Transcript:

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00
Hello everybody, and welcome to We Measure The World, a podcast produced by scientists, for scientists…

ALEX FOX 0:07
And the other part of our project is looking at soil health and Kernza ability to maintain and improve soil health when you’re transitioning from wheat into Kernza. You know, we think that planting Kernza in what was previously a wheat field should change the soil microbiome to be more similar to what you might expect to see in a CRP field, so that Conservation Reserve Program land that’s specifically designed just to mimic the behavior of the native prairie without any effort to extract resources from it. Basically, we’re hoping to see, and we have seen that planting Kernza does move the soil microbiome to be much more similar to that of CRP land, which is a strong indicator of improving soil health and the ability of soil to sequester more carbon into the future.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:01
That’s just a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure the World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues, and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil, plant, atmosphere, continuum. Today’s guest is Alex Fox. Alex received his bachelor’s in mathematics and astrophysics from Oberlin College. He is currently a hydrologic science PhD candidate at the University of Wyoming plant physiological ecology laboratory. Alex’s research focuses on modeling and measuring the relationship between ecosystem scale processes and plant physiology, especially as they relate to land management and disturbance. And today he’s here to talk about his research into Kernza, a perennial grain that could revitalize agriculture in drier climates through building soil health, fighting climate change and supporting local farmers. So Alex, thanks so much for being here.

ALEX FOX 1:53
It’s great to be here.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:55
All right, let’s jump in, first we’d love to get a little more info into your background. So we’d like like to know if you’d like to tell us a little bit about how you got into the sciences and what led you from mathematics and astrophysics on into studying agriculture and plant physiology and ecology.

ALEX FOX 2:15
Yeah. Well, I’ve always been interested in the natural world and sort of understanding how you can break down really complicated processes into simpler components that you can analyze and understand to help you solve problems. And that definitely is what led me to study physics and math at my undergrad. I was really drawn to how you can express so much complexity using the language of mathematics, I think, and that was really appealing to me intellectually, I think. But as I soil went through my undergrad, I realized that I wanted to study something that was a little bit more, I guess, down to earth, so to speak. So I started to get interested in hydrology, and initially I was drawn in by water policy in the western United States. I remember I read the Book Cadillac desert by I think, Mark Reisner. It was a phenomenal book, and it really kind of changed my perspective on just how important it is to focus on issues of natural resources and doing what we can to get what we can out of the land without really destroying it. He talks a lot in that book about how our need to, like acquire more water and more resources has really sort of put us in a bad predicament in the current age, and that sort of led me down a road to studying agriculture and sustainable agriculture, and trying to take my physics and math background and apply it where I could to natural ecosystems. Eventually, it took me to University of Wyoming, where I worked as a field tech, running Eddy Covariance instrumentation that University of Wyoming has in the snowy range east of Laramie, where they were looking at how bark beetles and forest fire interact to affect things like carbon cycling, water cycling and energy budgets in the established pine forests. And that’s part of my research. But another part of my research is what we’re talking about today, which is having to do with Kernza. So before I was at here at the University of Wyoming, I did an internship at the Land Institute, which is the research nonprofit who initially developed this, this grain crop called Kernza, with the idea of using it to sort of help reconcile the human economy with nature’s economy, of like carbon, water and nutrient cycling. So here at the University of Wyoming, we’re working on this project, which completed in April of this year, but we’re still doing a lot of the analysis on what we found to try to introduce this novel perennial grape crop to Wyoming agro-ecosystems.

BRAD NEWBOLD 4:58
So yeah, that’s that’s talk a little bit about. This Wyoming Kernza project. How did, how did this all get started, but just kind of an overview. Could you give us a quick glimpse into the Wyoming Kernza project, how it came about, what the main goals are for it?

