Category: Agriculture and Grasslands

To restore the prairie, you have to burn it.

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_{A juvenile alligator peeks out from the marsh. © Kenny Braun / TNC}

Goertz is giving me and colleague Claire Everett a tour of the Clive Runnells Family Mad Island Marsh, a Nature Conservancy preserve on the Texas Gulf Coast. And indeed, we’ve seen a lot of alligators. Big ones, small ones, ones that “cannonball” into the water at our approach and ones that sit along the bank and watch us with indifference.

But the alligators are a side attraction; we’re here to look at the influence of fire. Fire shapes nearly every aspect of the grassland and marsh ahead of us. But unlike the gators, the signs of fire are difficult for me to see.

I live on the edge of the Rockies, where you can see traces of fire on the forest for years afterwards. The charred trees of the famous 1988 fire in Yellowstone National Park are visible to any visitor.

Here, the grasses wave in the breeze, as if it has always been this way. As if this is a pristine, untouched landscape. Goertz is here to show us a different story.

A Brief History of Mad Island

My eyes kept looking up; as a naturalist, I had a lot to watch. Various species of herons, waders, ibis – singly and in flocks – lifted from the waters as we drove past. White-tailed deer trotted along the meadows and gar gulped air in the freshwater channels. In the bay, bottlenose dolphins offered quick glimpses as they surfaced.

Traveling along one wetland, we see a swimming flock of fulvous whistling ducks, a flushing flock of mottled ducks and a white-tailed hawk. Three lifer birds in a quarter mile.

The Texas Gulf Coast prairies and marsh once consisted of 9 million acres. By the 20^th century, much of that landscape had been developed, with just 2 percent of native habitat remaining.

The establishment of the Clive Runnells Family Mad Island Marsh Preserve began in 1989, when Clive Runnells II donated more than 3,000 acres of coastal wetlands and upland prairies to TNC. The land is directly adjacent to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s Mad Island Wildlife Management Area, which TNC helped establish with a 5,700-acre donation.

In 1993, TNC added 3,900 acres to the preserve with critical support from the North American Wetlands Conservation Council, as well as the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Dow Chemical, US Environmental Protection Agency, Trull Foundation and Communities Foundation of Texas.

For the first couple of decades of the preserve’s existence, much of the conservation effort focused on restoring wetlands for waterfowl and other wildlife. The area was well-known for its importance to migratory birds, sitting at the confluence of two principal North American migration routes. For years, the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center had operated a bird banding station on the preserve to study the patterns and behavior of migratory birds. These efforts are now carried on by collaborations between Texas A&M University and University of Maryland.  

But there was also a recognition that, for this landscape to naturally function as marsh and prairie, other restoration was needed.

And Goertz realized early on that to achieve that resilience would require the use of fire.

From Raggedy to Awesome

Another flock of ducks circles overhead and I strain my eyes to identify them. My eyes continue to look up. Goertz is urging me to look down.

He’s scrunched over, brushing his hands through the plants at our feet. From the road, this looks like a sea of grass. Up close, a rich diversity of native plant species is revealed.

With the global threats impacting lands and waters, conservationists often speak of the need of rapid, large-scale solutions. The Nature Conservancy, for instance, has ambitious goals that will lead to global change. But ultimately, those goals have to touch down on the ground, in places like this. Goertz has to think about the management of thousands of acres. And sometimes, he’s looking at plants right beneath his feet.

When TNC acquired this property, many parts were, as Goertz puts it, “raggedy.” The ranch had been heavily grazed by cattle for decades. Brush had encroached on the prairie, reducing its diversity and its importance to wildlife.

“I’ve put all my eggs in the fire basket, and it’s made all the difference,” says Goertz.

TNC has been using prescribed fire on its lands for decades. Staff know how to coordinate a safe, controlled burn that achieves the desired ecological results. Working with partners, Goertz continues conducting fires at Mad Island.

Still, this land had not seen fire to this extent for a long time. So it needs some additional help.

The Spaces Between

After Mad Island was burned, some of the changes were quickly apparent. Other changes would escape the notice of a casual visitor; that’s why Goertz is often bent down, examining plants at the square-foot level.

“Prescribed fire isn’t just about clearing brush,” he says. “It certainly does that. But what’s really interesting is what happens in the interspaces, the ground left open by the burning. The fire increases solar contact with the soil. So much comes up in the spaces between. You get quality and quantity of native plants in ways I wasn’t expecting.”

“First, you’d see circles of plants coming up around where we broadcast the seed,” says Goertz. “By year two or three, you see seed dispersion. That’s when it gets really exciting.”

_{© Kenny Braun / TNC}

Lately, the seed collection has intensified. Staff use a street sweeper-style harvester to pull seeds off native plants and dump them in a bin. Last season, 900 pounds were harvested off 16 acres.

