“Someone shot a buffalo last nite!”

“No?!  That is horrible.”

Thus began two storied days of learning at The Land Institute.  TLI is a non-profit research and teaching organization outside of Salina, KS devoted to creating sustainable agriculture.  Its mission: address the big problems with modern agriculture.  Soil erosion.  Monoculture.  Dependence on fossil fuels.  I learned of the Land 25 years ago from my college mentor, the environmental historian, Donald Worster.  Worster was attempting to guide me onto interesting paths.  At the time I was training to become a geneticist. Wes Jackson, who founded The Land forty-two years ago, is a geneticist. Yet, he is no average geneticist.  This geneticist returned back to his home in Kansas to create a farm powered by contemporary sun power.  This geneticist has a buffalo herd.

And electrophoresis and PCR machines.

Why?

Before ploughed up for crops, Kansas was covered in prairie. Prairie grasslands are some of the most hearty and diverse ecosystems on the planet.  As Tim Crew, the Director Research at the Land, explained to me:

I have found [the weather of] this place to be far more variable than any place I have ever lived, far less predictable.  Prairie vegetation can deal with it.  It goes dormant or it goes deep, or both, and that allows it to persist. Then, when there is a little window of opportunistic conditions, it thrives, and everything is alive!

He and his fellow researchers—hailing from all over the U.S. and globe—are attempting to learn from what Jackson calls “the genius” of the prairie. There are, they argue, two main lessons.

First, perenniality.  In the Dustbowl region of the United States—which included 100 million square miles of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico—billions of tons of soil were ripped away, deposited as far east as boats in the Atlantic Ocean.  During the 1920s, the plow dug up the deep rooted prairie grasses, leaving no defense to the intense south wind for which Kansas is named.  35 mph removes dirt.  Over 40 creates storms. Over the last several decades, the Land has developed perennial crops that would re-anchor soil with their deep roots.

There most celebrated creation is the beautiful Kernza.

Kernza is a variety of the intermediate wheat grass Thinopyrum intermedium. Researchers at the Land spent many years laboriously crossing T. intermediumto to create strains that bore wheatberries of high enough yield to be viable for agriculture.

Test plots of Kernza and perennial wheat

Although technically Kernza is not wheatgrass, but rather the grain produced from it. The Land trademarked Kernza® a few years back to identify the strains it had developed, and to help fund its development. Recently, Patagonia Provisions and Hopworks Urban Brewery worked together to produce Long Root Ale®.  You should drink it, they argue, not just because of its grapefruit hoppy flavor, but because of its purpose: “regenerative agriculture.” I had my first taste last month at Café Gratitude in Los Angeles. My second taste was last nite at the Blue Sky Brewery in Salina, KS.

The second element of the “genius” of the prairie is diversity.  The Land argues that productivity of crops will increase by planting them not alone, but with complimentary plants.  For example, Kernza® wheat grass can be planted with alfalfa.  On a day I was visiting, the research team were excited about the possibility that alfalfa might not only help provide nitrogen to the soil, but it also might act as a hydraulic lift, pulling water up from the soil depths.  They spent many a hot hour out in the fields testing this theory.

The Land is a place where prairie pasts meet these prairie futures.

Computer-aided counting of sees

Will regeneration result?  Certainly by afternoon the buffalo had.  Instead of being shot, it appears that it just poked itself with its horns.  It, along with its mates, contently munched prairie grasses.

Whatever form regeneration takes, those at the Land assured me it will not be dogmatic.  The goal is not to go strictly ‘native.’  Rather it is to learn from the pasts of the prairie. To grapple with the good and the bad.  What will native futures look like in the presence of the ghosts of a past in which plants and peoples were removed from these lands?

Today, many are trying to return.  The Kanza, native peoples forced from Kanasa to Oklahoma in the 1870’s, recently bought 168 acres outside Dunlap, Kansas and established Allegawaho Heritage Memorial Park.  The land encompasses one of the three villages the Kanza occupied from the 1840s to the 1872.  This weekend, some members of the Kanza will return for a Powwow there.

As we re-turn, where shall the routes lead?  A question at the heart of this journey …