Q. and A.: Farming for an Uncertain Future

Nearly 40 years ago, while teaching environmental studies at California State University in Sacramento, Wes Jackson began reflecting that something about the country’s agricultural practices wasn’t quite right. Soon that instinct grew into a powerful itch.

“The source of that itch was things like, my golly, do we want to be putting those chemicals out here? And my golly, look at that soil erosion. Don’t we have a conservation service, or aren’t they paying attention? And my golly, look at the size of that equipment and think of the fossil fuel going into food production,” he said.

So Mr. Jackson scratched it.

Returning to his native Kansas, he helped to found the Land Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to sustainable alternatives in agriculture, in 1976. The institute, based in Salina, promotes “natural systems agriculture,” or practices that mimic the ecological stability of the prairie yet result in a grain yield comparable to that of mainstream farming,

For his work, Mr. Jackson was named a Pew Conservation Scholar in 1990 and a MacArthur Fellow in 1992. In 2000 he received a Right Livelihood Award, which goes to honorees “working on practical and exemplary solutions to the most urgent challenges facing the world today.”

Among those challenges is feeding a global population that is expected to reach nine billion people by midcentury. The Land, as devotees call the institute, is developing perennial crops like Kernza, a wheatgrass with a substantial root structure that would alleviate the need for yearly planting and thus help to replenish the soil and reduce erosion while guaranteeing an annual food crop.

On Friday, the Land Institute kicks off its 34th annual Prairie Festival, a weekend of scientific lectures that will also include a barn dance, bonfire and a celebration of the 35th anniversary of the publication of Wendell Berry’s seminal book, “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.”

In a phone interview, Mr. Jackson spoke about the festival, his research and the 10,000-year-old “problem of agriculture,” as he puts it. Following are excerpts, edited for brevity and clarity.

What’s the focus of this year’s festival?

One of the topics I’m thinking about is “getting over the hump.” Imagine the lines of population growth, resource depletion and accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere going up, up and up. And as they are going up, up and up, our whole scientific effort is dependent on fossil fuels for our pickup trucks, for our tractors, for our greenhouses, for the tremendous power we have with these computers. It’s all dependent upon the scaffolding within civilization of lots of highly dense carbon.

So the question is, will these new species and varieties be dependent on the extractive economy? And I am saying, no. That as we get over that hump and somewhere on the down slope in the use of resources, there will come a time in which the creatureliness of these plants, these perennial grain crops, are available for the same kind of selection that farmers have had for millennia, and agronomists for hundreds of years.

The new species and varieties are only half of the equation. The other half is to bring two or more species together with a diverse ecosystem as the conceptual tool. Essentially, all of nature’s ecosystems are perennial mixtures, so that’s our standard.

I assume you’re talking about Kernza, the wheatgrass that the institute is developing. How long before it will be released to the public?

That will be eight or nine years away, and it will be available for farmers working with ecologists and agronomists. When we say “a release,” we have to be careful qualifying that, because there’s an awful lot that’s going to have to be dealt with because the agronomics have not been worked out.

You know, the agronomics of many of the crops that we have were probably worked out over hundreds of years in order to achieve what by our standards today would be some acceptable level. By a standard at the time of the early Neolithic, they’re totally acceptable. So at this moment we may have about early-to-middle-Neolithic species. But by using modern genetic methods, we’re able to accelerate quickly, along with the computational power of our time. We’ve gone from wild nature to Neolithic in 10 years.

And in nine years, farmers would volunteer to try it out?

We have a lot of farmers who would like to have this stuff. People come to us all the time, and say, “Just give me some seed and let me play with it.” Well, now, just imagine. Say they get the seed, and they don’t get the right depth. And remember, the seeds are still small. But some farmer says, “Yeah, I planted those, and no thank you.” Farmers are conservative for a good reason. You know, they’ve had to deal with the pitfalls as well as the promises.

But let’s say we get enough of the agronomics worked out with these special farmers that we work with, and then others see it, and it becomes a compelling alternative. Will the Chicago Board of Trade have the mechanisms to embrace it, or are they so ossified, whether it involves export policy or what, that they can’t adjust? I’m more concerned about that than whether farmers will want to do it.