“There’s a lot of opportunity to increase that harvest,” says Goertz. “We can then use them on our own restoration sites or share them with other conservation projects.”

The prescribed burning is an annual effort, and one that seemingly occupies Goertz’s thoughts most hours of the day. As we walk through the grass, he’s constantly pointing. He’s showing me those little changes in topography, clumps of plants, how those plants have responded to fire.

“This place looks flat, but there’s a lot of landscape diversity here,” he says. “You see that when you’re out here, the little depressions and rises in the landscape.”

The result of that attention to detail, that passion for the land, is everywhere around me. I can’t see signs of the fire. I can see swaying prairie grass, the birds lifting off out of the marshes, the deer trotting ahead of us. To my eyes, it looks perfect, but I know it’s not pristine.

“I can’t do a perfect replication of the native prairie,” says Goertz. “That’s not the goal. I want it to function in a resilient state. What we are finding is that when we burn at this scale, diversity is embedded in the whole system. There’s a ‘Field of Dreams’ aspect to this. Burn it, and the diversity comes.”

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This article was originally published in Cool Green Science, a blog by The Nature Conservancy, on June 18, 2023 and updated on June 26, 2023.

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There is no silver bullet to improving soil health and mitigating climate change, but biochar has potential to be a widespread and powerful tool in the soil health and climate-smart toolbox. Managing soils with charred biomass has been practiced for centuries, originating with indigenous people who created the Terra Preta soils of the Amazon Basin. The creation of biochar from organic materials and its application to sandy, acidic, weathered tropical soils improved soil water holding capacity, pH, nutrient retention, structure, and crop yields, while also adding stable carbon.

Today, biochars are created from pyrolysis i.e., process of thermochemical conversion at temperatures >350°C and low to no oxygen of organic waste feedstocks (like woody or crop residues) and can be co-composted with other organic materials, combined with fertilizers, or treated post-production to produce specific physical and chemical properties in the final biochar amendment. 

Scientific consensus on the benefits of biochar soil amendments

Building on the traditional practice, research in the last 20 years has produced over 20,000 peer-reviewed publications investigating the benefits of diverse biochars on agricultural soils around the world. There are complex interactions among soil type, biochar type, crop, management, and weather as well as on-going efforts to expand decision support to match the right biochar with the right soil. From a convening of stakeholders and experts in March 2022 (Biochar Convening Summary), there was broad consensus on the benefits of biochar soil amendments, including:

Scroll through the eight data cards below:

Quantifying climate mitigation potential of biochar

Biochars have been proposed as a natural climate solution. Pyrogenic Carbon Capture and Storage (PyCCS; Schmidt et al. 2019) is the thermochemical conversion of feedstocks into pyrolyzed materials that are 100s to 1000s of times more stable. Without pyrolysis, the feedstocks would be burned or decomposed faster, releasing more CO₂ into the atmosphere. 

One commonly cited estimate of the global maximum potential of biochar to sequester carbon is 1.8 Gt CO₂e per year (Woolf et al. 2010), potentially mitigating around 10% of global GHG emissions from agrifood systems. Complete life cycle analysis evaluates the impact of biochar amendments on GHG emissions and should include a comparison of emissions from non-pyrolyzed feedstocks and the impact of biochar production, transportation, and application in agricultural systems, which could define when  the carbon drawdown period begins (Amonette et al. 2021 ). Biochars can also be by-products of a sustainable bioenergy industry, reducing net GHG emissions from the energy sector. Adaptation and resilience co-benefits of biochar should be included in any climate impact assessment. 

Barriers to biochar adoption

Centuries of practice and decades of research have not translated into widespread adoption of biochar in today’s agricultural production systems. A recent paper from American Farmland Trust, National Center for Appropriate Technology, and US Biochar Initiative outlined recommendations for stakeholders and policymakers to scale up a biochar industry through coordinated research and outreach. Some barriers to implementation of biochar as an agricultural soil amendment have included:

• Lack of education and awareness of the potential for biochars to provide climate adaptation, resilience, and mitigation benefits 
• Decision support tools for management of appropriate biochars on specific soils and production systems 
• Availability of local, sustainable, affordable biochar products.

Breaking down barriers

American Farmland Trust (AFT) and our partners are working to reduce barriers to biochar adoption. AFT, in collaboration with policy and industry leaders, researchers, and innovative farmers, is addressing barriers to adoption of biochar as a natural climate solution through the following efforts:

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Learn more about Biochar production in the United States:

When you mention biological soil crusts (also known as biocrusts) to Dr. Sasha Reed, her eyes light up and a smile widens across her face. For the last 15 years, this U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) biogeochemist has been on the ground and in the lab studying these soil communities that, while small, have big potential to sustain ecosystems as our planet warms. Now, thanks to increasing focus on dryland restoration and climate change science, there are new opportunities to scale up nature-based solutions with federal funding from programs like America the Beautiful.