ALEX FOX 5:12
This project is sort of inspired by the fact that dry land grain agriculture in Wyoming is very hard. So, much of the grain that’s grown in eastern Wyoming, so like east of Laramie range, near the Nebraska border, is grown in this wheat fallow rotation, where you’ll have wheat in the ground for about eight months, and then you’ll let the fields go fallow for the next 14 months. Like no cover crops. We’ve looked at cover crops, using cover crops in this area, and they don’t work. They use up too many resources. They don’t produce enough yield to be able to make money. They’re very water hungry. They’re very thirsty. So they use this one year wheat, one year fallow rotation. I mean, it has a lot of problems. It’s really inefficient at using water, right? Because any water that falls on the fallow fields, most of it will run off or evaporate by the time you actually get your wheat in the ground the next year. It’s really bad for soil erosion. It requires, generally requires very heavy tillage, and also, since you don’t have a cover crop, you’re just sort of letting your soil, your top soil and nutrients run off and blow away into Nebraska, you know. And on top of that, we also have since we’re reliant on rainfall for all of our water inputs, and Wyoming only gets between 400-450 millimeters of precipitation a year in that part of the state anyway, which is less than less than half of what you might get in like Minnesota, or about half of what you might expect in central Kansas, you end up with really unreliable yields. So maybe one every three years, you might get a yield that you can sell or make a good amount of money on. So what farmers really need here is a crop that is cheap to plant and cheap to maintain, because, you know, annual wheat, all the tillage and fertilizer inputs and pesticide inputs are very expensive to farmers here, but also it can serve as a multi use crop that can still provide utility and income when yields are poor and the weather is not conducive to producing grain yield. And on top of that, we want to be able to have crop that can stabilize the soil structure and improve soil health. Kernza is kind of a perfect candidate for that. You know, a lot of farms in this part of the country are part of the USDA Conservation Reserve Program, CRP. Or the goal with that program is to try to maintain and stabilize the soil health and soil structure and reduce erosion and conserve our sort of soil resources and sort of try to mimic the ecological functions of the natural prairie. You know, they use a lot of plants you wouldn’t expect in the natural prairie in this part of the country, like wheat grass and alfalfa, for example. And that’s very good at doing things like improving soil health and stabilizing soil structure and improving biodiversity, but it doesn’t really provide any utility to farmers. And the thing with Kernza is that it is crop that can be harvested for grain, for human consumption or for forage for cattle. So it’s a great multi use crop that also is to you know, if you farm it right, is designed to fulfill some of those other goals of stabilizing soil structure, building soil health, building up soil in general, sequestering carbon. And there’s a lot of ways that you can grow it that promote biodiversity as well, with inter cropping, with various other perennial species.

BRAD NEWBOLD 8:35
I’d love to get kind of back up a little bit and talk about, if you could the the history of of Kernza, like, where did this come from? How was it developed, and how did it become a a promising candidate for for studies like this?

ALEX FOX 8:52
So Kernza is actually just intermediate wheat grass. So Thinopyrum Intermedium is the species. It’s a grass that’s really commonly grown here in the West as part of CRP. It’s just a perennial wheatgrass. It’s not native to the US, but it provides a lot of ecological benefits being a perennial grass, and it has just been selectively bred over several decades to produce a grain yield that you can harvest and you can sell and you can use to make beer and whiskey and bread and cereals. Our local Walmart actually, in Laramie just started stocking Kernza of flour, which is pretty exciting for us to see. So the history of it is that it is, it’s really the first brand new grain crop we’ve had in 1000s of years, right? It’s a brand new species that has been selectively bred, like we did with the annual wheat that we currently have to farm. Kernza is a trademark for the grain harvested from this cultivar intermediate wheat grass. It’s a trademark that. Is owned by the Land Institute, which is a research nonprofit based in Salina Kansas, where their their overall mission is, like I said earlier. So this idea of improving the health of the general ecosphere, I guess, in a way that we can extract things like food and other resources from the natural world without destroying it, right? While maintaining its health and its benefits in the long term, such as carbon sequestration, the ability to produce food for us for hundreds of 1000s of years, started to focus on is this idea of natural systems agriculture, right? I think that’s a pretty common term that’s used now, yeah, so they they’ve had this breeding program to produce grain from intermediate wheat grass for several decades. And Kernza is definitely the best known of what they’ve bred, it gets the most press I think. They actually do research in many other, many other different types of crops. So they have sort of a sister organization in China that has had a lot of success in breeding perennial rice for the same purpose. And a program that, from what I understand, is done much better than any of the programs with Kernza per annual rice is actually a one understand, a very successful breeding effort. There’s several other programs, for example, breeding silphium as a perennial oil seed and then other crops like that I know less about, such as sorghum, perennial sorghum and sainfoin is another crop they’re focusing on. Yeah. So instead of a grain, legumes, other sorts of food crops that we can try to make perennial in a way where we can get food and resources out of the landscape without degrading soil health and fertility in the long term.

BRAD NEWBOLD 11:45
So what are some of the key distinctive traits that have been selected for in the process of developing what is now Kernza?

