instead become perennial, like wheat grows in the wild—if it could be “native to its place,” as Wes likes to say—agriculture’s worst offenses, like plowing and the need for chemical fertilizers, could be avoided.
In 2009, Wes and I attended a food conference in California as part of a panel about the future of food. When asked by the moderator to describe his work, Wes simply said, “I’m solving the ten-thousand-year-old problem of agriculture.” To his mind, agriculture’s problem is not mega-farms or feedlots or chemical fertilizers. The problem is agriculture itself.
On the walk back to the hotel that evening, I asked him about the possibility of his perennial wheat appearing anytime soon, a question I later learned annoys Wes, because he hears it so often. But he only cranked up his slow prairie drawl and said, not immodestly, “If you’re working on a problemyou can solve in your own lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.” He said he wanted to show me what he meant.
I followed him to his room, where he handed me a cardboard shipping tube. “You are the first to see this,” he said. I must have had a look of
Why me?
because he added, “We shipped them here the day they arrived. I knew I wouldn’t sleep tonight if I didn’t have a nice, long look-see.” I started uncorking the tube. He stopped me. “Go ahead and roll it out, but do it in the hallway. It won’t fit in the room.”
I unfurled the photographic banner onto the hallway carpet. It was twenty-two feet long and reached down the corridor, past the doorways of two other rooms. Wes bent down and evened out the crinkles. On the left was a life-size profile of perennial prairie wheat, showing the plant both above and below the soil. Aboveground, the stalks, leaves, and seed head took up less than half the photograph. Belowground, the wheat’s root system was at least eight feet long—a Rapunzel-like tangle of thick fibers anchored deep in the soil.
I stepped back. The roots merged into what looked like the trunk of a sequoia tree, only growing down instead of up. “That’s nature investing—digging into the soil, seeking nutrients and moisture,” Wes said as I studied what once had been the underbelly of the prairie.
To the right of this, a photo showed another patch of wheat, above and below ground. But this was modern wheat, the kind that’s planted each year and, as Wes reminded me, “occupies sixty million acres of real estate in this country alone.” Aboveground, the wheat was a much shorter copy of itsperennial cousin. But belowground, the roots were wispy, thin hairs, barely an arm’s length in depth. Compared with the perennial, they looked laughably anemic, needle threads next to those dreadlocks. Such are the roots that blanket the prairie and fill those bags of white flour dumped into the bin in front of my office. I was looking at the roots of my cuisine.
“Those wimpy little things,” Wes said, smiling. “There’s your problem right there.”
Until the 1800s, almost everyone who visited the Great Plains thought the problem was the prairie itself. The massive land area was called theGreat American Desert, which, from the perspective of people accustomed to things like trees, is a forgivable first impression. But also a mistaken one.
In fact, there was plenty of aboveground diversity in the prairie. Add to the grasses the surrounding two hundred or so broadleaf flowering plants, the forbs, shrubs, and sedges, and what you had was a kaleidoscope of natural variety—a richly purposeful system in which grass and plant depended on one another to thrive.
And yet, the true wealth of any prairie exists in the soil, where the majority of the biomass resides (unlike, say, a rainforest ecology, where the richness, or biomass, is mostly above the surface). Wes likes to remind his audiences that the soil’s richness results from a lucky geological break. A few million years ago, glaciers formed in the
In 2009, Wes and I attended a food conference in California as part of a panel about the future of food. When asked by the moderator to describe his work, Wes simply said, “I’m solving the ten-thousand-year-old problem of agriculture.” To his mind, agriculture’s problem is not mega-farms or feedlots or chemical fertilizers. The problem is agriculture itself.
On the walk back to the hotel that evening, I asked him about the possibility of his perennial wheat appearing anytime soon, a question I later learned annoys Wes, because he hears it so often. But he only cranked up his slow prairie drawl and said, not immodestly, “If you’re working on a problemyou can solve in your own lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.” He said he wanted to show me what he meant.
I followed him to his room, where he handed me a cardboard shipping tube. “You are the first to see this,” he said. I must have had a look of
Why me?
because he added, “We shipped them here the day they arrived. I knew I wouldn’t sleep tonight if I didn’t have a nice, long look-see.” I started uncorking the tube. He stopped me. “Go ahead and roll it out, but do it in the hallway. It won’t fit in the room.”
I unfurled the photographic banner onto the hallway carpet. It was twenty-two feet long and reached down the corridor, past the doorways of two other rooms. Wes bent down and evened out the crinkles. On the left was a life-size profile of perennial prairie wheat, showing the plant both above and below the soil. Aboveground, the stalks, leaves, and seed head took up less than half the photograph. Belowground, the wheat’s root system was at least eight feet long—a Rapunzel-like tangle of thick fibers anchored deep in the soil.
I stepped back. The roots merged into what looked like the trunk of a sequoia tree, only growing down instead of up. “That’s nature investing—digging into the soil, seeking nutrients and moisture,” Wes said as I studied what once had been the underbelly of the prairie.
To the right of this, a photo showed another patch of wheat, above and below ground. But this was modern wheat, the kind that’s planted each year and, as Wes reminded me, “occupies sixty million acres of real estate in this country alone.” Aboveground, the wheat was a much shorter copy of itsperennial cousin. But belowground, the roots were wispy, thin hairs, barely an arm’s length in depth. Compared with the perennial, they looked laughably anemic, needle threads next to those dreadlocks. Such are the roots that blanket the prairie and fill those bags of white flour dumped into the bin in front of my office. I was looking at the roots of my cuisine.
“Those wimpy little things,” Wes said, smiling. “There’s your problem right there.”
Until the 1800s, almost everyone who visited the Great Plains thought the problem was the prairie itself. The massive land area was called theGreat American Desert, which, from the perspective of people accustomed to things like trees, is a forgivable first impression. But also a mistaken one.
In fact, there was plenty of aboveground diversity in the prairie. Add to the grasses the surrounding two hundred or so broadleaf flowering plants, the forbs, shrubs, and sedges, and what you had was a kaleidoscope of natural variety—a richly purposeful system in which grass and plant depended on one another to thrive.
And yet, the true wealth of any prairie exists in the soil, where the majority of the biomass resides (unlike, say, a rainforest ecology, where the richness, or biomass, is mostly above the surface). Wes likes to remind his audiences that the soil’s richness results from a lucky geological break. A few million years ago, glaciers formed in the
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