If you close your eyes and picture a desert landscape, you might see sparse trees or shrubs and then lots of open areas of sand among the plants. While these areas look barren, they are actually filled with life in the form of soil surface communities called biocrusts. Biocrusts are the desert’s skin—a community of lichens, mosses and cyanobacteria that live on the soil surface in places where soils are exposed to the sun. Although the organisms are small, biocrusts are estimated to cover 12 percent of Earth’s land surface and can be found on all seven continents.

These complex communities play an astonishingly important role in sustaining desert ecosystems and in protecting human health. However, until recently, they have been sorely underappreciated. A growing climate crisis for Earth’s drylands and exciting research revelations are intersecting to shine a new light on the importance of biocrusts.

Dr. Reed – along with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Northern Arizona University and Rim to Rim Restoration – leads one of the world’s largest-scale cultivations of whole biocrust communities. With funding from a Wildlife Conservation Society grant, through their Climate Adaptation Fund, and with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the team is working toward a scientific breakthrough that will benefit dryland communities around the globe.

Homebase for the project is the Canyonlands Research Center (CRC) headquartered at TNC’s Dugout Ranch near Canyonlands National Park in southeast Utah. The CRC is a collaboration of academic institutions, land managers, and state and federal research agencies working together on climate science and sustainable land management solutions. With powerful partnerships, the cutting-edge CRC research facility attracts some of the world’s leading scientists in climate change, biological soil crusts, rangeland management, dryland vegetation ecology and soil erosion.

Thirty-four percent of people on Earth live in dryland regions. These areas support 44 percent of the world’s cultivated systems and 50 percent of the world’s livestock. Yet drylands are home to the poorest and most marginalized people in the world. Experts estimate that 25 to 35 percent of Earth’s drylands are already degraded, with over 250 million people directly affected and about one billion people in over 100 countries at risk. With climate change impacts intensifying rapidly, restoration solutions for key dryland components—like biocrusts—can’t come soon enough.

“These organisms pack so much punch!” exclaims Dr. Reed with two pumping fists. Just as coral reefs are critical to marine habitats, biocrusts are the ecosystem engineer of Earth’s drylands. Biocrusts provide important services to people and nature by:

• Stabilizing Soils – Biocrusts act as a “glue” to stabilize desert soil and prevent it from blowing away. In this way, biocrusts are nature’s safeguard against dust storms that threaten human health and wildlife.
• Boosting Fertility – Biocrusts take in nitrogen and concentrates other nutrients, playing a valuable role in the diversity and productiveness of desert soils that sustain plants, wildlife and agriculture. 
• Retaining Moisture – Biocrusts increase the ability of soils to retain water from precipitation, a critical process for the entire desert ecosystem. 
• Storing carbon – Like all photosynthetic organisms, biocrusts take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, sequestering carbon in soils.

Sue Bellagamba, TNC’s Canyonlands Regional Director, who is partnering with Dr. Reed, sums it up this way: “Biocrusts are the keystone element of the landscape in the western United States. If we lose our biocrusts, we could see major impacts on soil stability, vegetation and wildlife. Restoring biocrusts is a nature-based solution for mitigating the impacts of climate change and creating resilient drylands in the face of a warmer and dryer world.”

When healthy biocrusts are doing their job, they prevent the soil loss caused by wind and rainstorms. Massive dust storms, which are increasing in frequency across the southwest United States and in other drylands around the globe, are becoming more hazardous for people. Dust from one region can travel thousands of miles. These storms can limit visibility, threatening the safety of people on our highways and wreaking havoc on the human respiratory system. The reality is that if we lose biocrusts, people could also be impacted.

A bonus benefit is carbon storage. “There’s a lot of interest in carbon sequestration to mitigate climate change and we know biocrusts can take carbon out of the atmosphere via photosynthesis. However, we need to better quantify this carbon control. Our understanding of how much carbon restored biocrusts could sequester and how climate change will affect this uptake remains exceedingly poor,” says Dr. Reed.

Emerging evidence suggests drylands play a dominant role in key aspects of Earth’s carbon cycle, helping to regulate our planet’s terrestrial carbon sink. Dr. Reed and her team are working to quantify this role and to add this quantitative understanding in the context of climate change.

For years, scientists have known biocrusts were vulnerable to long-lasting damage from tires, boots and hooves. Now, a new threat looms: climate change. As heat and drought intensify for Earth’s dryland regions, the impacts on biocrusts are raising red flags. A recent study conducted by the USGS in Utah revealed that long-term experimental climate warming resulted in the dramatic loss of biocrust mosses, as well as slowed recovery of biocrusts following disturbance. Scientists warn that in the face of a warming climate, these biocrust losses could occur around the globe.