ALEX FOX 11:52
So when you think of producing grain, the first thing you probably think of is just the volume of seeds, right? If you, if you look at wild grass, and then you look at a head of wheat, head of wheat will it’s huge, it’s heavy, it’s it’s full of giant seeds, whereas head of wild type intermediate wheat grass, I might have the same number of seeds, but they’ll be very small. So that’s sort of the first thing that comes to mind. Other important factors to consider have to do with the supply chain and with how you actually process the grain. So you want all the heads of your grain crop to mature at the same exact time, right? You don’t want some of them to be mature and some of them haven’t quite reached maturity yet, and some of them are too old and too dry. They just fall, fall off when you run your combine over it. So you want to be able to collect everything all at once. You want to be able to dehull the grain really easily when you you put it through a dehuller or a mill. So you want a really high free threshing fraction of your grain, right? You want to be able to put it through the thresher and basically have all of your grain come out of the husk. Wheat is really good at that. Intermediate wheat grass is not so good at that. So that’s like they have to breathe for. There’s several of the traits I know that. There’s one that has to do with head shattering, which is something that I don’t fully understand what that means. I think it has something to do with how easily the grains fall off of the of the head. And there’s some other important considerations to make right, like, if you’re breeding for really high grain yield and you want it this plant to stick all of its carbohydrates into its grain, maybe you have to worry about whether or not you’re breeding that plant to take those nutrients out of, for example, its root system, right? Like maybe it when it’s putting all this energy into growing larger and fatter seeds for us to eat, maybe it’s not putting so much energy into growing healthy, extensive root systems. Maybe it’s not putting so much energy into feeding the microbiome in the soil that it needs to acquire more nutrients and to maintain soil health and stuff like that. And that’s much that’s much harder to focus on. Some of the research that’s come out of this project is focused on that, but yeah, those are some of the important considerations to make when breeding a crop, and that have been made in Kernza.

BRAD NEWBOLD 14:21
I definitely want to dig in to the research project itself, with the methodology and your findings and other things, but just kind of in general, what has been known of the benefits of Kernza in terms of soil health, water usage, so you know, the cost effectiveness for farmers that might be growing it? What have people been seeing already when it comes to those kinds of benefits?

ALEX FOX 14:43
So I am going to speak more about Wyoming and less about the rest of the country. There’s a whole host of research on the benefits that Kernza has for those things in the rest of the country, but in Wyoming, the economic and climatic landscape is. Very different. It’s very, like I said before, it’s very hard to grow dry land wheat here and make any sort of profit at all. So speaking to the last thing that you asked about, in terms of sort of the economics of growing kernza here, we’ve found that Kernza actually is really promising in this part of the country, in that it has very low input costs. So you when you plant Kernza, you might have to you might till the soil, you will plant it, and then you might spray it, and then that’s it for the next several years. If you want to harvest it, you just have to go harvest it, right? You don’t have to replant it. You don’t have to buy more seed. You don’t have to till it up and plant it again, right? You don’t have to spend all that money on fuel and more tractors and more labor hours. So it’s it’s very cost effective in that way. Kernza, while it does have a very low yield, so we found that the grain yield is about 1/6 of wheat when we grow it here, Kernza does fetch more at the market is a more expensive grain, so it kind of makes up for it in that way. And then also it really makes up for it in the fact that it’s very cheap to make. So it’s the expensive grain that gets a high price at market, and then it’s also requires very low inputs. That’s a huge benefit here. And also in years where you don’t get a good grain yield that you can sell, it makes a very good forage crop. It’s very high in protein. The farmers that we’ve worked with, we worked with about five farmers on this project. One of them sold their grain to a distillery in Colorado, I believe, and then another one has been using it as forage for its cattle. So it’s a great multi use crop for people here, I think you’ll have to repeat the first, the first half of your question?

BRAD NEWBOLD 16:46
Part of that was looking at, or at least, what are the known benefits so far in terms of like soil health and water usage?

ALEX FOX 16:56
Okay, yeah. So in terms of soil health, Kernza, or any other wheat grass, it’s a perennial, right? So the roots stay in the soil all year round, and that really helps stabilize the soil, right? It’s not going to blow away and run off as easily. It’s going to help to tighten nutrient cycling. So in Wyoming, this isn’t such a huge problem, because it’s really it’s very dry, but I know that in Kansas and farther east Kernza is great for tightening nutrient cycling, keeping nitrogen in your system and other nutrients in your system, because, again, the root network is so extensive. It’s great at feeding the microbiome because it produces so much below ground biomass, so you can sort of help to build soil health. And then also, one of our hypotheses here in terms of water usage is that, you know, Kernza’s perenniality and its rooting structure could really help it to acquire and hold on to water in ways that annual wheat crops cannot here. So, you know, you have deeper roots that might be able to access more soil, more soil moisture. You have denser roots and just higher live root biomass that can just access more soil moisture in the layers, in like the surface layers, and a little bit below that, it’s in the ground every single year, so any water that might run off or evaporate in a fallow field when you’re growing wheat, won’t do that, and the Kernza can use that to grow biomass. So you know, physiologically, from what I understand, Kernza is actually less efficient at turning transpired water into biomass, so it has a slightly lower water use efficiency than wheat. But the other aspect of its physiology and management, such as perenniality and its rooting structure means that seems to be able to regulate its need for water, and how much water can actually access better than we can. Seems to get less water stressed, and we think that it should just be able to get more water than we can.

BRAD NEWBOLD 18:57
With Kernza being a perennial, what is the the growth and harvest cycle like? What does that time span look like? Like, you mentioned some of the benefits compared to annual wheat?

