Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) Program 2024

Perennial grains contribute to sustainable agriculture through soil quality improvement, carbon sequestration, and as a unique food and forage product. An example of a successful perennial grain is intermediate wheatgrass (IWG; Thinopyrum intermedium), which has been bred by The Land Institute and marketed as Kernza. While IWG popularity and acreage has grown in the Great Plains, upper Midwest and West, IWG remains largely untested in the Southeast, and thus requires plant breeding for adaptation, assessment of soil health changes, and investment in regional value chains. The value of IWG research for the Southeast is particularly notable in Kentucky and Tennessee: these states have highly erodible farmlands that may benefit from perennial crops and local grain organizations that can promote this new crop in the region. In this proposal, we ask: How well does IWG grow in our region? Can we use plant breeding to develop new varieties that are adapted to our soils, climate, and end-uses? And, what is needed to cultivate sustainable regional value chains for this crop? To address these questions, our project brings together new collaborators in plant breeding and soil science, as well as farmers and end-users in Kentucky and Tennessee. With a systems approach towards developing regional perennial grain agriculture, we will work to build infrastructure for IWG (e.g., breeding, agronomic recommendations, end-use testing), and incentives for growers and end-users to adopt IWG (e.g., product testing, soil and climate health metrics). Our work includes multi-location trialing of IWG on-farm, under different production environments (e.g., animal agriculture), as well as intensive trials on research farms in Kentucky and Tennessee. This set of trials will provide quantitative and qualitative measures of IWG performance, and will help us identify if some locations or management practices (such as grain only harvests versus grain and forage harvests, or agronomic practices) contribute to more successful IWG cultivation. This multi-location data will inform plant breeding for IWG regional adaptation by defining ‘target environments’ and identifying key barriers to success in different areas (e.g., maturity dates, weed pressure, pest damage, etc). In collaboration with farmers, we will begin plant breeding to develop locally-adapted IWG populations. In addition, trial data will indicate opportunities by which IWG adoption may be incentivized for improvement of soil health, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, or other sustainable farm metrics, and/or as a unique, high- quality grain. On research farms, we will conduct intensive soil health measures and, with regional collaborators, we will assess baking quality. Importantly, we will conduct trials to test the degree to which these measures and end-use quality vary across locations. Overall, perennial grains have potential for improving cropping systems sustainability in Kentucky and Tennessee, and we propose a collaborative systems approach to integrating IWG into local grains markets.