In short: Scientists like Dr. Reed and her team have a small window of time to figure out how to protect the very fabric of dryland ecosystems.

As scientists seek ways to restore damaged biocrusts in the face of climate change, they have had both advances and setbacks. Initially encouraged to discover they could grow biocrusts in a nursery, scientists were disappointed when the nursery-grown biocrusts died after being relocated to restoration sites in the desert. What they decided was that the nursery may have made life too easy for the biocrusts.

“They withered and blew away shortly after we sprinkled them on restoration sites in drought-stricken areas, such as the western U.S.,” says Dr. Reed, with a sigh. “We asked a lot of questions and came up with an idea to grow the crusts outside so they could acclimate with the harsh climate where they face relentless sun, heat and very little water.”

Researchers grew intact crust communities on biodegradable cloth on the first biocrust farm near Moab. After 8 months, volunteers unrolled the crusts on two restoration sites. The team is now monitoring these sites to determine how well the biocrusts grow. So far, they are seeing phenomenal response and future potential to advance our ability to sustain biocrusts in the face of climate change.

This forward-thinking restoration technique holds promise for scaling up the work. The size and pace of growth at the Moab biocrust farm marked an important success for restoration science. 

“If the biocrust communities continue to succeed, it would be a significant advance in our ability to help resource managers bring back biocrust communities,” Dr. Reed notes. “People would be able to grow biocrusts without disturbing much land, a lot of new technology could take off, you could automate biocrust harvesting, increase the scale of the process, and open a really exciting new pathway for restoring much larger areas.”

Dr. Reed is animated…make that joyful. “I often study worrisome climate change impacts and threats, the pollution and damage,” she enthuses. “But this project, this is about hope. We are finding new ways to bring biocrusts back on the landscape, and it just feels so useful and so… good!”

More research and communication are imperative to building on the success in Utah. Restoring biocrusts across dryland ecosystems will look different in different places. While we still have many questions, biocrust climate science is happening in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and California, stretching all the way to Africa and Antarctica! To harness the power of biocrust knowledge and global research, a soil crust Community of Practice – called CrustNet – has been created by Dr. Reed and her collaborators. They aim to bring together biocrust researchers around to world to improve the understanding of where biocrusts are, the roles they play in diverse ecosystems and how they are responding to change. This network approach will enable learning, sharing and replicating projects.

Federal conservation programs could offer another avenue for scaling up biocrust restoration projects in the United States, providing incentives to landowners to protect and restore biocrusts, and providing support for efforts to reestablish biocrusts on degraded public lands. The America the Beautiful program offers one potential avenue of support.

In addition to scaling up biocrust restoration, increased awareness about what it is and why it’s so important is imperative. The average person has no idea what biocrusts are, which means they can’t care about it. With funds dedicated to education, partners produced a short biocrust video to educate people about these amazing and important communities.

If you want to support this effort, share a link on your organization’s social sites and with your friends and family. Though they are small, biocrusts are mighty and restoring these communities across our planet’s drylands offers a great deal of hope for Earth’s dryland ecosystems and people. 

For more information, please see our  Climate-Adapted Biocrust Restoration Fact Sheet. You can also access the current Biocrust Restoration Manual at: canyonlandsresearchcenter.org.

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Tracey Stone is an Associate Director of Communications for The Nature Conservancy.

Dr. Sasha Reed is a Biogeochemist at the United States Geological Survey.

Sue Bellagamba is the Canyonlands Regional Director at The Nature Conservancy in Utah.

The seeds of a new agricultural system are sprouting in Minnesota, one that can fight climate change using profitable new crops that keep agricultural lands covered with green, living plants year-round. Crops ranging from perennial Intermediate Wheatgrass (producing Kernza® perennial grain) to new winter annual “cash cover crops” such as winter camelina, pennycress, and winter pea have the potential to amplify carbon storage in plants and soils while also building climate resilience, protecting water quality, improving soil health, and creating new economic opportunities for rural communities. Many of these crops complement and enhance current Midwestern agriculture, whereas others offer new and exciting alternatives. All can bring greater choice to growers, new products to market, and diversification to the agricultural landscape.

The Forever Green Initiative at the University of Minnesota (UMN) is developing and scaling these crops in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, farmer groups, citizen advocates, private businesses, nonprofits, and research organizations. We write as a group of young to mid-career professionals building on groundwork laid over decades. As a group of rising leaders in this effort (among many others!), we want to highlight its recent successes, share its origin story, speak to the value of partnership in advancing climate solutions, and reflect on where we are headed. 

