{"id":8017,"date":"2019-12-12T02:43:52","date_gmt":"2019-12-11T21:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/udaen.info\/?p=8017"},"modified":"2019-12-12T02:43:52","modified_gmt":"2019-12-11T21:13:52","slug":"kernza-an-alternative-to-wheat-that-doesnt-need-replanting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/udaen.info\/?p=8017","title":{"rendered":"Kernza- An Alternative to Wheat that Doesn’t Need Replanting"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kernza- An Alternative to Wheat that Doesn’t Need Replanting<\/h2>\n
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A\u00a0 crop\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0that not only proved to be an alternative to wheat but its\u00a0speciality\u00a0lies in its nature to grow in the soil that does not require harvest which is usually the case with other crops.\u00a0\u00a0The plants real name is intermediate wheatgrass, but that struck people as kind of clunky, so they renamed it. It’s a distant relative of regular wheat. It’s never grown as a grain crop because it doesn’t produce as much seed as wheat. But it is a perennial.<\/p>\n

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The creator of this crop is a plant breeder\u00a0Lee\u00a0DeHaan\u00a0who has been working since\u00a0past 15 years\u00a0&\u00a0cross-pollinating individual\u00a0Kernza\u00a0plants. He grows them in greenhouses and in open fields and selects the best offspring, paying particular attention to the size of the seeds they make. Bigger seeds means bigger harvest to the mill.\u00a0“As you can see, the seed is pretty small. It’s about one-fifth the size of wheat,” he says.<\/p>\n

But he has been making progress. These seeds are twice as large as when the project started. The Land Institute has recruited farmers to grow\u00a0Kernza\u00a0in small fields (small for the Midwest, at least) of 40 acres or so. They’re harvesting it with standard farm machinery.<\/p>\n

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DeHaan\u00a0recalls the day, years ago, when he realized that\u00a0Kernza\u00a0might be more than a long-term scientific experiment. He was visiting a farmer who’d grown a field of\u00a0Kernza. The farmer had just finished his wheat harvest, and\u00a0DeHaan\u00a0asked if he’d be willing to try to harvest the\u00a0Kernza\u00a0field with his combine. “He was kind of skeptical, but he was willing to give it a shot,”\u00a0DeHaan\u00a0recalls. “I’m riding with him in the combine, and it’s starting to fill up his bin in the back. He was almost giddy; he was starting to giggle about it. He couldn’t believe it was working.” They ended up with almost a full semitrailer load of\u00a0Kernza\u00a0grain.<\/p>\n

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Companies like Cheerios and\u00a0Wheaties\u00a0say that they want\u00a0to make cereal out of it.\u00a0Many research firms are talking interest in the seed\u00a0 now as\u00a0\u00a0the R&D team saw this lovely grain and thought, ‘There is something we can do with it,’ says Maria Carolina Comings, marketing director for General Mills’ organic brand, Cascadian Farm.<\/p>\n

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In recent months, General Mills gathered up all the\u00a0Kernza\u00a0grain that it could find, milled it, and made 6,000 small boxes of cereal to hand out as samples \u2014 and at events like the one this week in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

The grain in sweet in taste and there’s actually more regular wheat in this cereal than\u00a0Kernza.\u00a0The quality of this crop is that it grows like grass\u00a0grass\u00a0on the prairie, protecting the soil, taking carbon from the air and storing it in the earth so it can be made available in huge quantity which can be marketed by General Mills.<\/p>\n

Cascadian Farm brand, Comings says.\u00a0“We want to scale this and be able to find it on any grocery store, sitting on the same shelves” alongside every other cereal put out by General\u00a0Mills. You\u00a0can start to be part of the solution to climate change by eating a cereal, which is just so lovely.”<\/p>\n

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The\u00a0president of\u00a0Land Institute\u00a0Fred\u00a0Lutzi,\u00a0is recruiting farmers to grow larger quantities of\u00a0Kernza, but they’re telling people not to expect too much, too soon. “Commercial production of\u00a0Kernza\u00a0in 2019 is akin to taking a car for a test drive when it’s halfway down the assembly line.”\u00a0For one thing,\u00a0Kernza\u00a0produces small harvests right now \u2014 perhaps 500 pounds per acre. By comparison, the average U.S. field of wheat yields about 4,000 pounds per acre.<\/p>\n

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But long-term, the Land Institute also has grand ambitions. “Our goal is not for it to be a small-scale, niche thing,” says Lee\u00a0DeHaan. “We have landscape-scale problems,” and to make a real impact, perennial grains need to cover the landscape.<\/p>\n

This past week in San Francisco, food writers and environmentalists gathered to taste\u00a0this\u00a0breakfast cereal.<\/p>\n

The crop has been invented 40 years ago when Wes Jackson, scientist-environmentalist argued that humanity took a wrong turn, thousands of years ago, when it came to rely on crops like wheat and rice for basic sustenance. These “annual” crops need replanting each year, “which means that if you’re going to get your seed to germinate, you’ve got to destroy the vegetation at the surface,” clearing away anything that might compete with the fragile seedlings and\u00a0that’s the result of a radical campaign to reinvent agriculture and reverse an environmentally disastrous choice made by our distant ancestors.<\/p>\n

No doubt in future,\u00a0Kernza\u00a0will prove to be the crop that farmers will\u00a0use as an alternative\u00a0to get rid of competing vegetation, that\u00a0inevitably wipe away habitat for birds and insects. Bare soil washes away and pollutes streams and rivers. Tilling the soil releases vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the\u00a0atmosphere. Therefore\u00a0using this crop will not only bring revolution in food production but also saves environment by protecting nature.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kernza- An Alternative to Wheat that Doesn’t Need Replanting A\u00a0 crop\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0that not only proved to be an alternative to wheat but its\u00a0speciality\u00a0lies in its nature to grow in the soil that does not require harvest which is usually the case with other crops.\u00a0\u00a0The plants real name is intermediate wheatgrass, but that struck people as kind […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/udaen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8017"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/udaen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/udaen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/udaen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/udaen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8017"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/udaen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8018,"href":"https:\/\/udaen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8017\/revisions\/8018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/udaen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/udaen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/udaen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}