ALEX FOX 19:09
So there’s a couple different ways to grow it. You can plant Kernza in the fall or in the spring. If you plant Kernza in the fall, the idea is it has a chance to over winter, and you can get a grain yield the next year, but it might not be as competitive with weeds. You can also plant Kernza in the spring. If you plant Kerns in the spring, it can be something more competitive. It’s easier for it to establish, but you won’t get a yield that summer. You have to wait until the next year to get a yield in Wyoming, what we’ve been doing is planting it in the spring, because we’re a little bit worried about weed pressure here, and it’s also it’s, it’s so dry that, you know, we just want to make sure that it’s able to grow first of all, before we’re worried about whether or not it’ll give us a yield. So planting in the spring it it grows. And over the summer it establishes itself in the next summer is when we get our first green yield. It’s a pre no crop. It’s a little bit more hardy than annual wheat, so it requires slightly less management. There’s at least one pesticide that’s approved for use on it. That’s 2, 4- D, a couple of the farmers here have used that spray. But from what I understand, it is a more hardy crop once it’s established and is less susceptible to weed pressure, so the more competitive.

BRAD NEWBOLD 20:28
And so then, as a perennial crop, they’re just letting it grow, go to seed, harvest, and that cycle continues basically infinitely?

ALEX FOX 20:39
As long as long as you want. Yeah, you know, I think that there is an issue with declining yields over the years. So in stands that have been growing for five or six years, they’ll see lower yields than in stands that have been growing for two or three years. But, yeah, that’s the that’s the general cycle. It’s you plant it, you let it grow, you harvest it that year or the next year, if you get a grain yield in Wyoming, we’re not expecting a grain yield every single year, you know, only some of the years and the other years you can harvest it for hay and forage. And then eventually grain yields will start to decrease and it’ll probably have to be replanted. Farmers can harvest the seeds for themselves and replant it if they want. That’s totally okay for farmers to do. One of the farmers we’re working with, he actually retired at the end of the project. So his farm has been operating for 100 years continuously, and so what he’s done is he has he’s just planted Kernza, and he’s just letting it grow. He’s not harvesting it anymore. He’s folding it into his CRP program, is what he has been able to do with it. So there’s a lot of different things you can do. You know, if you’re somewhere where you’re irrigating it, or you’re somewhere where it’s a lot wetter, you can definitely get a great yield every single year. Here it’s more about whatever the climate allows you to do this year, be it harvest when you can, or cut it for hay and sell to cattle farmers and ranchers.

BRAD NEWBOLD 22:08
When it comes to the farming of Kernza. Are there those that have tried out both irrigated and dry farming? Is Kernza a good candidate for dry farming I guess is kind of the simplest way to ask that?

ALEX FOX 22:20
It’s a great candidate for dry farming in eastern Wyoming, that’s for sure, because it’s a very resilient crop, and it’s able to sort of mediate a lot of the uncertainty that you get in dry land farming, you know, out east in Minnesota, especially where a lot of this, this research, there’s a lot of research being done by the University of Minnesota on Kernza, and it’s grown, I think the largest amount of acreage is in Minnesota. You know, there farmers are trying to compete with organic, irrigated corn, right? Which is a it’s a completely different economy. It’s completely different set of incentives for farmers. So I can’t really speak about it over there, but certainly in Wyoming, it’s a very good candidate for a dry land crop, anything, if you irrigate it, will grow more here. We’re in a super water limited in a very water limited environment. My part of the study doesn’t look at the irrigated Kernza. We have actually give me a sec to bring up some data. We planted a couple plots of Kernza at the SAREC Research Station, which is in Lingle Wyoming, we let the Kernza grow under just precipitation, and then the other plot, I think, we irrigated one crop to mean annual precipitation, and then the other crop, we fully irrigated to what would would be similar to a wet year around here. And it about doubled. It about doubled the grain yield. You know, I’m sure that farmers who have water rights are, of course, going to be irrigating their crops anyway, but we’re this project is mainly focused on dry land farming, because that is what the majority of farmers in this in this part of Wyoming do.

BRAD NEWBOLD 24:02
So, along with that, with working with some of these farmers, what has been, kind of the collaboration like on this project? I mean, you mentioned you’ve been working with with local farmers. Are you working with government agencies as well? You’re working with private sector at all?