In 2022, Forever Green and its partners saw several landmark successes:

• After decades of advocacy, Forever Green was allocated permanent general funding from the Minnesota Legislature to keep developing perennial and winter annual crops. 
• Simultaneously, a diverse grassroots coalition succeeded in developing a State pilot grant program to support entrepreneurs to scale value chains for these crops. 
• A State pilot program to de-risk grower adoption and increase acreage of these new perennial and winter annual crops is also expanding.
• Nationally, USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service incorporated perennial grains into the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). 
• Through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities and the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act, USDA moved to invest billions in “climate-smart agriculture,” including crops Forever Green is developing, like winter camelina.
• In the Fall of 2022, Forever Green hosted USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service and representatives from over 30 countries to learn about these crops and their potential to address grand global challenges around soil, water, climate, and biodiversity. 

These early successes have required decades of careful perennial partnership in science and society for new perennial and winter annual crops to start transitioning from ideas to reality.

Nearly 40 years ago, visionaries at The Rodale Institute and The Land Institute had the wild idea that producing grains from perennials—plants that grow for multiple years—could form the basis of more ecologically sound agriculture. Kernza® perennial grain is the first of these to reach farmers’ fields. This perennial’s deep and dense root system draws down carbon and regrows for years without the need for carbon-emitting tillage and the costs of annual replanting. It also reduces runoff and erosion, soaking up excess nutrients that can impair surface and groundwater, harm human health, and act as powerful greenhouse gasses. Recent research shows that Kernza reduces nitrogen loss by over 95% compared to corn.

_{LEFT: Kernza has roots up to 10-feet long. RIGHT: Kernza grain. Photos by: Alita Films}

Concurrent to early perennial grains breeding efforts, University of Minnesota researchers, including Dr. Don Wyse, were leading the basic science that spurred the development of a grower-owned, multi-million dollar perennial ryegrass seed industry in Northwest Minnesota. Together they learned that providing growers with a new profitable crop option was the quickest and best way to scale up the environmental benefits of perennial groundcover. Moreover, developing that new crop option required working together across disciplines and sectors. The University of Minnesota began expanding this model to other perennials and winter annuals in the early 2010s, including Kernza, in partnership with The Land Institute.

Today, the Forever Green Initiative is a uniquely broad innovation platform that supports the research, commercialization, and societal change required to transition toward continuous-living-cover agriculture in the Upper Midwestern US. Housed at the University of Minnesota, Forever Green supports over 15 interdisciplinary crop teams of plant breeders, agronomists, soil and water scientists, food scientists, economists, and commercialization staff. In addition to Kernza, Forever Green scientists are working on:

Beyond the university’s walls, Forever Green’s unique commercialization, adoption, and scaling program supports a wide range of growers, entrepreneurs, and businesses, taking these new crops to market in the form of new food, feed, seed, industrial, and energy products–spanning baking flour to biopolymers to biofuels. A coalition of advocates called the Forever Green Partnership continues the cross-sector work of advocacy, learning together, and building momentum. Forever Green has engaged hundreds of students and early career youth throughout its structure, preparing cadres of young scientists and professionals to continue tackling grand global challenges such as climate change.

Minnesota is now a leading hub of research, development, and innovation in perennial grains. A University of Minnesota research team works closely with The Land Institute and several others to holistically tackle breeding, agronomy, environmental science, food science, and commercialization. UMN Kernza breeders are making headway, increasing grain yield by an average of 10% per breeding cycle. Sustaining this increase would mean achieving yields equivalent to wheat in under a generation–an exceptionally fast and remarkable feat in the world of plant breeding. This work has led to the release of the first commercial Kernza variety, MN-Clearwater. Minnesota also hosts the USDA-supported KernzaCAP project, integrating research, commercialization, policy, and education across multiple states. 

_{INNOVATION Perennial Pantry is a dedicated Kernza processor and food brand, taking Kernza directly from the farmer and turning it into a variety of food products. Photos by: Alita Films.}

Outside the laboratory and research plots, Minnesota farmers are growing several thousand acres of Kernza® perennial grain–one-third of all commercial Kernza acres. The state is home to a new grower-owned Kernza cooperative, a startup food company devoted to putting delicious perennial products on your plate, and numerous small and large food businesses developing new products ranging from cereal to naan to beer. 

The seeds planted by visionary researchers would never have taken root in Minnesota without supportive state agencies, policymakers, committed advocates, and conservation-minded farmers. Their support grew from a long-standing concern that nutrient loss and erosion from Minnesota’s 20 million acres of agriculture threaten the state’s 10,000 lakes, the Mississippi River Watershed, and the people that rely on them. 

In 2004, a coalition of these entities formed a network called Green Lands Blue Waters to collaborate across sectors and states to scale up “continuous living cover” agriculture, which has been a critical partner in advancing perennial grains ever since. In the ensuing years, Minnesota advocates secured resources to develop perennial and winter annual crops from the State’s general fund, the Department of Agriculture, a unique state Clean Water Fund funded by sales tax, and a commission on natural resources funded by the state lottery. These state funds have been used to unlock 5-10 times more funding from federal, philanthropic, and other sources.

