November 2025

Dear supporters,

This season, as roots deepen and harvest is celebrated, I’ve been thinking about how far our work has come—and how much possibility still lies ahead.

My work as Director of the Perennial Cultures Lab at The Land Institute explores how people and plants live in relationship. How can we learn to co-evolve with the crops we need, to live well within the limits of our places and shared planet?

For nearly 50 years, The Land Institute has been developing perennial grain crops and food systems that work with nature, not against it. Each season brings a better understanding of how these plants—and the people who tend and study them—can help us feed both land and community in ways that endure.

In a time when so much of life feels uprooted—from the soil, from one another—this work offers a steadier rhythm: one of belonging, patience, and repair. I remember how I came to this work, decades ago.

It’s fall 2005 and I’m 21 years old. There’s dew on the grass in the morning, but by midday it’s warm and windy in central Kansas. I’m wondering what it means to be from here. I’m trying to understand the stories we tell about agricultural communities, the villages and towns dotted across rural landscapes in fading ink, still legible.

One of my mentors points me down the road to The Land Institute, where interns are welcomed. I’ll soon meet the perennial polyculture research plots, but first, the library: stacks of books and issues of the Land Report. I’m drawn to the margin notes and dog-eared pages. On the front steps with the skinks, I read Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. Around the lunch table, I find a warm, wholehearted community of thinkers and doers. Is their mission possible? What might my own purpose be?

If I could send a message back to this past self, I’d mark lines in the Wendell Berry poem I held: “Praise ignorance.” “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.” “Practice resurrection.”

I remember reading these lines for the first time and feeling their beauty. Now, through this work and community, I’ve also come to experience them as deeply practical.

Now it is fall 2025. Hours slip by as I work through essays in the office basement. Emerging late, I greet a thunderstorm. Lightning flickers behind me as sunlight breaks through the clouds in the west, illuminating the silphium. I’ve been on staff for less than a decade, but I’ve already lived many seasons. I’ve learned how change comes both slow and fast. What will become of us social creatures? Will more sustainable perennial agricultures nourish more responsible, creative, and fair human cultures?

We can’t know the future. But the questions we ask and the actions we take in community—with you and so many others—keep this work alive with possibility.

Right now, the Perennial Cultures Lab is receiving harvest and soil samples and data from the 150 or so civic scientists we partner with across more than 40 states to study three potential perennial grains. We’re sharing Kernza® curriculum with teachers and schools who seek hands-on activities across subject areas, planting the educational seeds for students to meet and taste perennials and find their vocations. We’re co-editing a book to uplift the stories of people advancing diverse, perennial foods and food cultures. We’re planning meetings with regional community groups working toward a just transition, and engaging with colleagues near and far to collectively produce the next Prairie Festival celebration. We’re building new collaborations to inform ethical governance related to perennial crop development.

Every day, I see how the perennial movement is taking root. Farmers plant fields that hold and rebuild the soil. Ecologists track how water moves through those living systems, how carbon is stored. Chefs and dishwashers and eaters offer a circle of hospitality and care. Plant breeders guide cycles of selection. Social scientists evaluate community well-being. Artists, storytellers, and community organizers envision new ways for human and ecological flourishing to intertwine. Across the world, technicians and advocates, economists and educators, donors and neighbors—all are helping this agricultural work grow in collaboration with perennial plants, who can help restitch the fabric of life for generations to come.

And so I imagine forward. It’s fall 2075. Another intern walks a well-trodden path to the archives. They leaf through New Roots for Agriculture, whose pages still bear our margin notes. They munch on some perennial wheat toast smeared with berry jam as they consider all the facts. And then they carry joy in their daily practices, research tasks, and community conversations. The fields we’re dreaming of now have become commonplace for this intern: perennial grains waving in the south wind, through sun and storm. They have their own questions, of course. Our process of inquiry will persist, but our answers may stretch deeper, shaped by everything learned so far in this human journey.

As The Land Institute approaches its 50th anniversary, I’m reminded that perennial agriculture is both experiment and legacy. Roots in the soil, and recipes shared at the table. What once seemed improbable, even impossible, is now on the threshold: perennial grain crops grown and harvested, and a global community continuing to carry this work forward.

Thank you for deepening and growing this work. Your support bolsters the perennial movement—strengthening the possibility we share and helping this living experiment continue to thrive.

With perennial gratitude,

Aubrey Streit Krug
Director, Perennial Cultures Lab