It is the holy grail for wheat farmers, and environmentally correct, to boot: a perennial food plant that requires plowing only once every three to five years and prevents dust storms, stems soil erosion and even absorbs carbon to help mitigate climate change.
The latest search for perennial wheat, which comes up each year, began a decade ago here at Washington State University, said Dr. Stephen Jones, a geneticist, with a big question: What are the genetics that govern a plant's annual nature?
"That life-and-death question was fairly simple to answer," Jones said recently, standing in a thicket of greenhouse-raised experimental wheat plants that towered over him. "It's only a single gene that convinces a plant not to die." Once that gene is bypassed through breeding, "the question is, Does it have what it takes to live?"
That answer is considerably more difficult. A successful perennial wheat not only has to live, but it also has to do it in the right ways: It has to enter a dormant cycle in the fall and then return to life in the spring; it has to look like wheat, have a satisfactory yield and thresh cleanly.
Jones and his graduate students overrode the "death" gene in the late 1990s -- through old-fashioned breeding techniques that crossed wheat with wild grass, not genetic modification -- but it takes years, allowing plants to breed at their natural pace to make sure the wheat ends up with the right characteristics.
"We stick them together like putting a certain bull and a certain cow together in a certain corral," Jones said. As the plants create offspring, the scientists select the traits they wish to perpetuate and plant them. Some test plants have been planted by farmers and still need some work. The key is not yield but predictable survivability. As the first plants prove themselves, they will be planted in highly erodible areas, like hilltops, in the next several years.
Erosion is the big problem. Scientists say that an average of 12 tons of soil are lost per acre per year to water erosion, and high winds can take a whopping 50 tons of top soil from an acre of bare wheat field in just 24 hours.
The quest here is one of several around the world, to perennialize everything from sorghum to chickpeas to sunflowers. It has taken on new urgency for a variety of reasons, like climate change and soil loss.
"You talk about a cure for the common cold," said Ken Warren, managing director of the Land Institute in Salina, Kan., which is in the process of breeding a mix of perennial crops, like wheat, sunflowers and sorghum. "You name an abuse from farming," Warren said, "from soil erosion to the use of hydrocarbons to pesticides and herbicides, and we can get rid of it with perennial crops."
In Australia, researchers have a well-financed project to breed a perennial wheat to reduce salinity in annual wheat fields. In Texas and Oklahoma, researchers are working on perennial wheat as a crop and for grazing cattle. In Nepal, where farming is terraced, farmers want it for erosion control.
Farmers in eastern Washington have pushed for the new, longer-growing wheat. "It fits the bill real well to lower our cost as producers," said Mark Schoesler, a wheat and cattle farmer near Ritzville, Wash. "It could be the ultimate conservation tool."
Because it needs less plowing and planting, he estimates it would lower his fuel costs by 75 percent. Seed costs would also drop.
There are high stakes involved in a perennial wheat here. The soil in the Palouse, as this region is known, was dumped west of here by large-scale outburst flooding from Glacial Lake Missoula, which last occurred about 12,000 years ago. After the flood, soil called loess, made by glaciers grinding volcanic rock into powder, was blown in great dunelike waves. As a result, the millions of acres of nearly treeless landscape are covered with soil as much as 100 feet thick.
"It's a gift of the ice age and a wonderful cocktail of different rocks and minerals, and if you add organic material, great for plant growth," Warren said of the soil. "Without it, we'd be Australia, which didn't have a good ice age."
Thanks to the soil and cool nights, Whitman County is the richest wheat region in the United States, with per-acre yields at 75 bushels, more than twice those of Kansas.
But the soil is disappearing. When the soil has no cover of vegetation -- a period of months to more than a year -- the wind blows across the rolling hills here and sucks the fine-grain soil into the sky. It creates giant clouds and an eerie brown darkness in the middle of the day. Traffic accidents are not uncommon, and road signs warn of blowing dust. The drifts pile up against fences, like snow.
On many exposed hilltops here, all of the soil has been stripped away down to clay. The soil also washes into small streams that feed eventually into the Columbia River, where they choke salmon spawning beds.
Erosion problem
It is the same problem in Kansas. "The streams run brown from the erosion of soil from flat-lying wheat fields," Warren said. "Here at the Land Institute, where the prairie has been restored" with perennial plants, he said, "the water is running clear because the root system holds the soil."
The key has been to move back to a more natural wheat. "All breeders have been working under a high-input system," Jones said. "The diet of their plants is luxurious. If we make plants that are tougher, we can use water and nutrients more efficiently. We're trying to make wheat more like a weed."
Land Institute scientists believe a crop of several kinds of perennial plants, with wheat in the mix, would solve even more problems than a lone perennial wheat. "Perennial roots don't allow annual weeds to take hold," Warren said. "And diseases don't fare as well in mixed cropping systems as they do in a monoculture."
Researchers have searched for these kinds of plants before. Beginning in the 1940s, a large amount of research was conducted at the University of California, Davis, but was abandoned in the 1960s because the yield was only 70 percent of annuals. "Our farmers would take that in a second," Dr. Jones said. "If we can get 50 percent, that would be great because it solves so many other problems." In the 1920s and '30s, a researcher here, Hannah Aase, also researched perennial wheat. In both cases, the research was lost or destroyed.
Researchers are still years away from replacing annuals with perennials, because of the slow nature of such breeding programs. "It won't be in my lifetime," said Jones, who is 50.
Still, early results are encouraging. A graduate student here made some cookies from the perennial wheat. "They were good," said Kevin Masters, a graduate student. "And they had more zinc, iron calcium and copper."

Jim Robbins
New York Times News Service