- [Narrator] Throughout the country, people are planting seeds of innovation, harvesting a bounty of ideas to help care for the only home we have, planet Earth.

The core of sustainability is meeting the needs of today's society without compromising the world for future generations.

With billions of people on Earth and climate change a reality, it's more important than ever to open our eyes and minds to alternative ideas, both new and old about food production, renewable energy, a circular economy and more.

This series explores eco-friendly ideas and lifestyles that help to make our world a little bit better.

Welcome to "My World Too," short stories of sustainable living and earthly innovations.

(bright music) - [Brandon] Mother nature functioned here for tens of thousands of years until man came and everything functioned just fine.

People were able to survive off the land.

- [Peter] Perenniality is sort of the overarching strategy, and so we're proving with Kernza of what can be done as we perennialize other crops, and that's really where we start to have much larger scale and impact.

- [Narrator] For 100 years, farmers have been planting the same grains the same way.

Is there a better option?

One scientific nonprofit in the middle of the Great Plains thinks so and has been working on a perennial solution.

Nick Schmitz heads out into the field to find out the latest from The Land Institute.

- Welcome to The Land Institute.

We are standing right at the top of Wauhab Prairie, which is a little remnant, mixed grass prairie right up the bank of the Smokey Hill River.

The Land Institute was founded in this place right outside of Salina, Kansas back in 1976.

- [Nick] And what happens here at The Land Institute?

- [Aubrey] We are an agricultural research organization.

We're a nonprofit, and what we're doing is learning how to develop perennial grain crops that can be grown in diverse cropping systems and mixtures that can feed people and that can be stewarded by human communities across the landscape.

- When you say a perennial grain crop, what does that mean?

- (laughs) It's a great question.

So we're standing amidst a prairie that's full of perennials.

This is a mostly perennial ecosystem.

And what that means is that the plants that grow here grow for multiple years.

They recur.

Their lifecycle is ongoing.

And so rather than an annual plant that completes its whole lifecycle within one growing season, perennial plants have living roots below ground that stay alive for multiple years.

So perennials include lots of trees and shrubs and a lot of prairie grasses.

- So Aubrey, when you are telling me about developing these new perennial grains, what exactly is the process?

- So one pathway that we have teams of researchers working on is to identify wild perennial plants that could be good grain crops.

So in those kind of domestication pathway, some of the plants that we're working on include Kernza perennial grains.

So this is produced from intermediate wheatgrass or Thinopyrum intermedium, which is an Eurasian crop, that was as a plant brought to the US as a forage crop.

So grazed by animals.

And then over the last several decades, many decades, this has been identified for essential human grain use.

So that's sort of one pathway, the domestication pathway.

And then another pathway is to take an existing kind of annual elite grain crop.

So here you might think of wheat or sorghum and take that already high-yielding grain crop and go back and identify some of the wild perennial relatives that could be crossed with that.

That kind of hybridization, wide hybridization process is how our perennial wheat program is proceeding, and then how our perennial sorghum or milo is proceeding.

And then we have been in connection with a perennial rice breeding program in China, which is another kind of crop along those lines.

- These are all some of the seeds that our grains produce.

This one is wheat.

So this is just an example of what is already growing out in fields.

This is an annual crop.

This is perennial wheat.

You can see the seed head here.

This is it broken up, and then the flour that it makes.

This is a similar setup with the Kernza perennial grain here.

This little vial represents what the forage variety looks like.

So this is what we started with before the breeding process.

And you can kind of see the differences that over the decades here we've been able to breed as well as the flower.

This is perennial sorghum and this is kind of in different states.

So this is dehulled sorghum, and then this is a little bit of what you might actually see out on the plant, what the head looks like.

This is silphium, our oil seed.

This is one of our ones that's kind of at the beginning of domestication.

So you can see it's still got its hulls on.

We haven't quite figured out like we have with some of the other grains, how to get the hull off of it in a really efficient way.

And so it's really papery, but it still has a lot of that oil that we're looking for.

