues I hadn’t thought about very much, if at all. I’m still not 100% convinced that the fruit and nuts outperform the grains calorifically on a per hectare basis – the fact that we squander them post-harvest doesn’t really alter their productivity. Still, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t move towards the kind of systems you’re advocating, given the margins that we have available to us – indeed, your post helps convince me more than ever that we should, and that we’re better off looking to fruit & nuts for perennial staples than chasing perennial grain rainbows. I’m interested in your point about fire management of the prairies – what you say about the northeast is certainly convincing, but I was under the impression that the prairies were relatively treeless even prior to human management, and that, prior to the horse, hunting on them was relatively limited – could you point me to any further literature on this?
Hi Chris, the Wikipedia article on the pre-Columbian American grasslands gives a good overview on Native Americans’ “fire ecology” and links to (what I can tell are) credible sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_savannas_of_North_America
A good resource on this subject appears to be “Imperfect Balance” — I haven’t read it yet, but it looks up my alley. http://www.amazon.com/Imperfect-Balance-Transformations-Pre-Columbian-Historical-ebook/dp/B007C5TR64/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1
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I don’t think the “squandering” of field corn post-harvest is really an accident: It’s pre-ordained, a consequence of our decision to grow that specific crop. Field corn is simply not very compatible with human digestive system, which is why we’ve either got to industrially process it into something resembling a fruit (corn syrup) or feed it to other animals before we can get its caloric benefit. Tamar Haspel thinks we could do well with field corn polenta, but as I tried to point out in my article, this would have disastrous consequences for human health because field corn’s carbs are either poorly-digested or are associated with metabolic disorders. The nutritional problems with field corn militate against using it directly for human consumption, and once you forgo that, then corn’s superior caloric efficiency is totally obviated.
Dethroning corn from its status as calorie king is problematic for the idea of widespread grain farming, because other grains aren’t nearly as promising in this regard. Even industrial wheat (which has infamous health effects of its own) produces only about 4 million calories per acre, which is much less than apples and watermelon (6 and 5 million), and less than most tree fruits.
Thanks Robert – fair points, though on the basis of the figures I’ve seen from the Land Institute and from the likes of Mark Shepard I’m still not totally convinced of the calorific superiority of the fruits over the grains. Perhaps I need to go back to this and crunch a few more numbers, so I’d be interested in any sources you have for the kind of figures you mention. Of course, it’ll depend on which part of the world we’re talking about – I’m easily persuaded of the case for fruit in the humid tropics, but less so here in the UK at 51degN or more, where watermelons certainly don’t outperform wheat.
Yeah, there may be some regional bias to my post — my calorie figures are taken from average U.S. yield for those crops. (The numbers are crunched from the links in my article, except for watermelon, which is here: ). Though if North America is really particularly well-suited to grains, then maybe that’s decent evidence that it’d work on your side of the pond as well?
Of course different regions need Watermelons may not be great because of your latitude, but what about apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches?
To be more specific, to obtain the calories/acre figures I mentioned above, I took the total yield per acre in the United States for the crops mentioned (available in my article except for watermelon, which is supported by the link in my above comment), and multiplied that weight per acre by the calories in a unit weight of the crop. Field corn is about 1500 calories per pound, apples about 210, watermelon roughly 150. The final calories/acre figures are of course theoretical, but because they represent data averaged across all U.S. farms, they seem a reasonable approximation of what is possible.
Yeah, but then you have to deduct the calories that went into it, as well as the damage done (not sure how to express that in calories, for say, soil lost). I have been told that much of ultramodern farming with huge machines is so input intensive and so damaging to the structure of the soil that you barely get an EROEI of 1:1. Which is pretty much disastrous.
Thanks for these posts – I’ll certainly come back to this issue at some point. Clearly EROEI is an important metric which should be used much more in agricultural policy. Though I don’t think it should be the only metric – otherwise I doubt I’d ever get to have any basil with my pasta!
I agree, Chris. I am mostly objecting to the eco-mods (or mainstream ag folk) just taking sheer quantity and running with it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying these crude measures should be determinative of what we should grow. But often, the industrial agriculture crowd pooh-poohs calls for more fruit and nut growing, because allegedly those products can’t “feed the world”. So it makes sense to use calories-per-land comparisons to push back on those claims.
Absolutely agree – I’m not questioning your general line of argument, just unsure about a few details.
The eastern Indians used to burn huge chunks of forest. The Plains Indians, living in the plains, also used fire… to freshen up the prairie (as did mother nature with lightning). Much of the arid prairie was created by the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains.