
A Grain That Tastes Like Wheat, but Grows Like a Prairie Grass - stevekemp
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-grain-that-tastes-like-wheat-but-grows-like-a-prairie-grass/
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russnewcomer
One of the other important things about Kernza that the article doesn't talk
about much is hardiness and drought-resistance. Kernza's yield at its best is
lower than modern seed at an average year, but during a drought year, their
yields are a probably lot closer. (They haven't been able to do extensive
enough tests to confirm this, if I remember correctly) That's a huge win,
especially because of potential problems with the Ogalalla Aquifer in the
coming years.

Another advantage, unmentioned in the article, is that it is easily possible
to grow Kernza in a backyard with little intervention, and have enough grain
to make a loaf of bread a week, or a couple pizza crusts. You need a mill,
sure, but hand powered mills are pretty cheap ($50 for one that will work for
the amount of Kernza you'll probably grow in your backyard), and in the
midwest, your local library might have one to borrow. You might need a
specialty mill, I'm not sure, my dad bought one of the heavy $500 hand mills
when I was a kid and it had no problem with some Kernza.

I grew up in Salina, where the Land Institute is headquartered, and
tangentially know some of the people mentioned in the article, so while I'm
not an expert, I am a semi-interested lay person.

~~~
setr
>your local library might have one to borrow.

Why would you find mills in a library? What else do they have..

~~~
netghost
A lot of libraries don't just share books. For instance some let you check out
laptops, wifi devices, etc. There are also tool libraries, and even seed
libraries.

You might be surprised by what's available at your local library these days.

~~~
andrewem
Seeds too. My local library has a bunch of different types of plant seeds,
mainly foods. The idea is you take seeds in the spring, plant and grow them,
harvest them, and then preserve the seeds and return them to the library to be
"borrowed" by another person the next year. They have the seeds in an old card
catalog case, and each drawer has the plant name on the outside and a color
green, yellow, or red, indicating how easy or hard it is to save the seeds.

------
24gttghh
If they can engineer it to have a higher gluten content I'd be interested!
Until then it is no wheat-replacement by any stretch from my perspective as a
baker. Another grain to add to the arsenal for sure, but in terms of baking
it's just another low-gluten flour like buckwheat, amaranth, rice flour, etc,
which certainly have their places. I'd try it steamed up with some couscous
and veggies as a side-dish for sure.

They seem to tout it's no-tillage aspect, but there are already methods of
planting wheat without tilling. For instance, the no-till drill[0]

One can also plant wheat with low-cover crops like clover to help prevent the
inevitable weeds that try to take over in the absence of tillage[1].

But hey if it means farmers grow less corn then I'm all for it!

[0][https://www.deere.com/en/seeding-equipment/1590-no-till-
dril...](https://www.deere.com/en/seeding-equipment/1590-no-till-drill/)

[1][http://www.mofga.org/Publications/MaineOrganicFarmerGardener...](http://www.mofga.org/Publications/MaineOrganicFarmerGardener/Summer2016/BanatkaWheat/tabid/3171/Default.aspx)

~~~
vanderZwan
> _But hey if it means farmers grow less corn then I 'm all for it!_

I keep hearing that - least in the US - this is more of a problem with
subsidies and perverse incentives, is that true? Sincere question from a naive
non-economist outsider here.

~~~
deadmetheny
Yes, absolutely. Corn is grown to excess for purposes of livestock feed and
fuel due to various subsidies for ethanol production. At least here in the
Midwest, almost none of the corn grown is for actual human consumption.
Additionally, corn is an awful crop, it requires a ton of nitrogen and water
to grow well. I'm very much for less of it being grown here.

~~~
sliverstorm
_corn is an awful crop_

I've only been gardening a season but I've already come to the same
conclusion. The corn stalks were the divas of the bed, wilting days before
anything else and underproducing. Especially compared to the squash plants.

~~~
tptacek
If there is ever an apocolypse leaving me dependent on personal agriculture,
I’m planting nothing but squash. Until then keep it away from my backyard.

