This is a transcript of episode 3, “Grain of the Future.” Listen to Hot Farm wherever you get your podcasts. Narration by Eve Abrams and Rachel Yang.
EVE: My friend Thor Oechsner is a grain farmer in Central New York. He grows a couple kinds of wheat, plus corn, rye, buckwheat. He also co-owns a mill, which grinds his crops into flour.
THOR: All-purpose flour, whole wheat bread, flour, corn flour, and polenta, which I know you like.
I do like the polenta. Also: the sourdough bread and croissants – made with Thor’s flour at the bakery he also co-owns.
THOR: So this whole circle got started from the farm to the mill, to the bakery
And it started … in this indirect way, a few years after Thor graduated from Ag School. Inspired by a grain Thor never even grew.
EVE: I didn’t know you were a conventional farmer at one point.
THOR: Yeah. Um, so Cornell in— in the eighties, there was nothing to do with organic agriculture. You know, my weed control course was all about spraying—
EVE: Spraying pesticides, lots of them. And after Thor graduated, that’s how he farmed. But one day he was out spraying his corn,
THOR OECHSNER: And I’m going along in my Kevlar suit with my mask on blasting this stuff. And I look over and I see the wellhead to the house I was living in right next to the field. And this light went off in my head that was like: You know, this is— This is not right. There has to be a different way to do this.
EVE: A different way to farm. One without all those chemicals. Not long after, Thor was flipping through a magazine.
THOR OECHSNER: And there’s this article about // Kernza—
EVE: Kernza. A grain scientists and farmers have been developing now for around twenty years. Kernza is a relative of wheat — which people have been cultivating for ten thousand years. Kernza is just beginning its agricultural journey. It was even newer when Thor read about it.
THOR OECHSNER: And I thought, “Oh my God, if we could do that— This is— This is incredible.”
EVE: It was exciting. For one thing, Kernza wouldn’t need all those chemicals.
THOR OECHSNER: Fast forward to years later, I’ve got a 1300 acre organic grain farm
And a researcher up at Cornell
THOR: comes up to me and says, “Oh, we want to do a trial with Kernza in New York. And would you be one of the // three farms that grows Kernza?”: And for me… I couldn’t… I honestly couldn’t believe it. I was like: Kernza? Are you serious, Kernza? Like that is the plant that got me where I am today.
EVE: From the Food and Environment Reporting Network, I’m Eve Abrams. Welcome to Hot Farm, a podcast about farmers and food – your food – and what the people who grow that food are doing – or could be doing – to take on the climate emergency.
In our first two episodes, we talked about farmers changing their practices – HOW they farm. Now let’s talk about WHAT they farm.
Kernza has a way of inspiring people, like Thor, to think big. On one hand, Kernza is just a grain – one most of us are hearing about for the first time right now, but Kernza also represents a total rethink of what farming could BE and DO in the age of climate change.
This is episode three – in which producer Rachel Yang asks: Is Kernza the grain of the future? Hello, Rachel!
RACHEL: Hi, Eve!
EVE: So my friend Thor is obviously enthusiastic about Kernza. It changed him as a farmer. But you’ve been telling me he’s not alone.
RACHEL: That’s right! For this story, I talked to a lot of people in my home state of Minnesota who are trying to make Kernza HAPPEN. And many of them share Thor’s unbridled enthusiasm about the ways this grain could revolutionize farming.
EVE: Revolutionize?
RACHEL: Yes, that’s the word a lot of them are using! But to understand why it’s so “revolutionary,” I want to zoom out a little first and talk about the way we farm grains NOW.
EVE: Zoom away!
RACHEL: Well, for starters, we grow a LOT of grains — crops like wheat, rice, and corn. Grains provide about HALF of the calories we humans consume. We also feed a lot of grains to livestock. And we use some for biodiesel. And so grains make up a whopping 70% of the world’s croplands.
Which turns out, is pretty bad for earth’s soil, water, and air. The way we farm those crops results in soil erosion, chemical runoff, and carbon emissions. Which spells bad news for the future of… eating.