ALEX FOX 24:15
Yeah, so this project was primarily funded by a Western SARE professional Producer Grant. So the idea behind that program is that they will fund research projects that work directly with farmers to help try out new agricultural techniques in a way that can directly benefit farmers in that area. So we worked with five farms in eastern Wyoming as a core part of the project to see how their different management practices might work in terms of influencing soil health and water usage in farms in eastern Wyoming, I’ve been focusing primarily on one farm, but sort of looking at sort of the tries of the farms that we’re studying. But other parts of our project involve a huge amount of coordination and outreach with farmers in the local area and even the broader area and like eastern Wyoming and eastern Colorado, last spring, for example, we had a big field day that we hosted on one of our collaborating farmers fields, homestead acres in Alban Wyoming, where, for example, they’re super interested in planting Kernza in and inter cropping it with alfalfa and trying to incorporate that into the forage that they’re producing In a way that’s very cheap to produce and can sort of help build up their soil health for the long term, right? So that’s, that’s an example of a farmer who we’re working with who’s really interested in sort of starting up his business more in maintaining his farm in a way where he can keep it productive for decades and generations to come. Whereas other farmers we’re working with are, you know, for example, one of the farmers we’re working with recently retired, and so he’s looking for a crop that can help him sort of transition his farming into something that is slightly more sustainable and in a way where he can sort of go into semi retirement and maintain sort of the health and productivity of the land that he’s working on. So we’ve been able to engage with local farmers in a huge number of ways they’re all interested in, and sort of learn about their different economic incentives and their different sets of values, both like economically and socially, in terms of what sort of growing grain and wheat in eastern Wyoming, sort of means for them, and seeing how Kernza can help with that part of the local economy.

BRAD NEWBOLD 26:48
Awesome. So we’ve been talking, we’ve been talking for a while, kind of the general overview and some of the cool stuff with this project. I kind of wanted to get into the nitty gritty of it, and what are some of the your primary hypotheses that you’re testing with this project?

ALEX FOX 27:05
So my primary hypotheses that I’m looking at have to do with how Kernza can differentiate itself from annual wheat through mechanisms that I outlined earlier, that have to do with, you know, Kernza is a perennial, so it’s there in the soil more of the time, and it can extract extra soil water that might evaporate out during the fallow months. It has a deep and more extensive root system that can let it access more soil moisture that is typically not accessible by annual wheat. And it could be more tolerant of water stress so at the leaf level, or having to do with greater water access, living at moderated sleep level water stress through access to moisture in its roots. And our hypothesis is that those three mechanisms will influence current visibility to better manage fluctuations in water availability and be able to produce more consistent yields. And the other part of our project is looking at soil health and Kernza ability to maintain and improve soil health when you’re transitioning from wheat into Kernza. So, you know, we think that planting Kernza in was previously a wheat field should change the soil microbiome to be more similar to what you might expect to see in a CRP field, so that Conservation Reserve Program land that’s specifically designed just to mimic the behavior of the native prairie without any effort to extract resources from it. Basically, we’re hoping to see, and we have seen that planting Kernza does move the soil microbiome to be much more similar to that of CRP land, which is a strong indicator of improving soil health and the ability of the soil to sequester more carbon into the future, as the two primary scientific hypotheses that we’re looking at.

BRAD NEWBOLD 29:00
Got it and along with that. So what are some of the, yeah, some of the ways that you’re going about this. How are you testing this hype, these hypotheses? What are you measuring? How are you going about measuring that you want to kind of delve into all that fun stuff?

ALEX FOX 29:13
Yeah, so I guess this is for the METER podcast. So I should have mentioned before that we are using a bunch of METER soil moisture probes. We’re using the TEROS 11 that we’re able to get through the Grant A Harris fellowship. So that is funding a large part of this project as well. So one of the ways that we’re looking at KERNZA’s as water usage is through monitoring soil moisture over time. So we have soil moisture sensors installed in wheat Kernza and the CRP fields at one of the farms that we’re looking at in eastern Wyoming, and we’re trying to see how soil moisture is sort of related to depth and a treatment. So the treatment being CRP, Kernza, or wheat, and in these different fields, see if we are extracting more soil moisture from each of these fields, and we’re also trying to associate those soil moisture values that we’re seeing with indicators of plant stress, such as leaf water potential and leaf level fluorescence measurements, which are sort of lethal fluorescence measurements are sort of physiological indicators of how much stress the actual photosynthetic machinery is under, whereas leaf water potential measurements are indicative of the physical state of water that’s in the plant leaves. So at the end of the day, in the afternoon, you would expect to see really high leaf water potential values. And what we hope to see is that in Kernza, for example, there’s lower indicators of water stress at the leaf level compared to wheat, even when soil moisture might be low for example. Does that make sense? Right, so if soil moisture is low in wheat and in Kernza fields, the wheat might be having a much harder time than the Kernza is because even though soil moisture is low, we might feel to access a much larger volume of soil and still extract moisture and photosynthesize and produce biomass at yield so that is one of the key sets of measurements that we’re looking at. We also looked at a lot of indicators of soil microbial health, which I know very little about. I’m a hydrologist, not a soil microbiologist. They looked at things like, you know, soil microbial community composition and different indicators for the ratio of fungi to bacteria, carbon and nitrogen content, the presence of different enzymes that are representative of different microbial communities that might, for example, break down cellulose or cycle carbon very quickly, or cycle carbon more slowly. That those are some of the things that the soil microbial side of things are looking at. Something else that I’m looking at is also trying to use modeling to try to sort of explain those differences in soil moisture that we’re seeing. That’s kind of part of testing my general hypothesis that the perenniality and rooting structure of Kernza is what is directly influencing its ability to extract moisture from the soil. So we can apply a well tested process based model that has been established to accurately represent hydrologic processes in different crops. Can we use that to show that the, for example, soil moisture dynamics and water potential dynamics that we’re seeing in Kernza, if those are directly affected by rooting structure, that’s sort of the final piece of the puzzle, right? We can observe all the changes in soil moisture and water potential that we want, but we need a way to actually mechanistically link it to, you know, the rooting structure of soil and how it actually tries to require water to grow.