~~~
deadmetheny
I didn't care much for squash until I discovered spaghetti squash. I'll
usually find space for at least one plant now.

~~~
twic
I love spaghetti squash! Sadly, you rarely see it in the UK. In fact, you
rarely see any squash except butternut here, which i'm not a fan of.

There's a farm somewhere south of London which does pick-your-own pattypans,
and apparently at harvest time is overrun with South Africans, who evidently
feel very strongly about them.

~~~
deadmetheny
I've never heard of pattypans, they look absolutely delightful! I may have to
experiment with them in the garden next year.

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njarboe
I found it interesting that 40% of the corn crop goes to produce ethanol.
According to the article, that works out to 91*0.40= 36.4 million acres. This
is about the same as all the farmland in Iowa (32 million acres). The average
power output of this land by ethanol production is about 40 Gigawatts [(13.2
billion gallons of ethanol per year) X (89 million Joules/gallon) / 3.154e+7
seconds per year/1e9]. With the advent of electric cars, taking into
consideration the energy used in producing the ethanol and the lower
efficiency of internal combustion power, you could probably replace that
farmland energy output with ten 2 Gigawatt nuclear power plants.

It would be cool if the environmentalists and the farmers on the marginal
areas of the great plains could get together and work on opening up a huge
prairie preserve while building a dozen nuclear power plants to replace the
lost energy. Bring back the huge herds of Bison. After all, as said elsewhere
in this thread, the Ogalalla Aquifer is starting to run dry.

------
TACIXAT
If any other celiacs clicked this out of curiosity, it contains gluten. From
another article -

>It has a funny cylindrical shape that defies conventional milling machines,
and also contains a weird amount of gluten — too little to bake well with, too
much to be marketed to people who avoid it.

~~~
ch4s3
I wonder if it would be good for brewing. Irregular shape is fine, as you
don't really want super fine milling, and gluten content isn't super relevant.
If it has a strong flavor, it could be a neat way to add an extra dimension to
beers, not to mention potentially lowering the environmental impact.

~~~
anfractuosity
Yup it sounds like someone is making beer with it, it says "A local
microbrewery called Bang now makes a Kernza beer named Gold". I'm curious what
it tastes like too!

I haven't read the article in depth, but I wonder if like wheat when using
large quantities of wheat in mash, if you need to add rice hulls to prevent a
stuck sparge, not that, that is a big issue though.

~~~
ch4s3
From the article, describing its use in pastry

> tasted like nuts and crackers, coffee and grass

I imagine you could make a killer amber or brown ale.

~~~
anfractuosity
Ooh neat, yeah I bet that could be awesome in a brown ale.

Rather off topic, but you might be interested in this:
[https://www.sprowtlabs.com/2017/02/23/how-to-malt-at-
home/](https://www.sprowtlabs.com/2017/02/23/how-to-malt-at-home/)

(One day I'd like to try it, although first, to improve my basic beers :)

Not sure how easy it is to get this grain though... ;)

~~~
ch4s3
looks like a cool project

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stult
>Jackson believed that his vision was possible, but he imagined it would take
50 to 100 years of plant breeding—ambitious when you consider how many
millennia it took to create the grains we have now.

Less ambitious when you consider that it took millennia with a far smaller
number of people who had less knowledge about genetics and breeding, were
capable of farming far fewer plants per year, and did not employ a systematic
experimentation program to develop their crops.

~~~
logfromblammo
Honestly, 50 to 100 years sounds like overkill.

Granted, some crop plants can be tougher to engineer since many of them are
excessively polyploid, but it seems like 5 years in the lab, 10 years in
greenhouses, and 20 years on test plots should be more than enough. And you
could probably do it with only two partner universities, four tenured doctors,
eight postdoc fellows, and 32 grad students.