Will the current system of food production have to collapse before people will be open to this shift?

I think we need to keep the pressure on about the problem of our time. I have friends that will protest Monsanto. Now, I don’t like what Monsanto is doing, with their G.M.O’s [genetically modified organisms] and all that. But I’m not going to protest them. Because Monsanto is a derivative of corporate charters, and those corporate charters allow for growth and a fiduciary responsibility to stockholders. And what we need to do is to acknowledge that Monsanto is a derivative of assumptions.

I come back to my friend the late Dan Luten [a lecturer in geography at the University of California, Berkeley]. And he said our problem is: “Wes, we came as a poor people into a seemingly empty land that was rich in resources. And then we’ve become rich people in an increasingly poor land that’s filling up, and those institutions don’t hold.”

So if you put poor people in an empty land that’s rich, it’s inevitable that your institutions — whether they’re political institutions or economic institutions or educational institutions or even your religious institutions — will reflect that underlying assumption. We have these institutional structures that are predicated upon the idea of limitlessness.

The forests of America are limitless. The ocean is limitless. And you contrast that with what Robert Louis Stevenson saw in the South Pacific when he visited the islands — that they’re aware of how much land they have, they’re aware of how far out they can row to catch fish, so therefore they practice infanticide. Now, I’m not advocating infanticide. But I’m saying that, acknowledging the reality of limits, they act on it. And we could acknowledge the value of limits and begin to get more assiduous about birth control and consumption. Equally important.

I understand that you hold that the rise of the land-grant university is responsible for the state of agriculture today.

I would say, yeah, and that’s what got sent into the third world during the Green Revolution — a lot of those assumptions. That’s why bushels and acres became paramount. You know, people are hungry. They need calories. Oh, we need more bushels per acres. Totally understandable. Totally acceptable. And that’s considered hardheaded realism. Wendell Berry once used a line: “A hard-headed realist is somebody who uses a lot less information than what’s available.”

You’ve spoken about agriculture being “a 10,000-year-old problem.” What do you mean?

Let’s go back to 1600. We can see the kind of adjustments that came at the time of the Renaissance, which followed the Reformation of our Christian heritage. Just a change in the concept of the position of the earth relative to the sun had a way of kind of blowing the circuits. And it took a long time, a century and a half.

Now think about what we’re talking about — that 10,000 years ago, if we were going to get the seeds of incipient agriculture to germinate, nature had to be subdued or ignored. You’ve got to tear it up, you disk it, you harrow it, you plant the seeds. So nature has to be destroyed. Now what we’re saying is that nature becomes the standard or the measure, and we want to bring those processes of the wild to the farm? That’s 180 degrees away from the way we’ve thought for 10 millennia.

What’s your plan for changing that way of thinking?

The only thing I know is to get the good examples out there. The imagination develops that we don’t need the seed houses to the extent we do now — the crop just keeps coming up every year. And there’ll be some we have to plant. Doesn’t mean they go away completely. We don’t need the fertilizer people so much because of biological nitrogen fixation.

We don’t need the pesticide people so much because with species diversity, you have chemical diversity. It takes a tremendous enzyme system on the part of an insect or a pathogen to give you the epidemic. And the farm machinery companies aren’t as important because there are fewer passes through the field.

So here is a kind of an inversion of industrial agriculture.

I don’t think they’re going to go away and play tiddlywinks. I think there will be some resistance. They’ll find a lot of things wrong with it, and who can predict what it’ll be like. It’s just that if the compelling alternative is there, there will be enough of a push for it because people are concerned about soil erosion, people are concerned about fossil fuel dependency, people are concerned about putting chemicals out there we haven’t evolved with. So this is going to require, I think, people coming to their senses about limits.

Has the current drought crisis helped drive home this need for limits?

Oh, it might have. But then you get a lot of rain next year, and they’ll forget it. That’s one of the problems with the Paleolithic mind. Someday I’m going to make what I call the American Doll: you wind it up and it loses interest.