This is what a head looks like.

They're really fragile, but that's kind of what after the flower's done blooming and all of the petals fall off, it looks like this.

And these seeds are what we collect and then you can use it as an oil.

And lastly, we have the Baki bean here, which is our pulse crop.

So it has a lot of protein in it.

It has a really unique shape of its hull.

It makes me think of aliens and it's really fun, a texture.

And then this is what it looks like dehulled.

So you can see it's really similar to a lentil.

It has a really mild flavor.

And then you can also create a flower with it that is really high protein.

So that's a little bit of an overview of some of the perennial crops that we grow here at The Land Institute.

(bright music) - And what is the benefit of a perennial versus an annual?

- So we think about these perennial ecosystems comprised of perennial plants around the world like grasslands and prairies or like forest or tundras.

You can think of rainforest or deciduous forest, all these mostly perennial ecosystems.

Those are really different than the agricultural systems that mostly feed people.

As you were driving up to The Land Institute and coming up to our research plots and the prairie here.

You drove by a lot of wheat fields here in Kansas, it's summer where we're just in the midst of wheat harvest.

And wheat is an annual crop that completes its lifecycle within just one year.

And most of the grain crops that cover so much of the earth's terrestrial landscapes and that provide the majority of human food, those grain crops are annual.

So if you think about wheat, rice, corn, soy, milo, all of these are annual grain crops.

And so the question then is why would we be interested in having perennial versions of those grain crops instead of annuals?

And it has to do with those living roots that hold onto the soil below the ground.

So the ability to hold onto soil and to actually allow the soil to continue to form rather than to leave it vulnerable to washing away, to blowing away, is really important for us to be able to sustain agriculture for the long term.

So those roots are able to allow those soil formation processes to continue because they are part of these perennial systems.

Just like all of these ecosystems that allowed soils to be built in the first place, like here on the prairie.

So those roots allow those plants to regrow without having to be replanted every single year, without us having to till or disturb the landscape in order to clear it of all those vegetation to be able to replant.

And those perennial plants with those deeper, more robust root systems are able to be more effective at using some of the different things that plants need to grow.

So we're trying to accomplish both, that kind of conservation and also being able to provide staple foods to people through an agriculture that is more like the natural systems that have evolved on earth.

(bright music) - Since you've been growing Kernza on your land, what are some of the benefits that you've noticed?

- The first year we started obviously with the worst acres.

You could take a shovel out there that year, you wouldn't have found one worm ever.

Harvested it that first year.

And then we grazed it twice, that first year after harvesting the summer and then we grazed it later that fall also.

And those two grazing cycles the next spring, I mean I could take my pliers out there after a rain, move cow pies and just gobs and gobs of earthworms.

So immediately in year one, we're starting to get, things are changing.

And the great thing is you've always paid it forward, you know.

2018 we seeded it.

Great stand.

We've paid it forward to '19 to '20 to '21 to '22.

That first year we seeded and everything went really smooth and we got to harvest and it was about 110 degrees, I think that end of July.

And we're standing on top of the combine trying to get it outta the combine.

And I looked at him and I said, "If everybody has to do this," I said, "Nobody's gonna do it."

So getting it seeded and established, everybody's used to doing things like that.

But the harvesting is a different challenge.

We all have these preconceptions as to how things should work, doesn't work with perennial ag, can't just take it to the elevator, you know.

The marketing's different, the handling's different, the processing, all those steps.

And so that's why we started Sustain-A-Grain was to take that back half away, those headaches away from the farmer.

- Our mission with Sustain-A-Grain is to make it easy for growers to switch from annual agriculture to perennial agriculture and to make it easy for food and beverage brands to switch to sourcing perennial grain crops.

- [Nick] And how do you do that?

- We help growers by producing high-quality seed, providing agronomic support, processing their grain into ingredients.

And then we help brands to source those ingredients, find new uses for those things.

So creating flaked Kernza, creating malted Kernza, creating a whole new just entire brands working with the R&D teams at the food and beverage companies that partner with us.

