The Rise of Perennial Agriculture
Welcome to AgPunk, a newsletter about agriculture, sustainability and technology as seen through the lenses of science fiction and solarpunk. Today we’re exploring the rise of perennial agriculture.
Imagine that thirty years from now the food system is perennial
A traveler
A high speed train catapults Avery along the I-70 corridor from Denver to central Missouri, reducing a trip that previously took 12 hours to just a few. She gazes at the landscape whizzing by and marvels at alternating strips of trees and crops – a stark contrast to the stubby brown, fallow corn and soybean fields of 20 years ago. Children sitting behind her press their noses to the window, exclaiming at the sight of bison freely roaming the richly vegetated pastures.
A consumer
Avery stands at a kitchen island preparing a holiday meal, following a cooking tutorial from her smart glasses. She’s preparing a warm, wintry salad of fresh kale, roasted chestnuts and perennial whole grains that she’ll serve with a small but nutrient-dense portion of forest-raised pork tenderloin from the local butcher. She’s baked some kernza-sourdough bread to go along with it, with black walnut oil for dipping.
A farmer
Avery visits her friend’s farm in central Missouri where they’ve been farming 500 acres for the past 15 years. The bread and butter of their farm is, literally, grain for bread, plus specialty fruits and nuts. They also lease a few acres of silvopasture to a local livestock farmer for her growing herd. Technology is a mainstay of their operation – from software that monitors growth stages to automated tractors that use AI to weed and pick. This technology also frees them to focus on producing value-added products and iterating production practices to drive innovation.
A perennial vision inspired by a nutty past
That future scenario was inspired by my own past dabbling in perennial agriculture. As I hope some can relate, I went a little nutty in my college years.
Chestnut “milk” was a college experiment borne of my desire to see more trees across northern Missouri. I roasted and peeled chestnuts harvested from the local Center for Agroforestry’s research farm, where I was a research associate at the time. The rich, autumnal smell of the chestnuts shown through in my final “milk” product.
As a vegan then, and having just returned from a diverse farm in the Costa Rican rainforest, I was pursuing a “two birds, one stone” strategy: let’s make a tasty milk alternative while promoting a new market for tree crops. If the chestnut “milk” panned out, naturally I assumed that every farmer in Missouri and Iowa would plant chestnut trees across their corn and soybean fields, making the landscape more diverse and our crop systems more perennial.
Sadly, the milk was just okay. A bit too roasty to be an everyday staple.
But the dream didn’t die, nor did the question: what would a more perennial agriculture look like, and what would it take to get there?
Comparing corn to apples: annual versus perennial systems
Today, annual production is responsible for the majority of farm economic output and covers most cropland acres. Corn and soybean production comprises 57% of harvested cropland acres and generates 28% of the economic value derived from U.S. agricultural fields.
Comparatively, perennial systems - those composed of plants that endure year after year - are only common for specialty operations, like fruit and nut orchards and livestock grazing. Fruit and tree nuts comprise nearly six million acres, or 1.5% of cropland, and are responsible for less than 10% of crop economic value. It’s incredible that despite being grown on 3% of the land area of corn and soybeans, these specialty crops bring in about 25% of the economic value.
Livestock - which can be produced on perennially-managed grasslands - is responsible for over 40% of economic value through US cash receipts today. Yet most livestock produced in the United States relies on feed produced through annual agriculture. Still, nearly half of all agricultural land in the United States is managed as permanent pasture, which is technically perennial, though lacks management through a diversified perennial lens and thus foregoes many of the associated ecological benefits.
So, if we were to envision a perennial paradigm for agriculture, how might it look? Based on the way our land is used today, I see three prominent opportunities:
Incorporating trees into our annual commodity cropping systems. We can start small by adding productive filter strips, windbreaks and buffer strips, and then expand through alley cropping rows of timber or fruit and nut bearing trees with annual crops.
Replacing annual grain crops with perennial grain, as has been attempted with kernza.
Shifting away from the factory farm livestock model and towards a more pasture-focused model of livestock, which will require a decrease in meat consumption. This pasture model would be compatible with practices like silvopasture, where you intersperse trees (which themselves can provide fodder) and perennial grasses or legumes.
Making this transition will reap significant environmental benefits. Comparing annual and perennial systems, we see that annual systems contribute to environmental degradation, whereas perennial systems contribute to environmental regeneration.
The environmental consequences of annual agriculture include:
Soil erosion estimated at 4.6 tons per acre on cropland, and more recently projected to be 10 to 1,000 times worse than initially thought.
Nutrient loss to waterways, contributing to challenges like unsafe levels of nitrates in drinking water and a growing hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which has threatened fishing sector performance for decades
Greenhouse gas emissions, including the majority of US emissions of nitrous oxide
Reductions in biodiversity and increased use of pesticides that influences weed population genetics and the dawn of superweeds
Comparatively, perennial systems have been shown to create positive outcomes, like:
Reductions in soil loss to levels below 0.02 tons per acre per year
Retention of key soil nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, which might lead to less reliance on fertilizer inputs, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions and water quality challenges from nutrient losses
Natural carbon sequestration of 2 to 8 tons per acre per year
Increased biodiversity, which can promote pollinator populations and improve natural pest deterrence
While the environmental case for perennial agricultural systems is robust, the economic case is less certain. This piece is hugely important, as farmers will not adopt a new management practice unless it has a clear positive impact on their profitability.