BRAD NEWBOLD 32:51
So as you’ve been going through this project, so what have been some of the, I guess, biggest challenges or difficulties that you’ve had in in either working with or studying Kernza or measuring or modeling the data?

ALEX FOX 33:05
Yeah, well, a big problem is that we’re doing a lot of this stuff on working farms. It’s really hard to control the conditions that you’re growing under, because everybody has different preferences for how they manage their crops. So you know, the first year are, one of the farmers that we working with dropped out because, you know, hail storm destroyed his crop, and he I’m done. I’m not not growing the stuff anymore, you know, I’ll just put barley down instead just, you know, stuff like that, right. Having to work with the actual management practices that are in place, right. It’s a lot harder to do a controlled experiment in these conditions. So, you know, for example, the farm that I’m working on, we had to move some of our sensors from one field to another because the farmer changed his mind about what he wanted to grow there that here. He’s like, Yeah, I’m actually, I’m going to plant this to see I’m going to put like a CRP seed mix in this field that is right now wheat like, oh, well, I kind of wanted another year of data, so I have to go and look in one of your other fields. Yeah, so that that’s definitely been a big challenge, but it’s also meant that we can sort of observe these systems in the way they actually exist out in the world. You know, we have some crops, some some plots at the Research Extension Center in Lingle the SAREC, but they’re quite small, and, you know, it’s much wetter over there, and so it’s not super representative of what most farmers in the area are dealing with. So it’s had its deal with frustrations, but it’s also been a great opportunity to work in the actual working environments that people are trying to grow the grain in.

BRAD NEWBOLD 34:43
So what have been some of your I guess, key preliminary findings so far? Has there been anything that has surprised you with this research or what you’ve found so far of your insights?

ALEX FOX 34:52
What I’ve noticed so far is the soil moisture dynamics are definitely very different between Kernza and wheat. So, so we see that soil moisture is typically lower in the Kernza field at the rooting depths that we’re interested in, so sort of between zero and 15 centimeters into the ground. Soil Moisture is a lot lower in Kernza and whether or not that has to do with the rooting structure and Kernza extracting more moisture, or maybe the fact that, you know, Kernza is planted at a lower density, and so maybe there’s more, you know, radiation, wind that can reach the ground and influence evaporation is yet to be seen, but we do have some evidence that it does have to do with Kernzas rooting physiology, which is pretty exciting. So when we look at our water potential measurements, our leaf water potential measurements, we’re seeing that while the water potential of wheat sort of swings wildly between extreme values, and we can see wheat drying out pretty quickly, even before it begins to senesce the leaf water potentials that we’re observing in Kernza and in the CRP land are much more stable, so we’re just not seeing the same indicators of water stress in Kernza and the CRP grasses that we’re seeing in the annual wheat, which is really nice evidence to support the idea that Kernza might actually be getting more soil moisture than than the wheat crops. That’s the most exciting thing that I’ve seen so far, because that’s seems like pretty strong support for our hypothesis. We’ll have to see what the outcomes are when we try to model that behavior and see if we can sort of reproduce those findings and tie it back to rooting structure. But so far, on a pretty good track, another exciting thing we’ve seen is that the rhizosphere microbiome. So the rhizosphere is that soil that’s within like a millimeter or so of the roots of a plant in it, it’s really interface between the soil and the plant, right? It’s sort of where, where all the magic happens in the microbiome after a couple years of growing Kernza, the soil microbiome in Kernza is actually much more similar to that of that of what we see in the CRP land than it is to wheat. So there’s a very strong change in the soil microbiome towards, sort of our positive control, which is the CRP land, which we’re using as a proxy for healthy soil that can, you know, cycle carbon in a healthy way and hold on to nutrients and not erode basically. That’s another very exciting finding that we’ve seen. Yeah, and also, finally, our economic analysis has shown that Kernza does have the ability to be profitable in eastern Wyoming, which will make it much more appealing to farmers interested in transitioning their management strategies to make their operations more sustainable.

BRAD NEWBOLD 37:59
So if you were to put on your say, crop consultant hat. What would you be saying to to farmers who might be looking into growing Kernza and maybe either transitioning or finding some way to kind of mix with what they’re doing already? How would you, I guess, maybe sell them on on the costs and benefits and the potential impacts?

