Aubrey Streit Krug

Societal Impact Statement: Annual cereal grains account for ~50% of human food calories, but cultivation of these crops has resulted in major environmental and social issues worldwide. For nearly three decades, researchers have been breeding intermediate wheatgrass—a perennial cool‐season grass—to serve as the world's first commercial‐scale perennial grain crop to improve agricultural sustainability. Introducing a perennial grain crop onto landscapes and into markets has significant potential to reduce environmental impacts of agriculture, improve farmer economics, and offer a healthy new food ingredient for consumers. However, transdisciplinary collaboration is required to upscale Kernza to maximize positive societal impacts. Summary: Kernza is the tradename of grain harvested from advanced breeding lines of intermediate wheatgrass, a perennial grass being domesticated to serve as a perennial grain crop. Here, we present the need and justification for developing perennial grains as a contributing solution to agricultural challenges; we review the foundational science behind Kernza's development, outline the transdisciplinary efforts to scale and commercialize it, and address the unique challenges to its wider adoption and integration into the food system. Decades of plant breeding and development of genetic resources have resulted in the domestication of Kernza, which has since been studied for its food science, agronomic, and ecological properties at a research scale. Research and development have expanded to engage critical food system actors including farmers, processors, end‐users, and consumers, and these collaborations have resulted in coordinated networks ranging in scale from local communities to an international consortium to improve the social, environmental, and economic impacts of Kernza. Cross‐sector partnerships continue to develop and distribute knowledge and resources that support the adoption of Kernza by growers and end users. Examples of resources include grower business cooperatives, federal incentive programs, marketing toolkits, and educational materials for learners spanning generations. We outline key challenges to expedited progress, including the inherent time requirements to breed a crop for multi‐year grain production, and quantify certain environmental benefits like carbon sequestration. A coordinated, transdisciplinary, values‐based approach to overcoming these challenges is described and, if implemented, can accelerate the research and commercialization at a global scale.

Societal Impact Statement: Soils are globally degraded due in part to conventional agriculture and wildland conversion. To address the global challenge of soil degradation, we formed an interdisciplinary, cross‐institutional collaborative research team, New Roots for Restoration, to understand how perennial plant root and shoot traits relate to one another, and how they influence and are influenced by plant communities and the soil. We highlight how coordinated research projects, expertise cores, and cross‐institution training activities simultaneously advance scientific understanding and workforce development. We share approaches and tools, as well as challenges and lessons learned. This institute highlights how multi‐institution teams integrating diverse biological subdisciplines can advance major scientific and training goals. Summary: The challenge of restoring degraded soils must be met with integrated knowledge and practice of distinct biological subdisciplines. Here we share a model of scientific collaboration, an interdisciplinary cross‐institution team: New Roots for Restoration Biology Integration Institute (NRR). NRR focuses on how plant organismal systems (roots and shoots) relate to one another, and how those relationships influence and are influenced by plant communities and the soil ecosphere. Our aim is to enhance the ability to predict belowground functional traits from aboveground phenotypes to identify ecologically and functionally appropriate materials to restore natural ecosystems and to develop sustainable agricultural systems of the future. Plants provide the ecological and structural foundation of terrestrial landscapes, building soils and supporting productivity in natural and agricultural ecosystems. Plants connect aboveground components through their root systems in terrestrial ecosystems to the soil ecosphere. However, the field lacks a basic understanding of how plant traits, from roots to shoots, govern these connections. This is especially true for perennial plants, which are inherently difficult to study. NRR seeks to elucidate how attributes of the plant organismal system (plant traits, genetics, genetics × environment interactions), community ecology, and the soil ecosphere contribute to variation in aboveground and belowground plant structures through 10 integrated projects supported by expertise cores. Our efforts demonstrate how the integration of biological subdisciplines can advance understanding of the impacts of deep‐rooted plant systems in both restored grasslands and perennial agroecosystems.

Gundelia has been cooked as a wild edible plant from pastures and open areas in many countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. The foliage of this hardy, prickly, perennial genus resembles the artichoke (Cynara cardunculus) and has similar culinary uses. However, the heads are quite distinct and produce edible seeds that may once have been harvested as a source of vegetable oil. Though avoided by grazing sheep and goats, the dried foliage is palatable and nutritious when chopped and mixed in animal rations. Independently, several small producers in Palestine have begun sowing and raising Gundelia, known as ‘akkoub, as a crop because of its economic and cultural value, and because of increasingly constrained access to wild stands. An international collaboration could develop improved genetic varieties and agronomic practices to revive its use for oil seeds and to accelerate the domestication of this valuable, hardy plant.