(bright music) - So can you tell us a little bit about the difference in sort of what you're inputting with the Kernza compared to a more conventional annual grain?

- One of the important input pieces is labor.

So with a perennial, you're just out on your tractor less, there's less wear and tear on the equipment, there's less diesel being used.

The other thing that we like about Kernza is that it fits nicely into our cropping calendar.

So it's not coming at busy times.

And we find that it generally seems to require less water once it's established.

And the other thing that it does is when we do have a large rain event, that water is actually getting down into the soil rather than washing off.

- Because of the perennial and the activities of the roots in the soil, we're not having competition with weeds.

You know, mother nature is always trying to find solutions for monoculture systems.

And we have weeds and some diversity out there that we didn't seed, but the bad weed seeds that we typically look in annual cropping systems, those aren't getting expressed.

So we're not using herbicides, especially after year one.

We don't need any herbicides.

I mean it's just takes care of itself.

We're working with a degraded resource, you know, we've been here here a hundred years roughly.

My ancestors brought over Turkey Red wheat and the technology they had then would've been steel, had the plow behind a horse, you know.

And you're oxidizing that soil, breaking down organic matter that's probably at 6%.

You know, we're getting lots of nutrients, okay.

After a hundred years, we can't do that anymore.

Integration of cattle and livestock, you know, when you start cycling, completing the poop loop, that helps a lot.

At the end of the day though, we need to grow something and that acre needs to be productive, otherwise we're going backwards.

I mean there's a lot of people to feed, but because it's a grain that's a perennial and allows for livestock, we've got a two-legged stool.

You know, we don't quite need all the safety nets.

Traditional ag kind of depends upon.

So we need rainfall to create the green vegetation, right?

And when you go to deserts and things like that, you see all this dry matter.

So you know, things grew.

But the one process that nobody talks about is getting that dry matter back to the soil, back to the brown matter, okay.

So how do you do that?

Animal impact is the only way you get that back to the soil.

And so that's what's completing the loop.

We can have all the rainfall we want, but if the soil's not cycling, it doesn't matter.

And so in this system you see a lot more soil coverage.

The soil's cooler, keeps the water in, infiltrates better.

(bright music) - So Aubrey, when I think about more conventional wheat crops, I imagine it's taken thousands of years to get where we're at with those crops.

So what is the timeframe for the work you're doing here at The Land Institute and developing more perennial crops?

- You're totally right.

Domesticating and breeding the annual grain crops that feed people now has taken generations of people and those domestication processes are still ongoing.

The Land Institute was founded more than 40 years ago, and the programs that we are working on and the crops that we're developing are also gonna take a lot of time.

But we do also have the benefit now of new or emerging technologies that could be beneficial.

So as we continue the age-old human processes of cycles of selection that take time to select, replant, grow again.

We are also really interested in being able to invest more resources in growing the number of plants and the number of people and the number of places in this work so that we can make progress to develop perennial grain crops.

And we think that with that type of investment and research and development, we can have perennial grain crops over the coming decades that could be comparable to some of these annual crops in terms of yield.

But a lot of work and effort has to go into that and we have a long ways to go.

I hope that with a growing global research community in places around the world, that the perennial grain research that's started and rooted here can result in many kinds of perennial grain crops.

- There's a book written by David Montgomery, it's called "Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization."

And he looks back at all the people in the world that have become extinct.

And the common denominator from all the extinct societies has been the loss of soil and the inability to produce food.

We've only been here a hundred years, but we've lost a tremendous amount of top soil.

So with a degraded resource, we can't simply just pull the rug and expect it to function like it should or did.

I don't know what it'll be, but something's probably going to need to change or we're headed down a real slippery slope.

But I think Kernza might not be the whole answer, but it's a nice place to start and start exploring things, you know.

- So I'm from a fourth generation Kansas farm.

I know that the way that my ancestors farmed is not going to be able to continue.

Like, the Midwest has lost a third of its top soil since 1850.

And it's because it's just washed out to the Gulf of Mexico.

