The Land Institute
Wes Jackson, founder and president emeritus of The Land Institute, earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Kansas Wesleyan University, Salina; a master’s degree in botany from the University of Kansas, and a doctorate in genetics from North Carolina State University. He established and served as chair of one of the country’s first environmental studies programs at California State University-Sacramento and then returned to his native Kansas to found The Land Institute in 1976. He is the author of several books, including New Roots for Agriculture, Becoming Native to This Place, Consulting the Genius of the Place, and most recently Nature as Measure. Wes is widely recognized as a leader in the international movement for a more sustainable agriculture. He was a Pew Conservation Scholar in 1990, a MacArthur Fellow in 1992, and received the Right Livelihood Award in 2000. Life magazine included him as one of 18 individuals predicted to be among the 100 important Americans of the 20th century. Smithsonian in 2005 included him as one of “35 Who Made a Difference.”
Additional information here
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Books
Wes Jackson can teach us many things about the land, soil, and conservation, but what most resonates is this: The ecosphere is self-regulating, and as often as we attempt to understand it, we are not its builders, and our manuals will often be faulty. The only responsible way to learn the nuances of the land is to study the soil and vegetation in their natural state and pass this knowledge on to future generations. In Nature as Measure , a collection of Jackson’s essays from Altars of Unhewn Stone and Becoming Native to This Place , these ideas of land conservation and education are written from the point of view of a man who has practiced what he’s preached and proven that it is possible to partially restore much of the land that we’ve ravaged. Wes Jackson lays the foundation for a new farming economy, grounded in nature’s principles and located in dying small towns and rural communities. Exploding the tenets of industrial agriculture, Jackson seeks to integrate food production with nature in a way that sustains both.
“The plowshare may well have destroyed more options for future generations than the sword,” writes Wes Jackson in a review of practices that have brought U.S. agriculture to the edge of disaster. Tillage has hastened the erosion of irreplaceable topsoil everywhere and a technology based on fossil fuels has increased yields for short-term profits, leaving crops ever more vulnerable to diseases, pests, and droughts. Such, says Jackson, is “the failure of success.” As high-technology agriculture becomes more wasteful and expensive, more farmers are being forced off the land or into bankruptcy. Jackson’s major solution calls for the development of plant combinations that yield food while holding the soil and re-newing its nutrients without plowing or applying fossil-fuel-based fertilizers or pesticides. His new way of raising crops, by working with the soil’s natural systems, would keep the world’s bread-basket producing perpetually.
In six compelling essays, Wes Jackson lays the foundation for a new farming economy grounded in nature’s principles. Exploding the tenets of industrial agriculture, Jackson, a respected advocate for sustainable practices and the founder of The Land Institute, seeks to integrate food production with nature in a way that sustains both.
Locavore leaders such as Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, and Barbara Kingsolver all speak of the need for sweeping changes in how we get our food. A longtime leader of this movement is Wes Jackson, who for decades has taken it upon himself to speak for the land, to speak for the soil itself. Here, he offers a manifesto toward a conceptual revolution: Jackson asks us to look to natural ecosystems–or, if one prefers, nature in general–as the measure against which we judge all of our agricultural practices. Jackson believes the time is right to do away with annual monoculture grains, which are vulnerable to national security threats and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs. Soil erosion and the poisons polluting our water and air–all associated with agriculture from its beginnings–foretell a population with its natural fertility greatly destroyed. In this eloquent and timely volume, Jackson argues we must look to nature itself to lead us out of the mess we’ve made. The natural ecosystems will tell us, if we listen, what should happen to the future of food.
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Videos
Wes Jackson, PhD, President Emeritus and co-founder speaks at The Land Institute’s 2019 Prairie Festival.
The Land Institute’s Co-founder and President Emeritus Wes Jackson asks the question “Are We the Ones We Have Been Waiting For?”
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50-Year Farm Bill
“A 50-Year Farm Bill,” which has been in circulation now for more than three years, is a proposal by The Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas, with the concurrence of numerous allied groups and individuals. This bill addresses the most urgent problems of our dominant way of agriculture: soil erosion, toxic pollution of soil and water, loss of biodiversity, the destruction of farming communities and cultures. It addresses these problems by invoking nature’s primary law, in default of which her other laws are of no avail: Keep the ground covered, and keep it covered whenever possible with perennial plants
Wendell Berry, The Atlantic, November 13, 2012
Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, and Fred Kirschenmann traveled to Washington DC in mid-July 2009 to promote a 50-Year Farm Bill.
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The Land Insitute
Vision & Mission
Natural ecological systems are self-sustaining. For at least 10,000 years, humans have disrupted those systems and kept them in a continuous state of disruption in order to feed our populations and avoid famine. This, in a nutshell, is agriculture as we know it.
Increasingly, the modern scale of those agricultural disruptions threatens to collapse the critical cultural and natural systems upon which we depend.
The Land Institute believes that it doesn’t have to be this way.
The Land Institute and our partners are not working to tweak the now predominant industrial, disruptive system of agriculture. We are working to displace it. We believe it is possible to provide staple foods without destroying or compromising the cultural and ecological systems upon which we depend, but only if we understand and work with the constraints and capacities of those natural systems.
It took 10,000 years for humans to become reliant upon an industrial agriculture built upon annual crop monocultures. In the past forty years, The Land Institute and our partners have been breeding new perennial grain and seed crops and researching ecologically intensified polycultures that mimic natural systems.
In the next forty years, we intend to develop an agricultural system featuring perennials with the ecological stability of the prairie and a grain and seed yield comparable to that from annual crops. Through such a system, we can produce ample human food and reduce or eliminate impacts from the disruptions and dependencies of industrial agriculture.
Already, important questions have been answered and crucial principles explored. We’ve now demonstrated the scientific feasibility of our proposal for a Natural Systems Agriculture. Because our work deals with basic biological questions and principles, the implications are applicable worldwide.
When Natural Systems Agriculture is fully developed and implemented, we will see farmers and scientists around the world working together with nature to sustain and even rebuild soil, communities, and economies.
Mission Statement
When people, land, and community are as one, all three members prosper; when they relate not as members but as competing interests, all three are exploited. By consulting Nature as the source and measure of that membership, The Land Institute seeks to develop an agriculture that will save soil from being lost or poisoned, while promoting a community life at once prosperous and enduring.