Phosphorus (P) is a finite resource essential for food production currently lost from fields at an unsustainable rate via runoff and crop harvests. These losses could be addressed by pairing peren­nial crops, which reduce runoff with their deep roots that stabilize the soil, with recovering nutri­ents from human excreta. Urine contains the majority of P and other nutrients that humans excrete and therefore has been the focus of recent nutrient reclamation efforts. Urine fertilizer has yet to be explored for perennials, however, and under­standing the biophysical effects of urine ferti­lizer on soil nutrients and biomass in perennial crops could inform the design of a more circular food system. To that end, we started the first known workplace urine nutrient reclamation pro­ject in the state of Kansas, U.S., to test the feasibil­ity of supplying available soil P from urine to alfalfa (Medicago sativa), a perennial legume forage crop. After one growing season, urine fertilizer had no effect on aboveground biomass but did increase available soil P which otherwise decreased in the control treatments. Urine also increased soil nitrate and sodium compared to the water-only controls. The field study was coupled with a survey of staff members who participated in urine collection to identify opportunities and potential barriers to urine diversion in the U.S. The survey revealed a lack of awareness of both unsustainable P manage­ment and urine recovery as a potential solution, underscoring the need for increased education. Regulatory challenges faced in the second field sea­son also highlighted the need for policy that explic­itly defines urine separately from wastewater in the U.S. We hope that results from this project will make it more feasible to conduct additional studies and circular food system community-based pro­jects on a larger scale going forward.

Gardening experiments are timely in the context of what many now call the Anthropocene, an era that highlights questions of how humans collectively relate to the larger Earth systems in which we are embedded. In Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, Timothy Clark reflects on the “unreadability” of the Anthropocene. He invites ecocritics to address this challenge by practicing “scale framing,” reading texts in variable and increasingly broad scales, and engaging the contradictions that emerge. We applied a scale framing approach to a story of relationships with Silphium integrifolium in an experimental gardening project. Silphium is a native North American perennial prairie plant being domesticated as a future oilseed crop. We are researchers and participants in a civic science project, in which individual garden sites are designed to collect data on and conserve silphium ecotypes while being linked into a wider network. In particular, we analyzed a civic science video story created by Ellie Irons called “Un-Lawning with Silphium.” Through our ecocritical analysis, we generated a framework to visualize nested and cross-scalar relationships in gardening projects. This framework could help inform the design and assessment of experimental gardening projects that feature the arts and humanities (e.g., digital narratives, ecocriticism, and pedagogy) and connect them with the natural and social sciences (e.g., plant breeding, botany, geography, and ecology) through transdisciplinary and participatory research methodologies for public engagement (e.g., civic science). We found that civic science gardening with silphium, and other gardening experiments in the Anthropocene, can guide public sensory engagements with scale, help spark recognition and investigation of contradictory scale effects, and motivate us to imagine and build relationships of caring responsibility.

Current food systems are challenged by relying on a few input-intensive, staple crops. The prioritization of yield and the loss of diversity during the recent history of domestication has created contemporary crops and cropping systems that are ecologically unsustainable, vulnerable to climate change, nutrient poor, and socially inequitable. For decades, scientists have proposed diversity as a solution to address these challenges to global food security. Here, we outline the possibilities for a new era of crop domestication, focused on broadening the palette of crop diversity, that engages and benefits the three elements of domestication: crops, ecosystems, and humans. We explore how the suite of tools and technologies at hand can be applied to renew diversity in existing crops, improve underutilized crops, and domesticate new crops to bolster genetic, agroecosystem, and food system diversity. Implementing the new era of domestication requires that researchers, funders, and policymakers boldly invest in basic and translational research. Humans need more diverse food systems in the Anthropocene—the process of domestication can help build them.

The classic domestication scenario for grains and fruits has been portrayed as the lucky fixation of major-effect “domestication genes.” Characterization of these genes plus recent improvements in generating novel alleles (e.g., by gene editing) have created great interest in de novo domestication of new crops from wild species. While new gene editing technologies may accelerate some genetic aspects of domestication, we caution that de novo domestication should be understood as an iterative process rather than a singular event. Changes in human social preferences and relationships and ongoing agronomic innovation, along with broad genetic changes, may be foundational. Allele frequency changes at many loci controlling quantitative traits not normally included in the domestication syndrome may be required to achieve sufficient yield, quality, defense, and broad adaptation. The environments, practices and tools developed and maintained by farmers and researchers over generations contribute to crop yield and success, yet those may not be appropriate for new crops without a history of agronomy. New crops must compete with crops that benefit from long-standing participation in human cultural evolution; adoption of new crops may require accelerating the evolution of new crops’ culinary and cultural significance, the emergence of markets and trade, and the formation and support of agricultural and scholarly institutions. We provide a practical framework that highlights and integrates these genetic, agronomic, and cultural drivers of change to conceptualize de novo domestication for communities of new crop domesticators, growers and consumers. Major gene-focused domestication may be valuable in creating allele variants that are critical to domestication but will not alone result in widespread and ongoing cultivation of new crops. Gene editing does not bypass or diminish the need for classical breeding, ethnobotanical and horticultural knowledge, local agronomy and crop protection research and extension, farmer participation, and social and cultural research and outreach. To realize the ecological and social benefits that a new era of de novo domestication could offer, we call on funding agencies, proposal reviewers and authors, and research communities to value and support these disciplines and approaches as essential to the success of the breakthroughs that are expected from gene editing techniques.