Transforming Agriculture, Perennially
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Perennial Cultures

How do we grow more just human cultures that sustain and are sustained by diverse, perennial grain agroecosystems?

The Perennial Cultures Lab investigates the connection between cultural and agricultural change. We develop the research methods, patterns of relationship, and learning communities needed to realize more just perennial cultures of grain agriculture.


Why Perennial Cultures?

  • Perennial cultures are ways of life that adapt and persist within the context of particular places and the ecosphere. These cultures feature systems of meaning, norms, and behaviors that are shaped by sun-powered, diverse, perennial agroecosystems. Perennial cultures value and care for perennial grains.
  • Diverse, perennial grain agroecosystems can provide ecological, economic, and energetic infrastructure for human communities. But while an agriculture that provides food along with sustaining ecosystem processes may make more just cultural systems possible, it does not guarantee them.
  • More just perennial cultures could repair relationships between people who depend on each other. They could value the creative learning that is possible when people have the opportunity to help shape their lives and collective future. They could and seek to provide enough for all and to leave no one behind.
  • The growing network of researchers and communities developing and stewarding diverse, perennial grain agroecosystems may help shape if and how more just perennial cultures emerge.

Prairie Festival visitors participate in a sunrise walk organized by the Ecosphere Studies team that led participants through native prairie and woodlands along with Land Institute perennial crop breeding plots.

 

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Research Team

Aubrey Streit Krug
Director of Perennial Cultures Lab

Amy June Breesman
Land Relations Specialist

Reece Knapic
Research Technician, Civic Science

Lydia Nicholson
Research Technician, Educational Design

Related Content

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Read More about Prairie Festival 2022 – Updates on Progress Toward a Perennial Future

Publications

This collaborative paper, which includes research from The Land Institute’s Ecosphere Studies and Perennial Oilseeds…

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In the 2022 book Creating Resilient Landscapes in an Era of Climate Change, a shift to natural systems agriculture, which…

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Societal Impact Statement Plant scientists around the planet are working to develop new perennial grains…

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Caring for other beings – both human and more-than-human – is crucial to our ongoing…

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