Text by Scott Russell Sanders

 Could the prairie, which runs on sunlight and rain, be a model for the perfect farm? Wes Jackson thinks so.

In Salina, Kansas, first thing in the morning on the last day of October, not much is stirring except pickup trucks and rain. Pumpkins on porch railings gleam in the streetlights. Scarecrows and skeletons loom outside low frame houses. Tonight the children of Salina will troop from door to door in costumes, begging candy. But this morning, only a few of their grandparents cruise the wet streets, in search of breakfast.

In the diner where I come to rest, the talk is mainly about family and politics and prices. Beef sells for less than the cost of raising it. There's a glut of wheat. More local farmers have gone bankrupt. An older woman bustles in from the street, tugs a scarf from her helmet of white curls, and demands gaily, "Who says it can't rain in Kansas?" Another woman answers, "Oh, it rains every once in a while-and when it does, look out!"

Here in the heart of Kansas, where tallgrass prairie gives way to mid-grass, about 29 inches of water fall every year, enough to keep the pastures thick and lure farmers into planting row crops. Like farmers elsewhere, they spray pesticides and herbicides, spread artificial fertilizer, and irrigate in dry weather. They plow and plant and harvest with machinery that runs on petroleum. They do everything the land grant colleges and agribusinesses tell them to do, and still many of them go broke. And every year, from every plowed acre in Kansas, an average of two to eight tons of topsoil wash away. The streams near Salina carry rich dirt and troubling chemicals into the Missouri River, then to the Mississippi, and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico. Industrial agriculture puts food on our tables and those of much of the rest of the world. But the land and the farmers pay a terrible price, and so do all the species that depend on the land, including us.

I've come to Salina to speak with a man who's seeking a radical remedy for all of that-literally radical, as in going back to the roots, both of plants and of agriculture. Wes Jackson and his then-wife, Dana, founded the Land Institute in 1976 to seek ways of providing food, shelter, and energy without degrading the planet. Wes won a MacArthur fellowship in 1992 for his efforts, and he has begun to win support in the scientific community for a revolutionary approach to farming that he calls perennial polyculture-crops intermingled in a field that is never plowed, because the plants grow back on their own every year. The goal of his grand experiment: a form of agriculture that, like a prairie, runs entirely on sunlight and rain.

To reach the Land Institute, I drive past grain silos bound side to side like the columns of a great cathedral, past filling stations where gas sells for 85 cents a gallon, then onto a gravel road. The windshield wipers can't keep up with the rain. After the road crosses the Smoky Hill River, it leaves the flat bottomland, where bright-green shoots of alfalfa and winter wheat sprout from dirt the color of bittersweet chocolate, and climbs up onto a rolling prairie, where the Land Institute occupies 370 acres. Wes Jackson meets me in the yellow-brick house that serves as an office. It's easy to believe he played football at Kansas Wesleyan, because he's a burly man, with a broad, outdoor face leathered by sun and a full head of steel-gray hair. Although he'll soon be able to collect Social Security, he looks a decade younger. He holds a Ph.D. in genetics, and in the middle of a conversation he'll draw genomes and cells on whatever's handy-a notepad, a napkin, or thin air. For a man who thinks we've been farming the wrong way for about 10,000 years, he laughs often and delights in much. He also talks readily and well, with a prairie drawl acquired while growing up on a farm in the Kansas River valley, over near Topeka.

Where our ancestors went wrong, he believes, was in choosing to cultivate annual crops, which have to be planted each year in newly turned soil. The choice is understandable, since annual plants take hold more quickly and bear more abundantly than perennials do, and since our ancestors had no way of measuring the long-term consequences of all that digging and tilling. But what's the alternative? Jackson takes me outside to look at the radically different model for agriculture that he's been studying for 22 years: the native prairie. Because the rain hasn't let up, we drive a short distance along the road in his battered Toyota pickup, then pass through a gate and go jouncing onto an 80-acre stretch of prairie that's never been plowed. The rusty, swaying stalks of big bluestem wave higher than the windshield. The shorter stalks of little bluestem, Indian grass, and switchgrass brush against the fenders. We stop on the highest ridge and roll down the windows so rain blows on our faces, and we gaze across a rippling, sensuous landscape, all rounded flanks and shadowy crevices.