We have to do something to protect soils.

Perennials are a really important way to do that.

And if we don't change how we farm, then we're going to start losing options in the future.

And this is a way of protecting what we have.

(bright music) - [Narrator] There's nothing better on a warm, summer day than sitting under a beautiful shade tree.

Whitney Manney learns about an organization that is bringing shade trees to the urban core, helping to cool down the city.

Let's get to know the Heartland Tree Alliance.

- Hey, Joe, so nice to meet you.

Thank you for meeting me down here and like, I'm really excited to get to learn more about Heartland Tree Alliance.

So tell me more.

Like, what's going on.

- Heartland Tree Alliance is a program of Bridging The Gap.

Bridging The Gap is an environmental nonprofit organization in the Kansas City metro area.

So Heartland Tree Alliance, what we do is we plant trees in the whole metro area, mostly public trees and right of way spaces, park trees, and then we're getting a little bit into some private tree care and planting as well.

- When you say the metro area, I mean it, that's a lot of, you know, the city of Kansas City plus a lot of suburbs that make that up.

But are you all concentrating on the urban core?

- So mostly right now we focus on planting in right of way spaces in Kansas City, Missouri.

- [Whitney] Okay.

- We have the flexibility to kind of self-prioritize and identify spaces that we think would most benefit from trees.

We look at other environmental injustices and say, maybe this neighborhood is bisected by US Highway 71.

- [Whitney] Yeah.

- And we know air pollution is a really big issue.

So the greener we can make that neighborhood, the more those residents will benefit in the long run.

- I would imagine there's a bit of research that goes into there before you just like, "Okay, we got some trees, "let's plant 'em."

Like, are there certain factors that you take into consideration, about the neighborhood or the place you're gonna plant 'em in?

Like, are you constantly researching trees?

Like, what kind of happens behind the scenes before a tree is actually in the ground?

- We do a lot of research on the neighborhood, the areas themselves.

We pull census information, we pull heat, we look at data from Kansas City's Urban Forest Master plan, which kind of outlines the amount of trees that are already there, the potential for more trees.

We look at things like what's the current canopy composition?

So we look at a ton of different factors and then as we self-prioritize, then what we do is we go to those communities and we say, Would your community benefit from trees?

Would you like trees?

- Right.

- [Joe] We know that projects like this have the best outcomes when there's community buy-in and input from the front.

So we want to be as sensitive to that as we possibly can as well.

- That's cool to hear that the community is involved, the neighborhood, the people who live here, a lot of people born and raised and have never even thought about planting trees have that opportunity to be a part of something bigger.

That's really awesome.

(bright music) What types of trees are used in the urban areas as opposed to like, a rural area?

'Cause I'm like, a tree is a tree is a tree, right.

But there's obviously a lot more science and thought and compassion that goes into it.

- Primarily, we have a contract with Kansas City, Missouri to plant trees along the street.

And so that's in what's called like, the public right of way space.

A lot of times that's that green space between the curb and the sidewalk.

Or if there's no sidewalk on your street, it's usually about the first 10 feet back from the street.

And so that planting area really helps us determine what kinds of trees we wanna plant because it's not just about planting trees, it's about planting the right tree in the right place at the right time.

So the smaller that space, the smaller statured tree when mature we can plant.

So if it's about five feet, that's as small as we want to plant.

Because if you put a tree in a space much smaller than that, you'll get a bunch of fractured sidewalks from the roots as the tree grows.

- The roots.

Okay.

- And we know that mobility is also an issue.

We want these trees to be benefits, not burdens to communities.

So we're pretty intentional about what we select.

It's really about site conditions that also kind of determine what you'd want to plant.

In the more like, downtown built spaces, our pallet gets a little bit smaller because we have to think about trees that can handle lots of air pollution.

The number of cars that drive around here.

Every time a car drives by, it kicks out exhaust, it kicks up dirt.

Some trees handle that better than others.

Also, we run into issues with road salt and de-icing.

- [Whitney] Okay.

