Cultivate Change - Transform Agriculture Today

Advancing cultural and agricultural change

Our Perennial Cultures Lab investigates the connections among human communities and agriculture. We work to understand economic impacts and barriers to adoption, and explore the ways a thriving perennial system can be a model for transforming human relationships.

Program background

The growing network of researchers and communities developing and stewarding diverse, perennial grain systems can help shape how cultures and communities centered around perennial grain crops emerge.

Social science research

Understanding cultural impacts, barriers, and opportunities and to increase social legitimacy for perennial grains in agriculture.

Education

Using knowledge and questions from educational, land, and place-based research to develop and evaluate community learning opportunities featuring perennial grains and grow the movement of people learning with each other across cultures, geographies, and generations.

Transdisciplinary engagement

Testing, innovating, and openly sharing transdisciplinary research methods like civic science to help advance the intercultural development of diverse, perennial grain systems in ways that are caring and ethical and to help researchers and communities collaboratively develop a global network of local and regional hubs that create a perennial future.

Timeline

2015

Program origins

Land Institute co-founder Wes Jackson and prolific writer Bill Vitek convened a conference about how the invention of perennial grain crops grown in mixtures creates the possibility for new ways of thinking and making a living within the “ecosphere.”

2019

Participatory research beings

The Land Institute launched its first pilot silphium civic science community as a collaboration between our research teams in plant breeding, ecology, and ecosphere studies.

2022

Program formalized

Between 2015 and 2022, then between named the Ecosphere Studies program, program director Aubrey Streit Krug designed events and experiments to bring together researchers, teachers, students, and community members to co-produce and test participatory approaches to learning.

2023

Program evolution

To better integrate and structure the insights gained so far through this learning process, the Ecosphere Studies program evolved into both the Perennial Cultures Lab and the Ecosphere Fellows program.

2024

Participatory science expands

The Land Institute launched the Perennial Atlas civic science project, the largest participatory science project to date by the organization, engaging 224 civic scientists across 46 US states to study perennial grains and their annual counterparts.

Goals

The Perennial Cultures Lab works to help researchers and communities collaboratively develop a global network of local and regional hubs that create a perennial future.

Knowledge systems

Build and share knowledge about past and present human relationships to the plant species that will yield perennial grains

Refine research approaches

Test and apply approaches to understand if and how people change and learn as they interact with each other to develop diverse, perennial grain systems

Place-based and cultural learnings

Initiate and deepen intercultural land relations beginning in our home hub, grounded in the Central Great Plains

Participatory research and education

Design and evaluate educational practices, materials, and research methods like participatory science that broaden and sustain our lab’s culture of learning and The Land Institute’s organizational learning culture

Perennial cultures lab collaborators

Project team

Reece Knapic

Research Scientist I – Perennial Cultures Lab

As a longtime Lawrence, Kansas resident, Reece completed his Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Studies at the University of Kansas in 2019. After completing this degree, Reece continued his education at KU and received a Master of Arts degree in Geography as well as a graduate certificate in Geographic Information Sciences in 2022. During […]

Lydia Nicholson

Education Design Technician – Perennial Cultures Lab

Lydia grew up with a multicultural family on both sides of the Atlantic, often finding it hard to claim one place as her own. But she’s most at home amid the prairies and plains of Kansas, where she pursued a degree in Digital Art and English from Bethany College. At The Land Institute, Lydia puts […]

Aubrey Streit Krug

Perennial Cultures Lab Director

Aubrey grew up in the small town of Tipton in north-central Kansas, where her parents farm wheat and raise cattle, and considers limestone soils with rocky prairie hillsides her home ground. She lives in Lindsborg now with her husband and their son. Aubrey holds a BA in English and communications from Bethany College in Lindsborg, […]