I've followed The Land Institute for several years. This old post from an alternate universe 6 years ago can serve as introduction.

They assert that agriculture is a problem, not that it has problems. The whole idea of digging up natural ecosystems and planting shallow rooted, annual seed bearing plants creates unsolvable problems. It kills beneficial soil, reduces ecosystem resilience, and is subject to erosion, drought and pests. It has been a problem for humanity for 10,000 years that has ruined land all over the planet, wherever farming has been practiced.

The main problem is grains - wheat, maize, rice, oats, soya, barley etc. - which provide 75% of the calories humans consume. They are all shallow rooted annuals that have had their brains bred out of them and so need constant coddling and protection. They are juiced up, chemical dependent freaks that can't survive on their own. They are not just unnatural, they are anti-natural.

TLI seeks to develop perennial grasses and forbs that also bear seed like traditional food grains. They would have deep roots and grow in undisturbed soil rich in organic matter and microbial life, like a natural prairie ecosystem. Deep roots in undisturbed soil would make them drought tolerant and erosion resistant. Invasive annual weeds - the cockroaches and rats of the plant world that have followed humans wherever they have gone to live with them in the environments they create - would never have bare soil to get started.

They are doing some fairly sophisticated plant hybridization crossing annual grains with perennial grasses and forbs to create perennial grain plants. Getting past the tricky early generations which are sterile and then selecting for agronomic characteristics across many generations to arrive at a viable food crop plant is difficult, time consuming and expensive but they insist that they have proven the concept already and are making progress. Their methods don't involve genetic engineering but they do manipulate embryos and use some chemical methods such as pressurized nitrous oxide to cause gene doubling in early crosses.

There is still precious little to show for their efforts, but they have kept the faith.

The world's natural landscapes are covered mostly by perennial plants growing in mixed stands [3], w hereas more than two-thirds of global cropland is sown to monocultures of annual crops . Conversion from natural to agricultural landscapes dramatically alters ecological conditions. Across the planet, more land has been converted from perennial to annual cover since 1950 than in the previous 150 years. This recent expansion of cropland has made it more and more necessary to apply chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which disrupt natural nutrient cycles and erode biodiversity. . .

Agriculture is a problem older than history. It has always depended largely on annual grass and legume species that humans domesticated between 5000 and 10 000 years ago. That domestication of annuals set in motion a somewhat ironic series of events. First, annual grain crops made civilization both possible and necessary. Much later, civilization - largely through exploitation of fossil fuels and synthetic chemicals - created conditions under which agriculture could become both extraordinarily productive and ecologically destructive. But today, it is the fruits of the very civilization made possible by agriculture - scientific knowledge, data, and techniques - that have clearly revealed to us both the necessity and the possibility of correcting the well-intentioned wrong turn our species made 10 000 years ago [7](Jackson, 1980). . .

By far the most important factor that determines the degree of soil erosion in a field is the type of vegetation , annual or perennial , that covers the land. In one field experiment encompassing 100 years of data collection, perennial crops were more than 50 times more effective than annual crops in maintaining topsoil [8]. So-called “no-till” methods (in which annual crops are farmed without tillage) reduce soil loss but require heavy chemical inputs. No-till also performs as poorly as conventional farming in controlling percolation of nutrients and water out of the soil profile [9].

Global data for maize, rice, and wheat indicate that only 18 to 49 percent of nitrogen applied as fertilizer is taken up by crops; the remainder is lost to runoff, leaching, or volatilisation [10]. That occurs with or without tillage. Nitrogen losses from annual crops may be 30 to 50 times higher than those from perennial crops [9]. Organic farming with annual crops solves the problem of chemical contamination, but except in rare circumstances, requires as much or more tillage than conventional agriculture. And the inadequate root systems of annual species handle water and nutrients inefficiently even when crops are grown organically.

Modern societies, stuck as we are with annual crops, have little alternative but to treat grain cropping not as a source of life but as a dangerous activity against which humans and nature must be protected. Environmentally conscious researchers and farmers are making the most of the only perennial plants available to them, by growing more hay and pasture; growing perennial biofuel crops; planting more trees and grass along rivers and streams to soak up the contaminants that haemorrhage from cropland; and taking more erodable lands out of grain production altogether [11]. It's a monumental and discouraging task made necessary because we are still dependent on annual crop plants.

We cannot go back to the crossroads where our ancestors took that wrong turn, and a return to ancient farming methods would not address the problem of annual cropping. But by taking the successes of organic farming through another stage of evolution, it may be possible to produce food while simultaneously allowing the Earth itself to manage the soil, water, and air as it did before the dawn of agriculture.

