[upbeat folk music]
[upbeat music]
- Inga: Like most of us, Kernza is new to me,
so I wanted to take a trip around the state
to find out more about it.
[upbeat music]
My first stop was at the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute
in East Troy to meet with Nicole.
Nicole is an agroecologist
who is part of a network of farmers and researchers
around the Midwest who are growing Kernza
for food production while researching the best ways
to improve the viability of Kernza on a bigger scale.
This is really beautiful out here with the moving fields.
I feel like I'm in a ocean of Kernza.
- Yeah, you came on a great day here in southern Wisconsin.
- So what Kernza exactly?
- It's a lot like rye in how it looks
because it's a little bit of blue, unlike wheat,
but Kernza is actually a perennial grass.
[grunts] So let me pull some up
so we can look at the seed head.
So Kernza actually started out as a plant called
intermediate wheat grass. - Okay.
- Which was brought over from Europe and Asia
and was naturalized in the western United States
as a forage crop because it's very drought-hardy
and it has high forage quality,
which means that it's really good
for livestock to eat.
However, about 20 or so years ago, some folks out east
got the idea to transform our agriculture from annual,
that's where we plant grains every year.
They thought, "Why can't we make agriculture perennial,
"where we have plant cover all year round,
"the grower doesn't need to go out and plant
and do labor every single year to get a grain crop?"
So it has a lot of environmental benefits,
and it can also give us food for humans
in terms of the grain and forage for livestock.
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- Why is that so important for us here in Wisconsin?
- In the spring, we have bare fields,
which means that there aren't living roots
holding the soil down, keeping our soil in place
from wind and water.
So it just blows our soil away,
and with it go all of our nutrients
and our beneficial organisms.
So it's important to keep that soil in place.
It's important to keep living roots in the soil,
and in a climate change context, with perennial agriculture,
these guys are growing year-round.
And so they're fixing carbon year-round
and putting that back into the soil.
It's also more beautiful to look at,
it provides a lot of cover
and protection for wildlife and other nesting birds,
and it's great recreationally for humans too.
So there are many, many benefits,
and a big one that farmers talk about is it saves them time
and it improves their livelihoods
because they don't need to go out and till
and replant their crop every year.
Unlike what you would need to do for annuals,
like corn and wheat and rye.
- I'd love to just go look at the difference
between the cornfield over there and the Kernza
and just sort of, like, look at the soil
and kind of peek around more.
Do you mind? - Sure, let's go take a look.
[upbeat folksy music]
- This is really neat to be out here
and see the difference between the row crop over here
and the Kernza over here.
Can you kind of explain environmentally
what's happening with the differences?
- Yeah, a big one is early in the spring
in an annual system, Kernza is green and growing
right after snowmelt.
That ground where the Kernza is growing, it can actually,
we're hoping it'll have better infiltration
and absorb that snowmelt better
so we're not getting runoff and flooding.
Whereas the corn, we won't even have corn or soybeans planted
for a month when those hard, early spring rains come.
So that's when you get a lot of the water runoff.
It's washing out residual nutrients
and fertilizers into groundwaters,
which produce algal blooms later in the spring.
So Kernza is expected to have big benefits for water quality
and improving lake quality in Wisconsin,
which we all love blue lakes and green fields,
and not the other way around. [Inga laughing]
So we really wanna keep our soil and our nutrients in place,
which is good economically for the farmers
and it's good environmentally too,
and then we can still produce our annual grains.
So it's just sort of an evolution
and a melding of these two systems.
- Well, thank you Nicole for spending some time with me
and educating me about Kernza.
[upbeat folk music]