ALEX FOX 38:20
Well, it’s, it’s a grain crop, but it’s not wheat, right? You can’t grow it like wheat, and you can’t treat it like wheat. It does definitely require a change in, sort of a paradigm shift in how you might farm here. And you know, talking about the sort of downsize first, it does have a much lower yield. It is harder to get to market because some of the infrastructure for processing Kernza just is not here yet, but we’re working on it, and it’s getting better every year. On the other hand, it’s much cheaper to grow if you grow it properly, it can help sustain it could help sustain your farming operations for many years to come. It will make you less at the mercy of the climate and Mother Nature, right? It should be able to weather those sort of dry spells and extreme weather events much better than an annual crop like wheat. I mean, it tastes pretty good, too, I don’t know. Yeah, I’m a scientist, not a crop consultant, but I always feel a little weird when I supposed to give recommendations. Like, well, the study is still going on. I still have hypotheses we have to test. But yeah, from what, from what we’ve seen so far, you know, Kernza has a lower yield. It is a little bit harder to market right now, but it can really help mediate a lot of the frustrations that farmers in this part of the country experience in terms of unpredictability of their yield and how much money they have to pour in to growing a crop that might not even be useful at the end of the year. It’s fantastic for marginal lands like this.

BRAD NEWBOLD 39:58
Right, you’re working. There in in Wyoming, in a harsher environment, where are some other locations, whether in the US or outside, that that might be good candidates for potentially either expanding research into those, into those regions, or having farmers maybe try to implement some of these practices?

ALEX FOX 40:15
Kernza, is really, you know, is really directed at, at farmers in the western US, but anywhere that is growing grain on marginal lands that can be very susceptible to drought, that might not have great resources for irrigation, or where putting heavy inputs into your farmland, such as like heavy tilling, and you know, having to plant year after year, or in places where farmers have been historically exploited economically by agricultural companies could be excellent applications for this crop, anywhere with a dry land grain farming, where farmers struggle to produce consistent yields. And where farmers struggle with degrading soil health and having to pour more and more inputs like artificial fertilizer and things like that onto their crops, it could help. It could help, you know, it won’t. It won’t fix everything beyond, like, what we’re doing here is just growing Kernza in a in, like, a monoculture, right? You know, that’s really not the intended purpose of the crop, right? The ideal is that you grow it in a sort of like a poly culture with, you know, for example, inter cropping with alfalfa or other plants that can help you more efficiently get nitrogen inputs and cycle nutrients and invite pollinators, those sorts of things, right? So this is really the baseline, right? Is what we’re doing here, but it’s anywhere that has a climate and the economy similar to Eastern Wyoming will probably be a little bit better.

BRAD NEWBOLD 41:57
So you’d also mentioned, I mean, here and there in passing as well, some of the benefits with Kernza when it comes to the soil health. So you talked about how, after growing Kernza for a while, that that soil then is very similar in characteristics to kind of the the native soil of the prairie there are there any other, any other contributions that that Kernza or or similar perennial wheat grasses might have to the environment in general and the ecosystem?

ALEX FOX 42:23
Well, this is, this is where we start to get kind of outside of my you know, it’s, it’s definitely been established that growing perennials like Kernza will stabilize soils. You know, they can help produce, they can help improve a lot of soil characteristics if you grow them for long enough, right? The study that we’re doing here is not long enough to see large scale changes in bulk soil characteristics. So you know, things like increases in more stable soil carbon pools. That’s not something that we would be able to see in this study in this amount of time, but it’s something that you know perennial crops, such as Kernza definitely do, and that comes to the tone host of benefits, right? Like reducing erosion, improving your soils capacity to hold water and allow water to infiltrate. Yeah, I’m not a not a soil I’m not a soil scientist. I’m a soil scientist. But I know that you know, for example, improving the aggregation of your soil and increasing soil organic matter is great for crops in a lot of ways, not just in how they use water.

BRAD NEWBOLD 43:34
Going back to kind of the collaboration side of things, how are you going about I guess, just sharing your research and findings with kind of the broader agricultural community. I mean, this is, this is something that we’ve talked about with many of our guests, is, you know, how do you discuss and disseminate your findings? I mean, it’s one thing to do it at the academic level, you know, you have papers and conferences and things like that, but especially when you’re working with more so in the private sector, working with government agencies, I guess, have you had successes or difficulties in that outreach and education effort that you might be playing in, in trying to share your your findings and your research?