The basic insight - ripping the breasts of Mother Earth with iron fingers to steal from her what she would willing give - is valid. Cultivating soil to grow monocultures of annual grains is and always has been destructive. But it has nothing to do with chemical fertilizers, "organic" methods, fossil fuels or the rest of the brain dead pseudo-environmentalist litany. Read the deep history of Asia, Africa, and southern Europe and find that they had the same problems before they learned to write. Read the geologic record and find they they weren't telling tall tales about their ancestors. All that can be said about the modern experience is that there are many more of us, and though we have learned to do agriculture in less destructive ways than in the past we do it on a scale suited to our much larger population, for a net increase in impact.

The defects I'd like to focus on here are the ubiquitous intellectual errors of advocacy. Some problem - agriculture in this instance but it's the same for climate, health care, whatever - is identified, exaggerated, and demonized to justify some prescription and set of policies that don't even begin to solve the problem. The problem is horrible, something must be done, so let's set our tails on fire and run in circles. No competent analysis of the prescription is done to determine if it actually has a net benefit. All we get is selective use of data, unrealistic projections, evasion, talking points, magical thinking, and repetition of the horrors of the problem to justify doing something, anything, even if it isn't useful since pausing to think clearly and holding the mark while suffering the pain of current defect is not in their characters. They lack the strength and virtue required to do real problem solving.

Perennial grains are a pipe dream that defies thermodynamics. The survival strategies of plants vary for good reason. It takes great energy to live long and prosper. Stores must be set aside, stored in roots, during the salad days of the growing season. This leaves little energy for seed production since that is a very metabolically costly act. A plant that can do both is a super plant that can suck up water and nutrients with unprecedented skill, capture sunlight like no existing plants, convert sunlight to sugars with unprecedented efficiency, and so have the wealth to set seed in useful quantities while still having enough surplus to set aside energy stores for the lean season and so survive another year.

Plants choose their survival strategies more realistically. They either use their energy to survive or to set seed and launch their genomes into the future, but not both. Seeds can either be few and robust so that each has a good chance of germination and growth to repeat the cycle, or they can be numerous and more fragile with a lower germination rate but many more chances that enough will survive to continue the species. Long lived plants do set seed, but they are low quantities of less robust seeds since that is a secondary survival strategy. They also set tillers and rhizomes to produce genetically identical daughter plants, dispensing with the bother of sex altogether, but with greater risk due to diminished diversity. Annuals are all about sex, diversity, rapid evolution and aggresive competition.

We have coaxed domestic food crops into violating natural constraints, making them more suited to our purposes and less competent as natural survivors, but we have done so by exaggerating natural tendencies to extremes rather than working at cross purposes to those tendencies. It is no surprise that there has been precious little progress in developing useful perennial grain cultivars, and I doubt that much progress will be made in future. Much may be learned by the research teams, but there is little chance that there will be useful food plants as a result.

One day we will perfect food synthesis and cease agriculture. With energy and skillful techniques we'll turn space rocks and gases into food. Until then the smart thing to do is continue to get better at agriculture, as we have been doing all along, but more so. Tell the stories straight rather than filtered through some quasi-religious ideology that longs for some mythical golden past. Half baked notions like "organic" are merely a set of fetishes that seek to freeze development at some past level arbitrarily selected to support the regressive myths of some nativist fantasy. The useful elements of the past do merit continued use, but they are only a part of advanced agronomic systems capable of meeting current needs with the least negative impacts on a world that is now so well populated and will soon be more so.

Tell the stories straight. None of this can be achieved without fertilizers and pesticides. None of this ever was achieved without them. We have gotten better over time. We no longer plant fishes along with our grain seeds in order to get a useful crop. There aren't enough fishes in the world to do this, and they have better uses in any case. We no longer suffer frequent famines due to plagues of insects and diseases, and so we not only live better lives we use less land to do so, leaving more for semi-wild nature. At least this is all true for some of us. It is less true in developing nations where productivity languishes and the old plagues still run wild. If they could produce at the level of developed nations, and so feed their even more numerous selves, the world would be much improved.

The more useful story is one of progress, of ever better and more benign agronomic systems that produce more with fewer inputs and fewer impacts. The current problems and negative externalities do not sensibly suggest regression to less informed methods, they indicate the need for even better methods. We need better plants, better fertilizers, better pesticides, better and more precise soil management systems, better water management, better machinery for every phase - from cultivation (limited) to transportation, storage and processing. We need the best of the past, the present and the future rather than some nonsensical suite of antiquated fetishes and taboos based in misinformation, disinformation and myth.