A New Beer Offers a First Taste of the Grain of the Future
Patagonia Provisions’ Long Root Ale is the first commercial product ever made with the perennial grain kernza.
Much of what remains of the once vast American prairie can be found in the rolling Flint Hills of Kansas and Oklahoma. There, the rocky soils managed to halt the plows of pioneering farmers who were pushed West by manifest destiny, on the hunt for new land to turn over and farm. There was once more than 170 million acres of tallgrass prairie in North America, a grassland ecosystem that blanketed the Midwest—from Texas all the way up into Canada and extending from Kansas to Indiana. Today, just 4 percent of the landscape that defined the middle of the country persists. Even the deep topsoil—created by roots that reached farther down into the dirt than the head-high blades of big bluestem, indiangrass, and switchgrass—that made prairie states into agricultural powerhouses is dwindling. …