CBS NEWS: Southern Madagascar is on the brink of the first climate change famine.
PBS NEWS: In Honduras, where agriculture sustains many people, long-term drought, caused in part by climate change, is forcing many to leave.
WCCO: The lack of rain is making Minnesota farmers worried. Crops are starting to dry up. And stress is growing.
DON WYSE: So this is the breeding nursery, so those are all individual plants.
To learn about what Kernza is, and where it comes from, I hopped in the car with Dr. Don Wyse for a little field trip through the University of Minnesota’s research fields.
Don is a professor of Agronomy and Plant Genetics. And full disclosure: his research receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also supported this podcast.
Don’s driving with one hand on the wheel, all casual. He’s got wire-rimmed glasses and white hair long enough to pull back into a ponytail.
DON WYSE: You look at— This is a breeding nursery, so, if it was a field, it would be all covered, right?
It’s sunny. Warm for October. We’re off-roading in Don’s sedan, up and down the grassy paths between sprawling fields lined with crops scientists are studying.
DON WYSE: // Hybrid corn came out of this area here. Soybeans came out of this area up here.
Don leads a research program at the University called the Forever Green Initiative – which is all about improving the crops farmers grow. Usually, when scientists talk about “improving crops,” they mean breeding versions that are “more productive.” So: more corn, more soy, more—
DON WYSE: Wheat, barley, [FADE DOWN] they all came from this place.
But Don and Forever Green aren’t just focused on growing higher-yielding versions of the crops that already dominate the world’s farmland. They’re developing 16 new or improved crops designed to thrive in a world with an unpredictable climate.
Don hits the brakes and points out the window to introduce me to them:
DON WYSE: All right, so this is camelina.
DON WYSE: Silphium.
DON WYSE: Winter barley.
DON WYSE: The other big one is winter pea.
These crops are meant to check a few boxes, Don says: They can survive in a changing climate. They’re good for the soil. And farmers can make money growing them.
One of these crops is the reason I’m visiting Don today.
DON WYSE: These are different breeding lines of Kernza.
Kernza. The grain Thor was so excited about. On first glance, you might not think Kernza packs much potential. I mean: it doesn’t exactly LOOK that impressive:
LEE DEHAAN: It looks a lot like if you’re driving down the roadside and you see the grass on the side of the road. //
That’s Lee DeHaan.
Not a whole lot like a grain crop.
Another Kernza scientist. Lee first laid eyes on an early iteration of Kernza in the 90s. He was a grad student at the University of Minnesota at the time. Don Wyse was his advisor.
LEE DEHAAN: I think the first time I saw the plant // I got to admit that at the moment I thought, “Oh boy, that’s got a long ways to go.”
Today, Lee’s one of the world’s top experts in Kernza development.
LEE DEHAAN: I’m the leader of the Kernza Domestication Program at the Land Institute.
The Land Institute is a nonprofit ag research organization based in Salina, Kansas, and they’re sort of like Kernza mission control.
They partner with other labs — like the University of Minnesota’s Forever Green Initiative — to move Kernza development forward.
The Land Institute came up with the name “Kernza,” by the way, and trademarked it. And the reason it’s so exciting to scientists like Lee and Don?
DON WYSE: It’s the first perennial grain in the world.
A perennial grain. So, all of those grain crops I mentioned earlier — like corn and wheat? Those are annual crops.
Their roots are in the ground on a short-term basis — til harvest — and then they’re outta there. Annuals have to be cultivated every year — which does a lot of damage to the soil.
Kernza isn’t like that.
You plant it, harvest it, winter comes, the ground freezes, spring rolls around, and it grows back. For three or four years.
And because Kernza stays kickin’ all year long, it develops these super dense roots that reach deep into the earth — we’re talking, like, 10 feet deep.
Plants with deep perennial roots are super resilient to extreme climate events, Don tells me. And that’s an important quality for our food crops to have because—
DON WYSE: Here in Minnesota, we are in an area of the United States where there’s going to be dramatic shifts in our climate.