As the economic potential of these new crops became apparent, the coalition broadened to include farmers, rural economic development interests, community-based conservation organizations, and food and agriculture companies, large and small. Together, this uncommonly broad coalition has created fertile ground for innovations like Kernza and other new crops to take root. 

As we work to stave off climate disaster, transforming the world’s agricultural systems into a giant carbon sink is one of the most hopeful avenues for progress. We believe that advancing Forever Green agricultural systems is a key part of that transformation, and we hope this story will inspire farmers, researchers, advocates, companies, citizens, eaters, and policymakers across the U.S. and worldwide. First, to believe in wild ideas with transformational potential, and second to work together to make them a reality. Some ways you can advance this work include:

• Join your local soil health and regenerative agriculture movement, whether it’s as a citizen, consumer, employee, grower, or entrepreneur.
• Learn more about the priorities identified in Farm Bill Law Enterprise’s recent Climate and Conservation Report for the 2023 Farm Bill.
• More specifically, support continued development of perennial and winter annual crops as a climate adaptation and mitigation strategy–in Minnesota, your state, and the country.
• Show grassroots people power by signing on to the Regenerate America^TM campaign.
• Feed friends and family the message by enjoying Kernza perennial grain and similar new products at home. You can even now sign up for a monthly Perennial Share!
• Pursue an education or career that will help advance the grand transition toward a ‘forever green’ agricultural landscape.

No one effort will be sufficient to slow climate change. It will take leaders in every state, at the federal level, and in every country. It will happen in laboratories, on the land, on loading docks, lunch tables, and in legislation. It will take all our hands to lift new ways of farming that simultaneously work for growers, create value for companies, reduce emissions, and create a climate-resilient future. Join us!

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Prabin Bajgain is the Kernza breeder at the University of Minnesota and a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics.

Colin Cureton is the Director of Adoption and Scaling for the Forever Green Initiative in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics.

Jess Gutknecht is an Associate Professor in the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate, a Fellow of the UMN Institute on the Environment, and recipient of the Community Engaged Scholar Award at the University of Minnesota in 2022. 

Mitch Hunter is the Associate Director of the Forever Green Initiative and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics. 

Margaret Wagner is Manager of the Fertilizer Non-Point Section at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. She received an MS from the University of Minnesota and was a graduate fellow at The Land Institute in 2007.

Cheese, yogurt, butter… dairy is a long-time diet staple and integral to a vast number of food cultures worldwide. In the United States, dairy consumption has been on the rise for decades, while the number of U.S. dairy farms has steadily declined. Today, there are fewer than 30,000 U.S. dairy farms, and each has an opportunity to drive climate solutions within their operation.   

The dairy industry has a long-standing commitment to sustainability. In fact, thanks to improved farming practices the carbon footprint of producing 1 gallon of milk shrank by 19% between 2007 and 2017, requiring 30% less water and 21% less land, according to a study published in the Journal of Animal Science. But there is still more work ahead. While growing crops for cow feed contributes to a dairy farm’s environmental footprint, most of an operation’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is methane from cow burps and methane and nitrous oxide from manure.

With impact, comes opportunity.

The Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy has set aggressive environmental stewardship goals—including achieving greenhouse gas neutrality by 2050. To reach these goals, six national dairy organizations came together to form the U.S. Dairy Net Zero Initiative (NZI), an industry-wide collaboration to advance research and technology, on-farm pilots, and new market development. The objective is to make sustainable practices and technologies more accessible and affordable to all U.S. dairy farms. 

Farmers like Theo Scholze in Wisconsin are ready to do their part. “Just about every decision we make, there is a financial side to it,” he says. “But if I can make changes to help the overall global environment, I feel it is my responsibility to do that.”

Scholze is among the first farmers to enroll in the Dairy Feed in Focus program, a collaboration launched by the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, Syngenta and The Nature Conservancy (TNC). The program supports NZI’s environmental objectives by helping to incentivize and implement best practices in feed and forage production and feed efficiency.

Since farmer recruitment began in Michigan and Wisconsin in 2022, TNC has worked with Foremost Farms and  Michigan Milk Producers Association to enroll over 30 farmers and approximately 10,000 acres. These farms represent a total influence of over 42,000 acres and 23,000 dairy cows. Farmer recruitment for 2024 is slated to start in September 2023. The program is helping farmers adopt an array of practices expected to deliver climate, soil, and water quality benefits on dairy farms of all sizes. These practices include:

• Soil health practices like cover crops, reduced/no till, and crop rotation
• Edge of field practices such as harvestable buffers, grassed waterways, and pollinator strips  
• Nutrient and manure management
• Feed management practices such as alternative feed rations and/or feed additives/ingredients
• Grazing management

The minimum time commitment for farmers to implement practices on their farms is three years. Farmers also receive incentive payments for practice implementation. To date, the FiF team has fundraised over $1.5M for farmer incentives in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Idaho. Nestlé USA is funding the incentives in all three states, and Rotary International District 6310 is funding the incentives for several farms in Michigan.