50 years seems more like the timeline for domesticating _Vulpes vulpes_ ,
which started in 1959, and has the notable limitation that foxes can't have
thousands of offspring per year, whereas cultivated plants can.

~~~
gwern
> 50 years seems more like the timeline for domesticating Vulpes vulpes, which
> started in 1959, and has the notable limitation that foxes can't have
> thousands of offspring per year, whereas cultivated plants can.

A bull or stallion can't normally have thousands of offspring each year, but
the miracle of modern cloning or insemination or surrogacy techniques allows
it. :) The fox breeding program took as long as it did mostly because of
budget limits. If they had had an unlimited budget, they could have had a much
larger fox population allowing for much more extreme levels of selection each
generation and used techniques like artificial insemination to make selection
even more extreme, and of course today more money would also buy marker-
assisted selection techniques... (I don't know if anyone has worked out
insemination techniques for foxes but, well, that's probably just more money
too.)

If for some reason you wanted to redo the fox program now and had $1b to throw
at it, I'd be surprised if it took more than 10 years (set up a population of
10k foxes, whole-genome all of them, start inseminating from the elite 1-10%
for multiple assessments + GWAS, cycle as fast as they reach 1yr & sexual
maturity; each generation gets you ~1SD behavioral change, 10 years get you
~10SDs).

Fast, cheap, big changes, marketable on the EU/USA as 'not a GMO' \- choose
three.

------
bryanlarsen
This is awesome. Tillage is far more harmful to prairie ecosystem diversity
than herbicides and pesticides are. So increasingly farmers have been using
herbicides and pesticides as an alternative to tillage.

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terravion
I don't understand how taking 25M acres of wheat production and turning that
into 75M acres of Kernza produces a net environmental benefit. Which 50M acres
of native habitat are we going to cut down? That's the size of a North Eastern
state... we should be going the other direction and increasing yield and
decreasing total acres if we want to restore native habitats. There's no way
that the lower inputs (and wheat doesn't take much) of Kernza justify
destroying the native habitat of an entire state.

~~~
woodandsteel
But the yield is increasing rapidly, and there is far less energy use,
fertilizer which pollutes streams and the ocean, pesticides, and tillage which
causes soil loss and releases co2 into the atmosphere.

I don't think there is any doubt this is the direction we need to go. Unless,
of course, you are interested in maximizing the profits of certain
corporations.

~~~
terravion
Actually, there is great doubt. Many environmental campaigners are coming
around to intensification broadly as the path out of our current environmental
problems. Check out
[http://www.ecomodernism.org/](http://www.ecomodernism.org/) a bunch of ex-
greenpeace types that are concerned with practical solutions. Tripling yield
takes a long time and wheat, and especially corn, is on an exponential
improvement curve.
[https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtren...](https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtrends.html)

------
vanderZwan
> _(About 40 percent of American-grown corn in 2016 was turned into ethanol;
> 37 percent was used to fatten livestock or ended up damaged or miscounted;
> and a minuscule fraction entered the human diet, mostly as corn syrup.)_

It's just a tiny aside in the article, but this makes me wonder just how much
energy and resources are being wasted in agriculture. Especially since that
sentence construction implies that the 40% ethanol is meant not for human
consumption, which leads me to think it's inefficient biofuel.

~~~
autarch
Corn ethanol _is_ an inefficient biofuel. It uses more energy to produce than
it generates, but thanks to the federal government there's a mandate to
include it in gasoline, so we keep producing it.

~~~
simias
AFAIK the argument is that the CO2 is produces during combustion was captured
from the atmosphere while the plant was growing, so it's neutral in terms of
CO2 emissions (not taking into account other sources of CO2 emissions during
the fabrication of the ethanol).

Fossil fuels on the other end take carbon that was sleeping in the ground and
leave it in the atmosphere after combustion.

At least that's what I hear over here in Europe, maybe motivations are
different in the US.