The grasses are like a luxurious covering of fur, tinted copper and silver and gold. In spring or summer this place would be fiercely green and spangled with flowers, vibrant with butterflies and songbirds. Now, in the fall, it's thick with pheasant, quail, and wild turkey, Jackson reports. He and his colleagues don't harvest seeds here, but they do burn the prairie once every two or three years and let Texas longhorns graze it. Eventually they'll replace the cattle with bison, a species better adapted to these grasslands. From the pickup, we can see a few bison browsing on a neighbor's land, their shaggy coats dark with rain.

In every season, the prairie is lovely beyond words. It supports a wealth of wildlife, resists diseases and pests, holds water, recycles, fixes nitrogen, and builds soil. And it achieves all of that while using only sunlight, air, snow, and rain. If we hope to achieve as much in our agriculture, Jackson argues, then we'd better study how the prairie works: by combining four basic types of perennial plants-warm-season grasses, cool-season grasses, legumes, and sunflowers-all growing year after year from the same roots. The soil is never laid bare. The prairie survives droughts and floods and insects and pathogens because the long winnowing process of evolution has created plant communities adapted to local conditions. "The earth is an ecolog- ical mosaic," Jackson says. "We're only beginning to recognize the powers inherent in local adaptation."

If you wish to draw on that natural wisdom in agriculture, he tells me as we drive toward the greenhouse, then here in Kansas you need to mimic the structure of the prairie. It is all the more crucial a model, he figures, because at least 70 percent of the calories that humans eat come directly or indirectly from grains, and all our grains started as wild grasses. For nearly a quarter-century, Jackson and his colleagues have been working to develop perennial polyculture-as opposed to the annual monoculture of traditional farming-by experimenting with mixtures of wild plants. Recently they've focused on Illinois bundleflower, a nitrogen-fixing legume whose seed is about 38 percent protein; Leymus, a mammoth wild rye; eastern gamagrass, a bunchgrass that's related to corn but is three times as rich in protein; and Maximilian sunflower, a plentiful source of oil.

The United States loses 2 billion tons of topsoil a year to erosion, says the USDA, costing the nation $40 billion

In the sweet-smelling greenhouse, we find seeds from these and other plants drying in paper bags clipped to lines with clothespins. The bags are marked so as to identify the plots where the seeds were gathered; each plot represents a distinct ecological community. Over the years, researchers at the Land Institute have experimented with hundreds of combinations, seeking to answer four fundamental questions, which Jackson recites for me in a near-shout as rain hammers down on the greenhouse roof: Can perennial grains, which invest so much in roots, also produce high seed yields? Can perennial species yield more when planted in combination with other species, as on the prairie, than when planted alone? Can a perennial polyculture meet its own need for nitrogen? Can it adequately manage weeds and insects and disease?

So far, Jackson believes, the researchers can offer a tentative yes to all those questions. For example, his daughter Laura, now a professor of biology at the University of Northern Iowa, identified a mutant strain of eastern gamagrass whose seed production is four times greater than normal-without any corresponding loss of root mass or vigor. "Prior to this work, researchers believed that perennial plants had to yield less than annuals," says Stephen Jones, a plant geneticist at Washington State University. "But that was only because there had been so little effort at breeding perennials." Jones is now working to develop perennial forms of wheat suited to the dry soils of eastern Washington. He has already achieved yields up to 70 percent as large as those of the annual varieties.

Recent experiments at the Land Institute suggest that mixtures of wild plants not only rival monocultures in productivity but also inhibit weeds, resist pathogens, and build fertility. Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at the University of Tennessee who reported those results in Nature, sees clear promise in a design-with-nature approach-although he concedes that "perennial, mixed-species agriculture will probably not replace all conventional monocultures."

But Wes Jackson argues that on highly erodible soil, it makes sense to replace the current farming practice with the one he's working toward. The United States loses 2 billion tons of topsoil a year to erosion, and the cost-in lost productivity, silting of reservoirs, pollution of waterways-is $40 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Jackson estimates that only 50 million of the 400 million tillable acres in the United States are flatland, and even those are susceptible to erosion. The remaining 350 million acres-seven-eighths of the total-range from mildly to highly erodible, and they are thus prime territory for perennial polyculture.

More and more scientists are now testing this approach. Andrew Paterson, director of the plant-biotechnology program at the University of Georgia, is experimenting with perennial grains, and he draws encouragement from the work of the Land Institute. "They are among the few U.S. research institutions I am aware of that have a serious interest in this possibility," he says. Outside the United States, scientists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines are working to develop perennial strains of rice.