In Minnesota last year, like a lot of the country, we experienced extreme drought conditions between June and September. Most of the Forever Green crops needed extra water to make it through the dry season — with one exception.
DON WYSE: Kernza. So it was a good example of that difference — that deep root compared to the shallow roots of the— of the summer annual crops.
So Kernza’s deep perennial roots give it this superpower of climate-resilience. And that’s just superpower number ONE.
Those roots have other big benefits. Superpower number two?
Just by being there, they make the soil stronger.
TIM CREWS: The roots of perennial grains form soil in the way the annual species just don’t.
And that’s r eally exciting to soil scientists like Tim Crews.
TIM: I’m the Chief Scientist and a soil ecologist here at the Land Institute.
In the last two episodes, we heard about how cover crops hold the soil together, and pull carbon out of the air and store it in the earth. Tim says that Kernza, with its big old perennial roots, can do those things on, like, steroids.
Kernza also helps repair degraded ecosystems. That’s superpower number three.
Scientists call it “ecosystem services.”
TIM CREWS: For example, annual crops that rely on roots that appear and disappear, they leak about half of the fertilizer that’s put on every year.
When wheat’s little annual roots can’t drink up all the fertilizer they’re fed, that fertilizer ends up running off and polluting our drinking water. Kernza’s perennial roots can slurp up almost twice as much fertilizer as wheat’s, which means way less of it runs off as pollution.
TIM CREWS: It’s remarkable. And it’s those voracious roots. This huge root mass is able to just take up nutrients.
In fact, Kernza’s roots are so voracious that, a few years ago, The Forever Green Initiative tried planting Kernza near fertilizer-contaminated wells in Minnesota. And now, that water is drinkable again.
So, Kernza comes with these environmental benefits AND it can produce a grain we can eat… Not bad for a little wheatgrass, if you ask the Land Institute.
And that’s actually their whole angle: The Land Institute thinks that, eventually, replacing the world’s annual crops with their perennial cousins — like swapping out annual wheat for Kernza — is the key to feeding both people and soil in a warmer world.
Farming this way — using methods that are actually GOOD for the soil — has a name:
TIM CREWS: Regenerative agriculture.
Farming regeneratively is ONE way agriculture can remedy some of the problems of climate change — problems modern agriculture helped CREATE:
TIM CREWS: A lot, a lot of the soil’s carbon was lost when we converted natural ecosystems into annual ecosystems.
Minnesota’s natural ecosystems are big woods, wetlands, pine forests, and prairies. That landscape started to change on a big scale about 150 years ago, when homesteaders took this land and started plowing it into big annual fields — depleting the soil’s carbon in the process.
TIM CREWS: In order to recapture that carbon, we return the ecosystem to being diverse and perennial. Those roots will feed microbes. They feed all these processes that sequester carbon and draw it down out of the atmosphere.
Compared to the crops we grow now, perennials like Kernza are a lot more like the plants that originally grew on Midwestern grasslands. Tim gestures to the view outside his window.
TIM CREWS: When we walk outside // and we look at a tilled field, you go, “That field wants to be a prairie.” If you leave it alone for enough time, it will become a prairie. Like, it’ll just— That will happen, still.
And it’s not just the Midwest. Remember, 70% of the world’s croplands are planted with annual grains — often in places where those grains were never meant to grow.
Kernza’s not the only perennial on the soil-saving menu of the future! Scientists are also developing perennial rice, hybrid wheat, and a whole bunch of other crops which will disrupt the soil less than the varieties we currently grow.
If developing crops is in a race against climate change, then Kernza is like a promising rookie on the track team. But can a rookie crop really move from obscurity to world domination? Don Wyse tells me it’s not only possible — it’s actually happened before. Today, it’s Kernza. But in the early 20th Century—
DON WYSE: It was soybean.
That’s right. Soy — which came from Asia — didn’t get big in the U.S. until after World War Two. When wartime rationing ended, demand for meat skyrocketed, and farmers needed a cheaper feed source for their livestock.