Initial studies on the impact of perennial systems like alley cropping for annual crop farmers are few. Blanchett et al. (2018) reported that “the balance between the positive and negative effects of trees on the crop is still undecided,” where the positive impacts include climate mitigation and the negative include competition for water, nutrients and light. On the other hand, results from one model showed that alley cropped systems in the Midwest can lead to greater profitability.
Companies like Propagate are working hard to ensure that each farmer understands what to expect economically from an annual-to-perennial transition. I spoke with Jeremy Kaufman, COO and Co-Founder at Propagate, this week to get clarity on the economic picture of agroforestry systems.
Propagate delivers a software for farmers called Overyield to help them visualize and design diversified, profitable farming systems. The concept behind “Overyield” is that any given farmer theoretically can design a diversified, annual / perennial cropping system that leads one acre of land to perform better than it would with just a single crop.
Agroforestry is complex -– a sentiment that Jeremy emphasized at multiple points in our conversation. While we’re already seeing examples in Africa, where farmers are planting trees and introducing farmer managed natural regeneration, or small farms in Australia – we still lack robust data to validate alley cropped agroforestry systems at scale.
What we do have is data that shows the economic picture for each, single crop. We can combine that with available data that documents the impact of shading on crop yields. This combination gives us a picture of what might be true on a farm that adopts agroforestry systems, such as alley cropping.
The power of tools like Overyield is in illustrating for farmers what they might expect in terms of net yield from incorporating crops like chinese chestnuts into their fields. This is critical support since one of the most significant things we can do to accelerate farmer adoption of these systems is give them powerful frameworks on how they’ll earn income on these systems. And, there’s not a one-size-fits-all agroforestry system that will make most farmers more profitable, making these frameworks for decision-making even more critical.
So, we don't yet have resounding evidence that the positive economic impacts of agroforestry at scale outweigh the potential competition and initial upfront investment. However, that equation changes significantly if you factor in ecosystem payments and up-front financial assistance like cost-share, assuming the assistance from these sources is significant enough.
That’s where initiatives like WorkingTrees, my own company - FarmRaise - and increased cost-share support through the Inflation Reduction Act and Climate Smart Commodities (CSC) programs serve as the stopgap to provide transitional financial support to farmers. Early adopters of these systems will provide the data that can guide future adopters in their own decision-making.
A perennial roadmap
The regenerative agriculture market is expected to double in economic value in the next five years, with agroforestry being a key driver of that value. How will we get there?
The keys to integrating these perennial systems across more cropland will be to build a supportive technological ecosystem for their implementation and viable markets for alternative crops. The challenge with this kind of system shift is that it truly does take a village.
Farmers’ margins are tight, and this incentivizes them to make decisions that reap financial rewards in the near-term. Hence, increased availability of government financial assistance, more robust technical support, and ecosystem markets will pave the way for increased perennial system adoption. The USDA will be pumping over $2 billion into climate smart projects, with $60 million directed towards agroforestry. Through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the USDA is also planning to more than double the financial cost-share available to farmers to adopt climate-smart conservation practices, many of which are perennial adaptations like filter strips and windbreaks.
Propagate’s technical support will improve farmers’ ability to adopt perennial systems and envision the impact of the transitions on their operations. And, initiatives like WorkingTrees will help farmers circumvent the market hurdle of perennial products by helping farmers get paid through ecosystem market participation. These markets can pay farmers for the ecosystem benefits they’re creating much faster than we can build a new market for some of the physical products coming off of perennial farms.
Beyond the next five years, we’ll need to see greater technical capacity to support perennial systems in the form of perennial crop genetics and better equipment for diversified cropping systems. We’ll need to establish robust markets for the physical products coming off of perennial systems - going back to my college experiments with chestnut “milk.” Along with these markets, we’ll establish more processing facilities throughout the country for diversified crops.
There’s also huge potential in the next two decades to transition livestock over to pasture, though this would require reductions in consumer demand by up to 70% in North America. And throughout all of this, we might want to put policies and incentives in place that ensure these systems won’t be quickly abandoned. A professor of mine from college told a tale of how, over the course of her life, she’d seen windbreaks planted in response to the Dust Bowl torn down to make way for new irrigation equipment. How can we ensure that our soil conserving, landscape diversifying efforts of today aren’t compromised tomorrow?
Conclusion
It’s high time that agriculture became a little nuttier. While perennial systems are still very niche, they may become more dominant as ecosystem markets, increased government financial incentives, and improved technical support become available in the coming years.
And for those of us driving through Midwestern landscapes, this is welcome news. Not only might our vistas take on new hues and shapes, but the ecosystems themselves, and the human communities situated within them, will be healthier, a bit more resilient, and more evergreen.