Additional elements of the climate-smart Feed in Focus program include working with the farmer to collect data, and then track and analyze that data for sustainability metrics like reduction of GHG emissions. Program partners also provide tailored technical support for decision making, implementation, monitoring, reporting and verification.

Participating farmers, like Scholze, are pioneering a new phase of dairy farming. They are helping to create scientifically verified examples of the best agronomic and farm management practices that will serve as models for practice implementation on dairy farms of all sizes through the U.S. and beyond.

“Scalability is key to drive meaningful change and impact,” said Liz Hunt, Head of Sustainable and Responsible Business for Syngenta North America. “Our expectation is this project will deliver a blueprint for how to implement similar projects across the country, promoting shared learnings that benefit supply chains across the dairy industry.”

Throughout their broad networks, program partners will share these success stories with U.S. dairy farmers and help accelerate adoption of practices that improve productivity and reduce the industry’s environmental footprint.

But the collaboration between the dairy industry and conservation does not stop with the Feed in Focus program. In 2021 the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, the Institute for Feed Education and Research, and TNC were awarded a $537,440 grant by the U.S Department of Agriculture to explore innovative feed management strategies that can reduce enteric methane emissions in dairy cattle. This project, along with the Feed in Focus program, are examples of how government, businesses and NGOs can work together to advance climate-smart agriculture practices for the benefit of farmers, communities and nature.

“If we all contribute a little bit, we can move in a direction that is positive for the environment and positive for our industry,” says Scholze.

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^{Last edited on August 1, 2023.}

Karen Scanlon is the Executive VP of Environmental Stewardship at Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.

Alisha Staggs is the North America Dairy Program Director at The Nature Conservancy.

Additional Resources

Farmers can sequester more carbon, increase productivity

The agriculture community is on the front lines of one of the greatest environmental challenges of our time: climate change. Year after year, farmers endure chronic droughts, flooding, record high temperatures, frequent storm events and significant economic losses. These impacts make it harder for producers to support their families and, in turn, provide food for a growing global population. 

Yet farmers are drawing on their rich heritage and passion for stewardship to navigate a changing climate while leaving a legacy to the next generation, as illustrated in The Nature Conservancy’s three-part video series featuring two Midwest farming families.

Food production is the most basic and essential way people interact with nature, so it’s no surprise that the agriculture industry is poised to play a major role in combating a climate change. Farmers have enormous opportunities to help reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while ensuring the long-term resilience and profitability of their operations. 

In the three videos below, meet Elyssa McFarland and Fred Yoder, two farmers embracing regenerative practices to build soil health, reduce GHG emissions and leave a lasting legacy. By trying new techniques and investing in their land, they’re discovering the potential of ag lands assome of Earth’s largest natural reservoirs of carbon.

Soil Legacy: Farming for a Stable Climate

The soil health practices farmers use today can impact the resiliency and  productivity of their land for generations to come. What’s your soil legacy?

The Back Forty

Conservation farming practices don’t come in a one-size-fits-all package. The opportunity is finding out which practices work best on individual farms by testing new and different techniques—even some that might make you uncomfortable. 

Leaving Things Better

Family farms make up 98% of all U.S. operations. Learn why these farmers are hopeful each new generation will leave the land in better condition than when they received it.

When farmers use conservation practices (e.g., cover crops, no-till and crop rotation), they retain existing carbon sinks and draw more carbon out of the atmosphere and into the soil. Increased soil carbon sequestration helps restore degraded soils, improves holding capacity for water and nutrients that plants need to grow, and increases productivity.

This article was originally published on Farm Journal.

For more information about how agriculture holds the key to addressing climate change, visit http://nature.org/soil or USN4C’s Agricultural Lands Natural Climate Solutions Pathways.

Kernza perennial grain has sparked the imaginations of many, from bakers to brewers, farmers to foodies, conservationists to climate activists. The fascination comes from Kernza’s holistic proposition: 10-foot-long plant roots help sequester carbon from the air and foster healthy soil and water. Perennial growth builds soil organic matter and promotes biodiversity above and below ground. And the grain has many tasty uses in food and beverages. Kernza’s rise points to a hopeful ­step-change for the future, rooted in inherently regenerative, climate-smart agriculture.