DON WYSE: So there was this huge switch increasing the demand // for soy.
Only problem was: Soy was producing pretty teeny yields at the time. So scientists started breeding higher-yielding soy crops. Today’s soy is the second most widely grown crop in the U.S. — used for animal feed, people food, and biodiesel. But getting here took 80 years.
DON WYSE: So increasing yields over time takes time!
That’s the thing: We don’t have a lot of time. And Kernza faces other hurdles besides growing into a more robust version of itself. Right now, there’s virtually NO consumer demand for Kernza… and few businesses to support it.
SILVIA SECCHI: You need to think about the supply chain. Who’s going to buy your grains? Who’s going to process your grains?
Silvia Secchi is a natural resource economist at the University of Iowa. She says the future of perennial grains is going to depend on more than breakthroughs in plant breeding.
SILVIA SECCHI: You can’t just change the crops, right? // This is a whole system that we need to modify.
But getting perennial grains like Kernza to compete with the annuals we grow now is not going to be easy, because the U.S. farm bill pumps money into annuals like corn and soy.
Sylvia saw the impact of those subsidies in 2019, when her research brought her to Iowa’s corn fields. She interviewed farmers about their climate mitigation strategies.
SILVIA SECCHI: And we asked them: What is the main mechanism that you use to protect yourself against climate change? And what they said is: Subsidized crop insurance. Because they know that if their crop fails, they will get paid. // That’s why they plant corn after corn even though it creates problems // It’s because they know that that system is bulletproof. It’s protected by the federal government.
And that protection is getting increasingly expensive. In the last 25 years, federal crop insurance payouts to farmers who lost crops due to drought and flooding more than TRIPLED. In 2020 alone, federal insurance subsidies for “extreme weather events” surpassed 4 BILLION dollars.
So, until the government stops massively incentivizing farmers to grow annuals– corn, soy, and wheat aren’t going anywhere. A lot needs to change at the policy level, Silvia says, before a perennial revolution will be even remotely possible:
SILVIA SECCHI: What we need for Kernza to find its place is changes to our farm policy. For example, // If you have crop insurance subsidies for corn and beans, right? You should have them for Kernza.
Forever Green Director Don Wyse… agrees. For Kernza to stand up to the heavy hitters, it’ll need federal support. So the people who make decisions about ag policy have a choice to make:
DON WYSE: Whether or not it’s worthy of the investment in these new crops // that give you this new set of outcomes: Protection of the agricultural landscape, the enhancement of water quality, and creating new economic opportunities for rural communities.
But – with federal support or not – in order to see any of these benefits on a meaningful scale? We need to be growing a lot more Kernza than we are today. There are only about four thousand acres of Kernza growing worldwide. There are individual FARMS that are bigger than that! But Land Institute’s Lee DeHaan says this is just the beginning:
LEE DEHAAN: We have to have something that can be productive enough to be able to substitute for some of our staple grains.
We’re talking—
LEE DEHAAN: Hundreds of thousands to millions of acres.
Okay. So, it’s a long road ahead.
But in 2020, the Land Institute received a 10 million dollar grant from the USDA to start scaling Kernza up. That grant money has got people building out a supply chain by experimenting with Kernza: farmers farming it, millers milling it, and bakers baking it for eaters to eat. And this rollout plan? It’s designed to grow gradually.
TESSA PETERS: We’re really concerned about ensuring that there is a supply chain for years and years to come.
Tessa Peters is the Land Institute’s Crop Stewardship Director. She’s like a matchmaker between researchers, farmers, processors, and food producers.
Tessa hears from lots of farmers, all of them excited about a profitable way to farm regeneratively.
TESSA PETERS: You know, I don’t think there’s a farmer in the world who wants to kill their soil.
There are only about 60 Kernza growers in the whole U.S. — and most of them are in Minnesota.
Minnesota is something of an incubator for this fledgling Kernza supply chain. So let’s see what building that supply chain looks like. Starting on the farm.
