The Land Institute

The Land Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 1976 and based in Salina, Kansas.

Led by a team of plant breeders and ecologists working in global partnerships, we are developing new perennial crops to be grown in ecologically functional mixtures known as polycultures. Our goal is to create an agriculture that mimics many aspects of natural ecosystems in order to produce ample food and reduce the negative impacts of industrial agriculture.

Natural ecosystems are self-sustaining. For 10,000 years, humans have disrupted those ecosystems and kept them in a continuous state of disruption in order to feed our populations. Increasingly, the scale of those agricultural disruptions threatens to permanently degrade the ecosphere upon which we depend.

Annual crops are commonly maintained by yearly tillage as well as pesticide and fertilizer applications, all of which are energy intensive, biologically destructive and polluting. Tilling leaves soil exposed to erosion, and land use is second only to power generation in creating greenhouse gases.

We believe that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Diverse perennial crops are the building blocks for a new, regenerative agriculture, allowing us to achieve levels of soil protection and ecological intensification unattainable in our current agriculture based on annuals. Grown in mixtures, perennial crops are better at managing nutrients, fertility and pests while requiring fewer chemical- and carbon-intensive inputs.

Perennial grains, legumes and oilseeds represent a fundamental shift in modern agriculture, holding the potential for truly sustainable production systems. We use two approaches to breed perennial crops:

1. Domestication of wild perennial plants
2. Perennialization of existing annual crops

From test plots and greenhouses filled with many species, we select wild perennials with the best crop potential (domestication), or cross annual crops with a related wild perennial species (hybridization).

We analyze thousands of plants for desirable crop traits, crossing the most promising plants in search of more desirable characteristics in every generation (breeding). Then, with the help of collaborators, we test various species together in different soils and climates.

We do this season upon season, year after year, in collaboration with scientists around the United States and the world, including in Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Mali, Uganda and Sweden.

Diverse perennial crops are a prerequisite to an agriculture that relies on ecological intensification rather than intensification based on chemical or fossil fuel inputs. One reason is that undisturbed soils fed with large carbon inputs from perennial root systems maintain markedly different communities of microbes than occur under the disturbed soils of annual crops.

Perennial crop polycultures will require less fossil fuel consumption and tillage, conserve soil and water, help reduce or reverse agriculture’s contribution to climate change, and be more adaptable to varied conditions.

Perennial crops provide year-round cover, shielding soil from erosion, absorbing moisture, and providing habitat, including for the microorganisms and invertebrates critical to healthy soil. And perennials can sequester more atmospheric carbon dioxide than annual crops.

From nutrient retention to carbon sequestration to weed suppression, the agriculture we are bringing to fruition promises to become a soil-forming, rather than a soil-degrading activity.

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