Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute, at MBL's Lillie Auditorium

In order to solve humanity’s biggest crises—hunger, malnutrition, environmental degradation, and even climate change—farmers and ecologists need to get married.

That was the message Wes Jackson, founder and president of The Land Institute of Salina, Kansas, brought to Woods Hole last week.

In a room filled with local scientists and backyard farmers, one could imagine a harmonious marriage.

If only the two hadn’t gotten divorced in the first place.

Speaking at MBL’s Lillie Auditorium on Feb. 2, Dr. Jackson’s wisdom was disguised in his easy Kansas manner.

“We need a system with an ecological world view,” he said, resting his elbow on a bent knee at the front of the stage.

“We need to start where climate change began: agriculture.”

A geneticist-agronomist and author who has received a number of prestigious awards– including the MacArthur Fellowship in 1992 and the Right Livelihood Award in 2000– Dr. Jackson has dedicated his life’s work to developing perennial grains, including wheat, rice, sorghum, and prairie flowers.

Agricultural colonialism?

Since wheat was first developed as a domestic crop in 9000 BCE, farming has meant cultivating annual monocultures, Dr. Jackson said. But while great advances in civilization were made possible by the spread of agriculture, it also led to the destruction of the environment that supported it.

Wheat was the “pulverized coal of the soil. That’s where climate change had its beginnings,” he said. “If we were to eat, nature had to be subdued or ignored.”

Recognizing that scientific discoveries—including Copernican theory, Galileo’s discoveries, and Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species—would not have been possible if humanity had remained hunter-gatherers, Dr. Jackson pointed out that these advances were based on the “extracting economy” of various European empires, especially the British empire.

Whether people are mining for coal or engineering seeds to increase crop yields, there are consequences to this world view, he said.

With soil erosion in many parts of the world exceeding natural replacement levels and fertilizer runoff creating “dead zones” in places like the Gulf of Mexico, “we’re losing the stuff we are made of to the sea,” Dr. Jackson said.

Fifty years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring exposed the ecological threat posed by pesticides, the industry has doubled in size, he added. Though fertilizers led to the “green revolution,” the energy required to produce them outpaces the amount of calories created.

If only we would learn…

Humanity is operating on a “3.45 billion-year-old imperative” that causes us to seek out carbon-based resources to sustain ourselves, Dr. Jackson told the audience.

“There was never a need to practice restraint. It has to be something learned,” he said. “If we can save our soils, we can keep alive what we’ve learned on this long journey.”

Cultivating perennial poly-cultures can solve a number of agricultural headaches, from drought, pests, and the amount of work required to plow, plant, and harvest the crops each season, he said.

In partnership with researchers in China and Sweden, Land Institute researchers around the world are working on perennial varieties of the world’s three major major grains, rice, corn, and wheat– as well as oil-producing plants like mustard and sunflowers.

Dr. Jackson acknowledged the concept he and his colleagues are developing will not be popular with seed suppliers, and fertilizer, pesticide, and oil companies.

But even without millions in corporate and government funding, The Land Institute has been able to refute the arguments often made by pro-genetic engineering types and chemical corporations.

A paper published in 2008 by Land Institute researcher Stan Cox showed that perennial crops have the potential to  feed a growing, ever-hungry population without destroying nature.

In this vision, the “sustainable agriculture industry” finally ceases to be an oxymoron– and in fact, could provide the hope for greater food security across the globe.

Considering that in 2006, prices for basic grains jumped 80 % for wheat, 60% for corn, and a whopping 320% for rice, the world’s hungry need all the help they can get.

If the uprising in Egypt is at least partly due to rising food prices– in a country where people barely survive on $2 a day– it’s possible that revolutionizing agriculture could also lead to word peace.

The perennial promise

Unfurling an 18-foot poster comparing perennial wheat to its domestic sister species, Dr. Jackson pointed out that the perennial variety’s long root system can find water where the annual plant cannot.

Perennial wheat has been found to fix carbon in the soil and reduce nitrate and water losses typically incurred at each harvest.

Furthermore, its productive life span of five to 10 years means a heartier crop that can compete with weeds and resist pests, reducing the need for pesticides.

Perennial wheat strains developed by The Land Institute have only been able to produce 40 percent of the seeds of an annual variety, said Dr. Jackson, who estimated the perennial strain will require up to 50 more years of interbreeding to match–and eventually exceed– that level of productivity.