- Businesses are really worried about liability.

So they go out every time it's about to snow and just like, cover the ground with that ice melt.

But that really changes the soil chemistry and can be really damaging to trees.

There's only certain trees that can handle that.

- Wow.

Okay.

- So in our more built spaces, we have to be really intentional about choosing trees that can handle both air pollution and that salt tolerance.

- So when you think of city living, you think big buildings, bright lights, trees are probably on like, the last of people's like, priority list and thinking.

Why are trees so important though to the city?

- So our urban forest provides us with a lot of different environmental benefits.

Trees and urban spaces can cool the surrounding area by about 10 degrees, feels like temperature.

And that's because as they're growing, they're releasing oxygen and water vapor.

And just like we sweat to cool ourselves down, that is like, the same process for the city.

They also, the shade they provide can cool surfaces somewhere between like 20 and 50 degrees.

So that way, you know, if you're out playing on a playground.

- Right.

- You can actually touch the monkey bars.

- Yeah.

- Instead of, you know, just getting burned right from the start, those places can heat up really fast.

Additionally, trees placed in the right spacing around buildings can actually reduce heating and cooling costs by up to 30% over the life of that building.

Which can be really important, especially for homeowners who may be already, you know, financially burdened.

A tree can reduce that summer cooling cost by 30%, which may be, you know, a $200, $300 reduction in your bill over the whole year.

But trees clean our water, they help mitigate these big storm events that we're having, slow down the water, absorb some of it so that way we're not getting that flash flooding we see every time.

We get these big rainstorms.

- Right.

- They give us oxygen.

One mature tree probably can support about four people over the year.

- Wow.

- And then they also intercept air pollution.

And we know that the greener the neighborhood is, the lower the incident rate of childhood asthma, COPD, and we see lower blood pressure associated with those greener spaces.

You know, the literature probably says it's because people are more comfortable to get out and walk and they're just in general a little bit healthier.

But then there's all these like, social benefits that I think people don't talk about as much.

Trees help build community.

- Yeah.

- If it's a cool space where you can sit under a tree and kind of enjoy the day, you're more likely to meet your neighbors.

You're more likely to have conversations and build that social cohesion that kind of ties neighborhoods together.

- Right.

(bright music) - So when you think about the future of Heartland Tree Alliance and your partnership with Bridging The Gap, what do you all hope to achieve as an organization just going forward?

- We're gonna continue doing what we do best, which is educating the public, getting people involved and planting more right of way trees, park trees.

Additionally, there's lots of big pots of money, federal money swirling around right now.

The Inflation Reduction Act is gonna really revolutionize urban and community forestry.

They put in about $1.5 billion, which is like unheard of in this space.

And those monies are about to be dispersed at the end of this year.

And so projects will be starting and we're gonna see lots of shovel-ready projects to go, where we're gonna be planting trees strategically to address urban heat, to address air pollution, to combat inequity in our canopy.

We know that that's a really big issue.

Redline neighborhoods are statistically less green than they're more affluent white counterparts.

And so we're gonna be seeing a lot of action over the next five to 10 years, getting more trees in the ground.

And then after that we hope to be able to fund and continue doing maintenance of the trees because young tree pruning and early routine maintenance increases the life of those trees and makes sure that we reach maturity so we're getting those environmental and social benefits that we tout when we plant the tree.

- Right.

Well thank you so much, Joe.

I'm so excited to have learned more about Heartland Tree Alliance and just the importance of trees for our cities.

I'm ready to go plant a tree right now.

(bright music) - [Narrator] Share your sustainability story or learn more about sustainability and earth-friendly innovations at MyWorldToo.com.

- Okay, so now for the biggest question of the day.

Can we meet some of the animals?

- Yes.

Let me show you my favorite native animal we have here at the Nature Center.

- All right, let's go.

- You look at the population of this planet, over 8 billion people, about 10% of them have no access to a power grid.

About 43% of the people are on a grid that's unreliable.

(bright music) (gentle electronic music)