From Intermediate Wheatgrass to the Kernza^® Perennial Grain

Kernza is the grain harvested from a perennial plant called intermediate wheatgrass. A distant cousin of annual wheat, Kernza can be used in baked goods, beer, and cereal and be cooked as a whole grain like rice or barley. The long-rooted prairie grass originates from an area of Eurasia between the Black and Caspian Seas, which is now the location of Turkey, Armenia, Russia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Brought to the US in the 1930s by USDA researchers, intermediate wheatgrass has been grown primarily for livestock forage and hay. Today, improved varieties of Kernza are growing on farms across the US and abroad and being sold as a small-scale niche grain crop.

Domestication of intermediate wheatgrass for grain production has taken nearly four decades and began in 1983 at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania. Researchers there were inspired and guided by the vision of a Kansas non-profit organization called The Land Institute and its co-founder Wes Jackson, who have worked to develop perennial grain cropping systems that mimic natural systems. Led by plant breeder Peggy Wagoner, researchers selected intermediate wheatgrass as a promising perennial grain candidate.

The research eventually transferred to The Land Institute in 2003, where Dr. Lee DeHaan selected the best plants based on their yield, seed size, disease resistance, and other traits to improve grain production. Then, in 2008, institute staff began experimenting with flour from the grain in their home kitchens and found that it tasted great. As a result, the trade name Kernza^® was registered in 2009 to ensure quality oversight for the emerging perennial grain crop. A collaborative network of international researchers has since joined the effort with Kernza breeding programs at the University of Minnesota, University of Manitoba, and Utah State University.

Kernza Perennial Grain Goes to Market

Kernza perennial grain made its way into the commercial supply chain in small markets beginning in 2015. Since then, new varieties and growing methods have continued to be developed, enabling more farmers to plant Kernza and more producers to create products. Today about 4,000 acres of Kernza are grown by a network of farmers and researcher partners in 15 US states and 10 countries. Consumer access to Kernza products also continues to expand. First, a few intrepid restaurants and producers created products made with Kernza, like Patagonia Provisions’ Long-Root beers, General Mills’ Cascadian Farm Kernza cereals, and Minneapolis-based Birchwood Café’s baked goods. They were joined by additional regional restaurants, bakeries, distilleries, and breweries. Then in 2020, Christopher Abbott and the team at Perennial Pantry introduced a line of Kernza flour, whole grain kernels, and baking mixes that are now widely available to people across the US.

Making a Case for Perennial Grains as a Climate Solution

Perennial grains have already been identified as a climate change solution that could deliver mitigation and adaptation benefits, and perhaps the most compelling feature of Kernza is its potential as a climate solution. Soil carbon scientists are actively researching how much additional carbon Kernza perennial grain production can sequester.

Perennial grain crops hold unique and robust potential to help mitigate climate change by capturing significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the air and putting it back into the soil, while also efficiently using nitrogen within the soil, and thus reducing nitrous oxide emissions. Perennial grains do this by growing in place, setting down deep roots that remain undisturbed by plowing, building up soil carbon, and taking up nitrogen and water from deep in the soil, year-round.

Perennial grains may also provide a tool in adapting to climate change. If rains come less frequently but with greater intensity – as predicted in many regions of the world – deep-rooted perennial crops can direct more water into the soil, reducing runoff. The deep roots then utilize this stored water over time. Timely crop planting can spell the difference between a good versus a poor harvest for many farmers in semi-arid regions of the world. Because perennial grains regrow every year without replanting, farmers won’t have to depend so heavily on favorable timing of rains to get their crops started.

Finally, perennial grains could help reduce agriculture’s carbon footprint. In industrialized countries, perennial grain agriculture presents a pathway to help wean annual grain production from fossil fuels use. Over 99% of the energy farmers use to grow corn in the U.S. Midwest comes from fossil fuels. When farmland does not need to be plowed for planting every year, nutrients and water will be retained and used more efficiently. Weeds won’t need to be as intensively managed because well-established perennial grain crops will suppress them. As a result, there will be less “work” required to farm. In countries where grains are grown with human and animal labor, instead of fossil fuels, the reduced energy requirements to farm perennial grains should significantly reduce the labor required to produce a crop.

What’s Next for Kernza?

If current research progress is sustained, Kernza seed will be half the size of wheat seed by 2030. Breeders also continue to develop plants that are easier to grow, process, and harvest, with grain that has improved flavor and functionality. Although Kernza perennial grain currently has lower grain yields than annual wheat, farmers and consumers can benefit from the ecological impact of producing and consuming Kernza perennial grain today. The long-term goal is to have varieties with yields similar to wheat, resulting in Kernza grain that can be produced at a significant scale.

In addition to yield improvement, ecologists are working to develop intercropping systems where Kernza is grown alongside legumes, like alfalfa or clover. Kernza legume intercrops hold promise to enhance carbon sequestration and reduce nitrous oxide emissions even further. Kernza perennial grain will have the most extensive ecological impact when it is grown on millions of acres globally and is an everyday staple on grocery store shelves. This has positive consequences for climate change mitigation and adaptation and for the future of food.