~~~
yourapostasy
> At least that's what I hear over here in Europe, maybe motivations are
> different in the US.

The real reason corn-based ethanol is politically supported in the US is
because of an artifact of the US federal political process. Iowa is the first
state to hold caucuses [1], to a first approximation explanation. This exerts
an effect similar to first mover advantage: their outcomes have a
disproportionate effect upon other states' primaries [2] (linked article gives
a better, more nuanced explanation than a glib "they're first"). Not
coincidentally for this topic, Iowa grows a lot of corn [3], the most of any
state in the US, and more than all of Mexico combined.

The two major parties are terrified of pissing off Iowa voters who personally
depend upon the corn economy in Iowa. So corn-based ethanol stays encrusted
into the US federal political landscape, until an Alexander-like politician
cuts it in half, Gordian Knot-mythos-like [4]. Either that, or until Iowa's
shortsighted monocropping causes them to irretrievably lose their topsoil, and
they can't grow _anything_ at scale, and removing the subsidies becomes moot;
at the macro scale, they're eroding their topsoil with no end in sight. I SWAG
a few more decades before we reach an inflection point, where input costs to
prop up poor topsoil corn growing start to negate the subsidies' artificial
boost. That's going to really suck for our food supply system, if it comes
down to that.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucuses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucuses)

[2] [https://people.howstuffworks.com/iowa-
caucus.htm](https://people.howstuffworks.com/iowa-caucus.htm)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_States)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot)

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aaronmill1
I want to try cooking with this grain!

Also, Birchwood Cafe is great! Worth a visit if you are ever in the
Minneapolis area!

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mythrwy
This is really cool.

What I'd also like to see is cattle in the US moved off alfalfa and out of
feedlots and returned to the range of the buffalo. Migrate a giant herd of
cattle across this grass (selectively or early enough it still produces grain)
and rebuild the soils of the midwest the way they originally were built.
Perennial grass with migratory bovines.

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peterwwillis
Technology and increased profit have pushed the production of wheat as far as
possible without regard to the impact on the environment. If we find a more
profitable way to produce this new grain that causes harm, we will pursue it.
Just because it doesn't involve tilling [now] doesn't mean it won't be used in
an exploitative way later.

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coldcode
If I was a wheat farmer, I'd sign up for sure to try this.

~~~
mousa
>more irregular in size than wheat berries

Wheat is one of those plants that humans have mastered. One person can farm
thousands of acres of wheat. Generally that's only true of plants that are
very uniform and that you wipe out each harvest. It would be very hard to
replace it with a plant you can't use the same techniques on as the labor
would be 100x probably.

~~~
randomdata
Kernza is harvested (and planted) with the same equipment that wheat is. Some
irregularity isn't going to matter.

~~~
yxhuvud
As the seeds are much smaller, this may or may not be the case. The article
mentions mills not being able to handle the size, but it could also affect
other things.

~~~
randomdata
The seeds are huge compared to, say, quinoa, which is also harvested using a
regular old combine. My comment wasn't hypothetical. That is how it is
harvested already.

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aaroninsf
How nutritious is it relative to "the big three"?

I scanned through the article and could find no comparison...

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nimbius
from TFA: But to make it work, you must navigate a far-reaching system of
milling, processing, fermenting, and baking.

as a baker, I wonder how/if this grain could perform in place of actual wheat.
fermentation is a major step in almost every bread recipe.

~~~
kevinmchugh
from what i've read it has more protein but less gluten than flour, so most
bakers use a mix of kernza and wheat flours, though it seems you should be
able to add pure gluten

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bitL
Can't wait for unintended consequences, like more dead insects or only
aggressive crazy ones remaining, depleted soil, new long-term diseases,
changing ecotypes etc. We are simply one big lab these days... Even if we
aren't living in a simulation, we are run like a simulation.

~~~
criddell
The intended consequences seem pretty good though. I think Kernza is worth
experimenting with.