CARMEN: This is the stuff we’re going to be planting, this, in that field right there.
Meet Carmen Fernholz. He’s been farming small grains, corn, and soybeans organically in western Minnesota for almost 50 years. He added Kernza to his crop roster thanks to a buddy of his at the University of Minnesota.
CARMEN: Dr. Don Wyse.
Yeah, that Don Wyse. Director of the Forever Green Initiative. Don and Carmen go way back, and in 2011, Forever Green asked Carmen to help out with their Kernza research, to figure out how Kernza actually grows in practice.
CARMEN: I said, “For sure.” Give me some seed; I’ll plant it.
That first year, around harvest time, Carmen realized he didn’t actually know what to do with the crop he’d grown. So he gave Don a call.
CARMEN FERNHOLZ: Don says, “Well, I think you should try and harvest that. And I said, Well, is there any special way to harvest it? He says, “You’re a farmer. You can figure it out.” [Laugh fades down]
You can probably hear in Carmen’s voice that this was a real “building the plane as you’re flying it” situation. But he kept at it, and his Kernza field grew.
CARMEN: Right now we have about 80 acres of Kernza.
When I visited Carmen’s farm last August, he’d just completed his tenth Kernza harvest. Kernza still isn’t growing at a size where it’s a viable replacement for wheat. But Carmen’s on-farm trial and error is getting it to that point.
Carmen brought me out to his barn and opened up this big white plastic bag — big enough that I could fit inside. He reached in, grabbed a fistful of Kernza kernels, and let them filter through his fingers. Kernza still doesn’t mature to uniform sizes. Some kernels are bigger than others. But—
CARMEN FERNHOLZ: If you look at that kernel—
Carmen points to one of the kernels in his palm, a little bigger than a grain of rice.
CARMEN FERNHOLZ: —that’s starting to approach the size of a wheat kernel. And when I started in 2011—
He points to another kernel — this one much smaller than most of the others.
CARMEN FERNHOLZ: —that might have been the biggest kernel I had. So you look at that comparison.
RACHEL YANG: Yeah. It looks so tiny compared to that one. It’s, like, half the size.
CARMEN FERNHOLZ: Exactly. And that’s the work that they’ve been able to do now.
RACHEL YANG: Wow!
The week I visited, Carmen had just loaded 25,000 pounds of Kernza into a semi bound for a processing plant in North Dakota. There are just a couple of facilities in the Upper Midwest that can turn field-fresh Kernza into something we can eat. That’s our next stop in the Kernza supply chain. We’re heading to a grain processor just south of Minneapolis: Perennial Pantry.
It’s a modest little grain cleaning start-up tucked into an office park right off the highway. When Kernza arrives here from farms, it’s dropped off in the warehouse’s back room, usually in big plastic bags like the one in Carmen’s barn.
CHRISTOPHER: Raw grain comes in and oftentimes it has to go to each machine more than once, and eventually comes through to fully cleaned grain.
Christopher Abbott steers the ship around here – he’s the president of Perennial Pantry. He says the Kernza they get looks really different depending on how and where it was grown — and even what method the farmer used to harvest it.
CHRISTOPHER ABBOTT: Maybe 60 percent of what shows up is Kernza. And the rest is chaff and stalks and stuff that came out of the field. // And so we need to sort through that and say, this is good Kernza. This is other stuff.
In order to process Kernza of all shapes and sizes,– which keeps changing with every scientific tweak – the Perennial Pantry team Frankensteins machinery together:
CHRISTOPHER ABBOTT: We sort of build it, run it until it breaks and then say, “Okay, let’s build a new one.”
Christopher and his team take apart and put back together these machines to best suit whatever type of Kernza they’re working with: Puny Kernza. Beefy Kernza. This year’s Kernza. Next year’s Kernza. Kernza with a bunch of undesirable crud mixed in.