ALEX FOX 44:11
Well, we found that farmers in this area are very interested in trying to improve their management practices, and really, they just really like tinkering with different aspects of their operations and trying to improve what they can with changing how they grow crops and what crops they grow. And all the farmers we’ve worked with have been very excited to work with University of Wyoming Extension and just to try to improve what they’re doing. So we have interacted a lot with farmers on various field days. We’ve hosted where we sort of send out calls through University of Wyoming Extension channels to try to invite farmers from the region to come and look at sort of what we’ve been. Researching and what the farmers were working with, what their experiences have been growing these crops, trying to work with, you know, vendors, for example, who might be interested in using Kernza as grain, and trying to connect them directly with farmers in this area. We have done a lot of sort of local outreach, working with local news outlets and radio channels that are in like eastern Wyoming and western Nebraska to sort of get the word out. Yeah. So we, we’ve, aside from academic stuff, we have done a lot of work directly with the farmers and trying to introduce them to the community of growers that we have found or have introduced to this crop so far in the last four years, and it’s been going really well. We’ve we’ve gotten a lot of interest from farmers, especially in eastern Colorado and Eastern Wyoming, who have heard about our project and have contacted us directly, and we’ve been able to put them in contact with the other farmers who are growing them, tell them about our findings. Talk about the different channels that they can use to start growing the crop and where they can sell it, and what we found in terms of management practices and all those sorts of things so.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:15
So what are your, I guess, next steps with your research here, or what do you see as the near and or long term vision for for this kind of research?

ALEX FOX 46:24
I think the long term vision for this kind of research is to hopefully transition eastern Wyoming dryland agriculture away from annual crops entirely. That’s really what this landscape needs from what we’ve seen, helping people transition into more sustainable agricultural systems. I think in the near term, a lot more research needs to be done in what are actually the best management practices for this crop in this area, right? This has been a relatively small study over a relatively short amount of time, and to really know what the benefits are here, we need to actually look at how management recommendations here differ from what they are in wetter ecosystems, such as, you know, in central Kansas, for example, you know how you can plant Kernza, how you can manage it, how you can inter crop it With other species that might help improve your soil health and nutrient cycling, yeah, and generally, a much more in depth economic analysis of growing Kernza here. You know, right now we have a economic analysis we’ve done is not entirely in depth, but it’s enough to show that it’s viable. But you know, people want to know, what are the actual risks associated with growing a new crop like this here, what are the actual more precisely, what are the benefits that they could they could be getting? We’re definitely on track for that. There are several people at the USDA ARS in Fort Collins who have started looking at Kernza, both in terms of doing basic research into eco physiology of growing Kernza, or the yeah, the plant physiology of growing Kernza here, but also in terms of how to introduce perennial crops and other sustainable farming practices to farmers in this area, outside of just basic scientific research. So I think, I think we’re on a pretty good track to that.

BRAD NEWBOLD 48:27
Are there any new or emerging, I guess, technologies or methods that that you’d love to be able to incorporate into your research, or at the same time, I guess, flip side of that coin, as you’ve been working and going by your researcher, you’d be like, man I really wish I had a tool or something that could do this, or something that could measure that, or things like that?

ALEX FOX 48:47
I think I regret not taking better soil water potential data. Having high quality soil water potential data is something that is difficult to get in the field at something that I definitely wish that I had. That’s sort of the main thing that I think about one, one thing that we, that we tried to do is that didn’t work out, not not because the technology didn’t work, but just because the conditions weren’t right for it was we tried to get some Eddy flux data on the different fields that we were looking at, but the geometry of the fields was such that fields are too narrow, and you couldn’t actually the footprint of the different towers that we were using were far too large, for it to actually be useful, you know. So that’s an entirely different problem. But I think if I did the project again, I would focus a lot more on the below ground. I did a lot of work looking at leaf level, leaf level physiology of Kernza here compared to wheat, didn’t really see much that was particularly enlightening, and all the interesting things seem to be happening below ground.

BRAD NEWBOLD 49:48
I think, yeah, that’s something that, going back to what you were talking about with the water potential side of things, is that’s something that we we always try to help our customers understand how important it can be to have both your water content and water potential and figure out, you know your what is your water release curve for your particular soils, and other things like that, and just how does the soil move, and how is it held within the soils and availability to to the plants there all that fun stuff. Well, I think we’re up with our time here. Any other final thoughts or anything else that you’d like our audience to know?

ALEX FOX 50:23
Well, if you want to learn more about our project, we do have a website that is pretty up to date, as well as an Instagram page where you can learn a lot more about growing Kernza in Wyoming and sort of what the goals of the project are and what our findings have been. It’s just kernzawyoming.org and that’s the same as the Instagram that we have as well. There’s lots of resources, both for farmers and other researchers who might be interested. There’s also that’s a great way to get in contact.

BRAD NEWBOLD 50:51
Awesome, alright, well, thank you very much, Alex for joining us today. We do really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us and discuss your cool projects on researching Kernza and other things.

ALEX FOX 51:05
Yeah, I appreciate being invited here.

BRAD NEWBOLD 51:07
And if you in the audience have any questions about this topic or want to hear more, feel free to contact us at metergroup.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, @meter_env, and you can also view the full transcript from today in the podcast description that’s all for now, stay safe and we’ll catch you next time on We Measure the World.