Every time a farmer plants a cash crop, he or she makes a substantial investment of money, time and labor resources. But what if that crop wasn’t something that had to be planted every year, but instead, sprouted out of the ground each spring and was ready for a summer harvest?
Michigan State University (MSU) associate professor of crop and soil sciences at the Kellogg Biological Station, Sieg Snapp, is addressing that question. Her team is studying the possibilities for developing perennial wheat as a crop for environmentally friendly agricultural production. She’s conducting this work thanks to a four-year, one million dollar U.S. Department of Agriculture organic research grant.
Snapp is leading a team that includes MSU professor of agriculture, food and resource economics, Scott Swinton; MSU outreach specialist, Vicki Morrone; MSU wheat breeder, Janet Lewis; Michigan farmers; and colleagues at Washington State University. Their work builds on research that leads to a new type of perennial grain crop. “Our goal is to go the next step and develop perennial wheat varieties and management that are practical for farmers to adopt, to use as a ground cover, a forage AND a grain crop.
“Washington and Kansas have conducted innovative plant breeding, crossing intermediate wheat grass forage to annual wheat to get the annual wheat grain characteristics and a close to marketable product,” Snapp says. “I realized that nobody was focusing on agronomic management, and practical aspects of variety development, so my student, Brook Wilke, started about three years ago to evaluate varieties suitable for Michigan.” Snapp and the team will study these perennial wheat varieties at the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station (KBS), a Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station facility located in southwestern Michigan.
“We’re going to be investigating them for their adaptation to Michigan farms at the research station and on farms,” Snapp says. “We’re looking at organic production practices, and different management options, like whether we could possibly graze the crop in the fall to obtain multiple products, forage and grain.”
The research team will study the wheat over three to four cropping seasons so they can observe its hardiness under different weather conditions and extremes in temperature and precipitation. The perennial wheat isn’t just a money-saving crop –it also protects the environment — helping to keep the soil in place and capture rain and snow.
“It’s always growing and keeps roots in the soil to prevent erosion,” Snapp points out. “We’ve already found that the roots of the perennial wheat can reach three-times deeper than annual wheat roots and this is promising for a crop that could capture carbon.”
The perennial wheat may save farmers money at planting, produce enough yield to allow them to realize a profit, provide a secondary income source and protect the environment, but it also has to fit in on the typical Michigan farm. Snapp won’t be conducting her studies in a vacuum, but will include farmer cooperators who will be part of the research team, giving input into the experiments and sharing the results they find in using it on their farms.
In a year or two, the researchers will produce enough seed at KBS to provide farmer experimentation opportunities. Snapp plans to include growers who can help test the wheat under different conditions on farms of varying sizes around the state.
“We’ll also look at some of the economics and how it does as a single and dual crop,” she says. “That’s where the agricultural economist will come in and look at profitability of the dual use crop.”
Snapp says she’s looking forward to seeing how farmers will fit perennial wheat into their crop systems. “My experience with participatory farm research is that you learn new ways from the farmers to make it work,” she says.
The studies will continue at KBS while the on-farm research gets underway in a systematic effort that Snapp has developed that is used by plant breeders in Africa and Asia, a research design called “mother and baby trials.”
“The research station trial is the ‘mother’ and that’s the big-scale trial that includes all of the varieties and agronomic treatments,” she says. “The on-farm trials are the ‘baby’ trials. We’ll give farmers the opportunity to choose a few varieties to test on their farm, which will facilitate testing across many environments and under different management systems including organic production. Farmers will have the opportunity to provide feedback on varieties they test.”
So what will become of this information? It will be used to inform basic science research conducted at universities around the world, but Snapp will also disseminate the study’s outcomes via MSU Extension to farmers who might want to grow perennial wheat in fields across Michigan and beyond.
“MSU Extension is part of our advisory group and we work with several specialists,” Snapp says. “Their role will become even more important as we get more seed and do this on a larger scale — we couldn’t do it without Extension.”
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