But it will likely be worth the wait. Lab tests have shown that flour made from perennial wheat has 40 percent more protein, 10 times more folate and lutein, and up to 600 percent more nutrients than traditional wheat flour.

Dr. Jackson’s books, including the 2010 Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to New Agriculture, provide plenty of food for thought on the subject of sustainable agriculture, in which biologists and backyard gardeners may find common ground.

I wonder what would be served at the wedding.

That was one of the questions that Neil D. Bettez, of the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, spent five years as a doctoral student in Falmouth trying to answer. Working with Eric Davidson, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, and colleagues at Cornell University, Dr. Bettez came across a local nitrogen source that is often overlooked: emissions from cars and trucks.

“We’d like to say it’s only the power plants in the Midwest [that are responsible], but the fact that a lot of cars driving on Cape contributes to local impacts. What we drive, and how much, really matters on a local level,” Dr. Bettez said.

‘The more you put in, the more you put out’

Those driving around down Route 28 between 2003 and 2007 may have noticed bottles with funnels on top sitting under trees at the Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Reserve (WBNERR) near the Mashpee-Falmouth town line, or on the lawn at the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth. These contraptions collected rainwater dripping from tree leaves, which Dr. Bettez analyzed for nitrogen content.

His results showed that areas of the forest within 30 feet of a road contained the highest amounts of nitrogen. He also found more nitrogen underground near the road, pointing to a nitrogen source that is leaching into the groundwater, and eventually into nearby water bodies.

“Understanding sources of nitrogen is a key first step in managing and mitigating nitrogen pollution,” he said. “The more you put in, the more you get out. Even kids know that.”

The research conducted by Drs. Davidson, Bettez and their colleagues suggests that road runoff may have been underestimated in the past, and it could contribute as much as 10 percent of the nitrogen load to some local water bodies.

According to Dr. Bettez, atmospheric nitrogen has been on the rise since the Industrial Revolution. Through fertilizer production and fossil fuel combustion, humans now release as much reactive nitrogen (NOx and NH3) as is created naturally from lightning and nitrogen-fixing plants, such as soybeans or blue-green algae.

Due to cleaner emissions standards, power plants in the US now produce 29 percent less NOx than they did 30 years ago; and despite better emissions standards for cars, Americans also drive twice as much as they did in the 1970s, contributing 33 percent more nitrogen, said Dr. Bettez.

A hidden killer

Excess nitrogen in waterways can lead to eutrophication, resulting in low-oxygen conditions that makes it difficult for marine animals to survive. Algae thrives on the nitrogen, but sudden algal blooms can lead to smelly die-offs, unpleasant swimming conditions, and degraded eelgrass, an important habitat for shellfish.

Because most of the nitrogen that settles on leaves is retained in the forest, Dr. Bettez said, wastewater is still the single largest source of nitrogen in the water. However, he added, the forest’s capacity to hold that nitrogen is limited. In large quantities, he said, NOx and NH3 in the atmosphere can lead to tree “die back” due to acidification, an effect similar to acid rain.

While nitrogen deposition on the Cape is still too little to impact local forests, it could reach a saturation point, and end up in waterways, Dr. Bettez said. “My research points out that it will continue to be a bigger problem as people drive more.”

According to Ivan Valiela, of the Marine Biological Laboratory’s Ecosystems Center, different parts of Waquoit Bay could receive an additional 31 to 79 percent nitrogen load from rain and snow falling directly on the water.

“There is an additional atmospheric deposition directly onto the surface of the water of the bay, and this can be large,” Dr. Valiela said.

“Management action such as sewering would not affect this direct atmospheric source… a consideration, given the current interest in installation of municipal sewers.”

In comparison to wastewater and atmospheric deposition, the nitrogen from road runoff is “trivial,” at about four percent of the total load to the watershed, Dr. Valiela said.

However, Dr. Davidson said that the nitrogen contained in road runoff is significant enough to warrant better management in coastal zones. Analyzing the runoff he sampled during storms from Woods Hole Road, Oyster Pond Road, and Quonset Road, Dr. Davidson found that even small residential roads contain significant amounts of nitrogen, from a combination of car exhaust, lawn fertilizers, and animal waste.

“Roads are conduits for moving all that nitrogen rapidly. Where roads lead to water bodies, they contribute directly to the nitrogen load,” he said.

To reduce road runoff, the town could install “wells” that shuttle water from storm drains through layers of soil, where microbes can break down nitrogen and other hazardous byproducts, Dr. Davidson said.