But figuring out how to clean Kernza isn’t the only challenge Perennial Pantry is troubleshooting. They’re also figuring out how to cook with this stuff. So once the Kernza’s been filtered, cleaned, and milled into flour, it gets hoisted via 28-gallon tupperware tubs through a door transporting it from the warehouse —
RACHEL YANG: It smells pretty good in here.
JOE KAPLAN: There’s a bun in the oven.
– to the test kitchen. Welcome to the next stop on the supply chain, by the way: This is where Kernza becomes food. Perennial Pantry is experimenting with Kernza flour and whole grains in all kinds of recipes: for grain salads, pancake mixes, malt liquor, and baked goods.
CHRISTOPHER ABBOTT: We still don’t know what’s really going to work for Kernza. Is // Kernza cereal is really what’s going to take off and make Kernza well known? Or is it crackers? Or is it brownie mix or is it— Who knows?
Today’s Kernza flour is light and fluffy, more like a cake flour than all-purpose. To encourage Kernza’s progress on its quest to become the grain of the future, the test kitchen measures Kernza baked goods against those made with the grain of the now: wheat.
So, today, Kernza flour is getting baked into dinner rolls and measured against a control group of wheat buns — that control group is coming out of the oven right now.
From here, they start measuring. How high do they rise? How dense are they? Those measurements actually help plant geneticists back at the Land Institute, who are breeding Kernza into something that behaves a lot more like whole wheat. Because if casual bakers like yours truly are ever gonna add Kernza flour to our grocery lists?
CHRISTOPHER ABBOTT: It’s got to be relatively easy or relatively straightforward to swap in Kernza for wheat.
It also has to taste good.
RACHEL YANG: How does it taste?
EATER 1: Oh, Kernza is delicious.
EATER 2: There’s, like, brown sugar notes. Butterscotch.
Admittedly, these were Kernza-vangelists.
EATER 3: It provides something unique…
EATER 2: It’s got some nutty notes.
EATER 3: … but familiar?
EATER 2: Almond extract.
Kernza’s functioning – if tiny – supply chain means national brands are starting to pay attention. General Mills introduced a limited-run Kernza cereal. Patagonia Provisions is brewing a Kernza beer. And Whole Foods even named Kernza one of its “Top 10 Food Trends for 2022.”
It’s a start. And not just for Kernza!
In fact, says Forever Green’s Don Wyse, it’s not really about any of these grains at all.
DON WYSE: It’s about what those grains can DO.
And – Christopher Abbott of Perennial Pantry says – it’s about a much bigger change.
CHRISTOPHER ABBOTT: If you’re reimagining the whole system from the genetics, then it’s an opportunity to reimagine the whole system all the way through to the end consumer.
What a perennial grain like Kernza does is offer us a chance to look at what’s not working and change course — from field to fork. It’s a radical, long-term vision.
Next time on Hot Farm.. there’s yet another radical idea out there. Not just about how we farm, or what we farm… But where we farm.
MARTY MATLOCK: I wouldn’t call it the next California. I would say // where is our next garden? California, South Texas, Florida. They’re our current garden. Where are we going to expand our garden?
SHAWN PEEBLES: It’s gonna take a hundred million dollar investment from whatever corporation wants to come in here and put it. //
LUX: it’s like, it’s like if you build it, they will come?
PEEBLES: just like the field of dreams, you know?
This episode was reported and produced by Rachel Yang and edited by me, Eve Abrams, with additional editing help from Alison MacAdam. Hot Farm was conceived by me with the Food and Environment Reporting Network. A huge thanks to FERN Editor-in-Chief Sam Fromartz, Executive Editor Brent Cunningham, Contributing Editor Elizabeth Royte, and Staff Writer Teresa (Cot-sa-ril-us) Cotsirilos.
Thanks ALSO to Nick Jordan, Tammy Kimbler, and Claire Kelloway.
Greg Scahtz composed Hot Farm’s music and performed it, along with Paul Kemnitz and Tony Nozero. Recorded at the House of 1000Hz. Engineering by Andrew Gilchrest
Funding for this podcast was provided in part by the Walton Family Foundation.
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