A New Way to Grow Your Breakfast

  • Brook Wilke and his son, Charlie, visit a test farm at The Kellogg Biological Research Station. Wilke and other researchers are testing how well perennial versions of popular grain crops, such as wheat, will grow in Michigan. The test farm isn't too far from Battle Creek, the home of the commercial breakfast cereal industry. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

If you had a bowl of cereal or maybe a muffin this morning, you ate flour from an annual crop. They grow one season, they die, then get re-planted again the next year. Sounds as natural as could be, but repetitive planting can wear out farmland. It can cause soil erosion and cause more water pollution. Now, some scientists are trying to coax grain crops into growing for years at a time. Shawn Allee visited researchers who are testing perennial wheat in the heart of cereal country:

Transcript

If you had a bowl of cereal or maybe a muffin this morning, you ate flour from an annual crop. They grow one season, they die, then get re-planted again the next year. Sounds as natural as could be, but repetitive planting can wear out farmland. It can cause soil erosion and cause more water pollution. Now, some scientists are trying to coax grain crops into growing for years at a time. Shawn Allee visited researchers who are testing perennial wheat in the heart of cereal country:

I’ve headed to a test farm run by Michigan State University. It’s not that
far from Battle Creek,
Michigan where cereal companies like Kelloggs got started.

Dr. Sieg Snapp shows me grain that might make into our cereal bowls
someday.

Allee: “What are we looking at on this side?”

Snapp: “We have 6 varieties of perennial wheat.”

Right now, they kinda look like spindly blades of grass. But in some ways,
this is miraculous; regular
wheat dies after harvest. These have been harvested, and now they’re
popping back up.

“We’ll harvest these this summer, and then in the fall, they’ll re-grow.
They build a deep root
system, and they’re able to come back. So, at first, they start off very
similar, but they keep
growing longer, and they re-grow after harvest. That’s the real
difference.”

Actually, that’s just the start of the difference between annual grains
like wheat and perennial
varieties.

Dr. Snapp says when farmers plant most annual grain crops, soil gets torn
up again and again from
planting and replanting. Rain can wash away exposed top-soil.

Perennial crops get planted once every few years, so they might hold soil
and they might need less
fertilizer that runs off into streams and rivers.

Snapp: “So, the roots of traditional crops including annual wheat are
usually 1-2 feet. These
root systems might be down 6 feet. They can use fertilizers more
efficiently, so they can pick
it up from deep and then move it up where we want it, into the grain.”

Allee: “And if the roots are deep enough, you might need less herbicide
to kill weeds, right?
If that perennial wheat comes up strong enough, it’s already out-competing
the weeds that
are next to it?”

Snapp: “Right, and each year it should do it better for a couple years at
least, we don’t know
how long.”

Dr. Snapp and her colleagues use the word “maybe” a lot when they talk
about perennial grains. It’s
mostly because testing these crops is slow work. That’s one reason they’re
letting some farmers run
their own small tests.

She introduces me to one farmer.

“Hi John! Come on over!”

Part-time farmer and teacher John Edgerton says he checked his test batches
recently.

“I didn’t know what to expect and I went out there and low and behold,
it’s greening up
beautifully. In fact, now, it may be a little too thick. We’ll see.”

Edgerton wants to know whether sheep can get cheap feed from leftover wheat
grass, or whether
farmers could save on tractor fuel.

“One farmer said to me, you know, if I could get three or four years of a
decent crop of
perennial wheat without having to plow, there’d be enormous savings.”

Pretty soon, another perennial wheat researcher joins us in the test field.
He’s Brook Wilke.

He tells me, all this work on perennial wheat and other grains will work
best if the final product, the
grain, tastes like what we’re used to.

Allee: “I hear you baked some chocolate chip cookies with perennial
wheat.”

Wilke: “Yeah. A big component of this work is, “’will people eat the
perennial wheat?’”

Dr. Snapp tasted Wilke’s cookies. She says the wheat tasted kinda nutty,
but good.

Dr. Snapp says maybe one day, she and other researchers will prove
perennial grain plants can thrive.
After that, maybe bread or cereal companies, like Kellogs, will run
taste-tests of their own.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links