Global problem, local solution

Because nitrogen loading is a local problem, Dr. Bettez said that local solutions, such as driving less, or driving hybrid vehicles, will help reduce nitrogen emissions.

Another way to tackle nitrogen emissions would be to follow California’s lead in developing regulations that would limit ammonia, a compound that is created from NOx by highly efficient catalytic converters, said Dr. Davidson.

Dr. Bettez noted that NOx is responsible for smog and atmospheric ozone, while ammonia plays a role in creating haze. Ammonia is also deposited very close to its source, which means that emissions from cars can fall out onto nearby water bodies, Dr. Davidson said.

Both Dr. Bettez and Dr. Davidson added that dietary changes could make an impact on global nitrogen production, noting that it takes significant amounts of fertilizer to produce animal feed, and animals produce manure, another large source of nitrogen that is released into the environment

“If we’re eating meat three times a day, we have a bigger nitrogen footprint,” said Dr. Davidson. “For those who don’t want to be vegetarian, thinking about portion sizes, or whether they’re eating beef, or less nitrogen-demanding pork, chicken, or fish, makes a difference.”

In a report published earlier this month in Science, Marine Biological Laboratory senior scientist Jerry M. Melillo and research associate David W. Kicklighter found the costs of producing biofuels may outweigh the benefits of burning them.

Due to a rising demand for corn-based ethanol, cropland in the United States is slowly being converted from food to biofuel production, Dr. Melillo said, mirroring a global trend.

The scientists’ model, which looked at economic and biogeochemistry data, predicted that the land devoted to biofuels will become greater than the total area currently devoted to growing food by the end of this century.

The displacement of food crops and forests for growing biofuel products will release up to twice as much as the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from the same land, they found.

“Large greenhouse gas emissions from these indirect land-use changes are unintended consequences of a global biofuels program, consequences that add to the climate-change problem rather than helping to solve it,” said Dr. Melillo.

Oil for food

Increasing biofuel consumption in the United States may also lead to land use changes in other parts of the world. Dr. Melillo pointed out that as the United States grows more corn, it is growing less soybeans, which are in high demand from China. As a result, China is buying more soybeans from Brazil, a country that is rapidly destroying its rainforests to convert to agricultural production.

“Our ethanol production is having knock-off consequences on land use in Brazil. There are several degrees of separation but everything is connected,” Dr. Melillo said.

Growing more biofuel crops could also mean that fertilizer use will increase, resulting in greater nitrous oxide (N²O) emissions. Dr. Melillo said this potent greenhouse gas could become more important than carbon dioxide as a driver of climate change by the end of the century.

“When you cut down [trees or crops], you release carbon. Burning wood in remote tropics, or allowing it to decay, that’s a big pulse of carbon. And once you clear the land, the next thing is to fertilize,” Dr. Melillo said.

The N²O threat

Unwillingness to use fertile cropland to grow biofuel plants can mean that less productive land—and more fertilizer—is used, Dr. Melillo said. By 2100, the scientists estimated that more than half of the total N²O emissions will come from fertilizer, surpassing CO² as the leading cause of global warming.

For this reason, Dr. Melillo said that N2O emissions are what he is worried about over the long term.

“Fertilization is probably going to go on for a long time. Whereas, the large carbon losses occur around the time of conversion of natural lands,” he said.

Current climate policy is aimed at reducing CO2 emissions to 350 parts per million, a target that some countries are trying to achieve by increasing their dependence on biofuels. So far, Dr. Melillo said, greenhouse gas emissions from biofuel-related land use change are not included in any country’s carbon credit accounting.

Furthermore, the spin-off effects of such policies, Dr. Melillo said, could mean that land prices will increase, leading to higher prices for food and wood products.

Because most of the ethanol used in Massachusetts is not produced in the state, he said that the ecological consequences in the US will mostly be felt in the Midwest, where farms and refineries dedicated to ethanol production have sprouted up.

“Corn is a nitrogen-demanding crop. It does not use fertilizer efficiently, so it runs off into the groundwater, down the Mississippi, and to the Gulf Coast,” Dr. Melillo said.

“I have a feeling there will be work in the agricultural community to maximize the efficiency using of nitrogen by breeding crops,” he said.

While Dr. Melillo said he is not planning to attend the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen next month, he will present his research on biofuel issues to officials in the European Union next week. He will be pushing for a global greenhouse gas emissions policy that protects forests and encourages best practices for nitrogen fertilizer that will reduce emissions associated with biofuels production.