John Reganold, a professor of soil science and colleague of Jones at Washington State, predicts that with natural- systems agriculture, "soil quality will significantly improve-better structure, more organic matter, increased biological activity, and thicker topsoil." Jones himself admits that the effort needed to bring perennial polyculture to the marketplace will be huge. "But remember," he points out, "the amount of research going into conventional agriculture is equally huge."

Transforming perennial polyculture from a research program into a feasible alternative for the working farmer will require many more years of painstaking effort. Researchers must breed high-yielding varieties of perennial grains and discover combinations of species that rival the productivity of the wild prairie. Engineers must design machinery for harvesting mixed grains. Farmers must be persuaded to try the new seeds and new practices, and consumers must be persuaded to eat unfamiliar foods.

"We don't know how this is going to turn out," admits Jackson. "The risky thing is to keep going the way we've been going."

The training of farmers is especially close to Jackson's heart. "The children in rural schools are one day going to be in charge of the 400 million acres of tillable land in this country," he says. "They'll have the greatest ecological impact of any group." To help inform those schools-and help resettle the small towns in which many of those children will grow up-the Land Institute has created a Rural Community Studies Center in Matfield Green, a tiny settlement in the Flint Hills about 100 miles southeast of Salina. "We want to bring the message of ecology to bear on the curriculum of rural schools," Jackson says. "I want those young people to go to Kansas State, Ohio State, all the ag schools, and ask questions that push beyond the existing paradigm."

One question is how well annual monoculture would perform if it weren't subsidized by inputs of petroleum and groundwater, and if it weren't able to write off the ecological costs of pesticides and herbicides and erosion. To answer that question, the Land Institute has devoted 150 acres to the Sunshine Farm, a 10-year project for growing livestock and conventional crops without fossil fuels, chemicals, or irrigation. The Sunshine Farm is where we go next, and the arrival of our truck wakes three dappled-gray Percheron draft horses from their rainy drowse in a paddock beside the barn. There's also a tractor, for the heaviest work; it runs on biodiesel fuel made from soybeans and sunflower seeds. The farmhouse is heated with wood, and all the buildings are lit by batteries charged by a bank of photovoltaic cells.

Six years into the study, data from the Sunshine Farm are providing a truer measure of how much conventional farming costs. Marty Bender, who manages the farm, explains, "We look at the energy content of all the crops and livestock that we produce, and we look at the inputs-fuels, feeds, stock, seeds, tools, labor. If you divide our outputs by our inputs, the ratio is comparable to what you see on Amish farms. And that tells me we're on the right track."

Back in the yellow-brick office, jackson unrolls onto a table what he calls the Big Chart, which lays out a 25-year research plan. The boxes on the chart frame problems to be solved, and the arrows all point toward the vision of a sustainable agriculture that will overturn the mistaken practices of the past 10 millennia. It's a bold scheme, and Jackson calculates that it will cost $5 to $7 million a year-up from the Land Institute's current annual budget of $850,000. To secure that level of funding, Jackson will need backing from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and even from agribusiness firms. "So far," he admits, "we've hit a brick wall at USDA." He realizes how difficult it will be to pry money from institutions whose philosophy of farming he so squarely opposes, but he relishes the challenge.

"In America," he tells me, "we've got mostly two kinds of scientists-the ones who get us in trouble, and the ones who tell us what the troubles are-but very few who are looking for solutions. Here at the Land Institute, we're looking for solutions."

Before I go, I can't help asking him to explain how a Kansas farm boy grew up to be a visionary who's trying to revolutionize farming. He can't say for sure. His family's been in Kansas since 1854 (the year that Walden was published); his grandchildren are the sixth generation to live here. So he feels committed to this place for the long haul, and he wants it to be a beautiful and fertile place well after he's gone. "It seems like, no matter what else I tried, I just kept thinking about the source-soil, water, photosynthesis, the things that sustain us." Is he hopeful that a sustainable form of agriculture will be found in time to feed the earth's swelling population? "We don't know how this is all going to turn out," he admits. "But the risky thing is to do nothing, to keep going the way we've been going. No matter how dark the times, it's still worthwhile to do good work."

The next morning, as I drive east toward my home in Indiana, the radio carries reports of brimming rivers and flooded roads across Kansas. The plowed fields I pass are gouged by rivulets, and the roadside ditches run black with dirt. But where grass covers the land, there's no sign of runoff, for the prairie keeps doing what it's learned how to do over thousands of years: holding water, building soil, waiting for spring.

Scott Russell Sanders is the author of numerous books, most recently Hunting for Hope, published last fall by Beacon Press. He lived and worked on farms as a boy in Ohio.