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Manipulating the Unseen Microbial Ecosystem—The Future of Hospitals?

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 A hospital room may feel sterile, with its recycled air and scrubbed smooth surfaces. But underneath that antiseptic veil is a teeming, invisible world of microbes, the composition of which constantly changes.
 

 Each new patient brings their own microbiome—the collection of bacteria and other microbes that live in and on the body—which they shed on the hospital bed, the television remote, and anything else they touch. Each nurse, doctor, and visitor that enters the room drops microbes, too. The tiny organisms also circulate through ventilation systems and travel through the air. Some come not from humans but water systems, heaters, and other human-made niche environments. Collectively, these microbes make up the built microbiome, which exists in a unique and dynamic form in every single building on the planet.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/hospital-microbiome-project-collection.width-990_RJ4LYho.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Collecting samples for the Hospital Microbiome Project
 
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 Not all microbes are bad, of course. Most are benign or even beneficial. But disease-causing agents are a constant in hospitals, and every day one out of 25 patients gets at least one inadvertent infection during their hospital stay.
 

 Some researchers suspect that hospitals’ microbial ecosystems may influence the spread of pathogens, which in turn may affect human health. While the research is in early stages, it may lead to changes in hospital design or practice to promote healthier built microbiomes.
 
<h2>
 Broadening Focus
 </h2>

 Researchers have been interested in microbes in hospitals since at least 1847, when Ignaz Semmelweis, a German-Hungarian doctor, discovered that medical students in a Vienna hospital were inadvertently transmitting puerperal sepsis from autopsy rooms to maternity wards, leading to high death rates. Semmelweis introduced mandatory hand washing, the first intervention for a hospital-acquired infection on record.
 

 Since then, most work on microbes in hospitals has similarly focused on preventing outbreaks of specific pathogens, especially those that are dangerous to people who are already ill or have weakened immune systems. In 1976, for example, scientists first discovered the bacteria that cause Legionnaires’ Disease,
 
 Legionella pneumophila
 
 , after an outbreak at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia. The bacteria, which can cause fatal pneumonia, lived in the cooling tower of a hotel and circulated through the building’s air conditioning.
 

 The pathogen can similarly thrive in in drinking fountains and hot water heaters, and is a particular concern in hospital water systems. Since its discovery, outbreaks have been identified in hospitals across the world. To prevent the bacteria from taking hold and spreading from its source to patients’ rooms, hospitals regularly clean and maintain ventilation systems and position cooling towers so that potentially infected air can’t circulate.
 
<aside class="pulledquote">
 “Some people are now trying to understand the entire ecosystem instead of just the impact of pathogens.”
 </aside>

 Today, other examples of hospital pathogens include black mold from the
 
 Stachybotrys
 
 genus, which may spark respiratory illness and can be controlled with ultraviolet sanitation systems, and the bacteria
 
 Clostridium difficile
 
 , which cause severe gastrointestinal distress and may be wiped out of contaminated rooms by robots spewing hydrogen peroxide vapor. Antibiotic resistant bacteria such as methicillin-resistant
 
 Staphylococcus aureus
 
 (MRSA), which can cause untreatable infections, may be tracked with genomic sequencing techniques. Finding the source of the bacteria with genetic maps to see how they mutate over time can encourage changes in behavior of hospital staff, such as taking extra care to wash hands and keeping infected patients quarantined.
 

 But these bacteria and fungi do not live in a vacuum. They interact with other microbes just as a murderer may have a network of co-conspirators and bystanders who help or hinder their actions. Understanding these relationships can help illuminate the pathogen’s success or failure.
 

 “What is new—and is critically important and interesting—is that some people are trying to understand the entire ecosystem instead of just the impact of pathogens,” explains Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis who specializes in microbes in the built environment. “If we want to understand why MRSA is spreading in a hospital, we probably should understand the entire collection of microbes in the hospital.”
 
<h2>
 Early Steps
 </h2>

 Eisen’s lab oversees the
 <a href="http://microbe.net/">
 Microbiology of the Built Environment Network
 </a>
 (microBEnet), an online resource that tracks around two dozen groups working to understand microbes not only in hospitals, but also in other built environments including various buildings, cars, and airplanes.
 

 Although we spend around 90 percent of our time indoors, the microbiome of the built environment is one of the last that scientists have explored. Like other work that came before—including microbial research in the ocean, soil, and even humans—Eisen and his collaborators have benefited from advances in genome sequencing technology, which can identify an organism’s genetic code relatively quickly and cheaply. Swabbing a room and then running the samples through a sequencing machine can identify microbes, and tracking where the swabs came from can show where they live.
 
<aside class="pulledquote">
 Different ventilation systems can impact a room’s microbial content.
 </aside>

 Some researchers are already using these techniques to explore hospital microbiomes. In 2012, researchers at the
 <a href="http://biobe.uoregon.edu/">
 Biology and the Built Environment (BioBE) Center
 </a>
 at the University of Oregon
 <a href="http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/v6/n8/full/ismej2011211a.html">
 published a paper
 </a>
 that looked at the microbial content of the air at Providence Milwaukie Hospital in Oregon. The researchers took air samples from hospital rooms that were ventilated either by open windows or mechanical systems and found that the former had greater bacterial diversity. But rooms that were mechanically ventilated and thus exposed to a smaller amount of outside air also had more bacteria related to human pathogens. While this doesn’t mean that an open window will definitely benefit a patient’s health, the work did demonstrate how different ventilation systems can impact a room’s microbial content.
 

 People who spend time in a room may be affected by its microbiome, including non-pathogenic microbes. Earlier this year, a team led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley
 <a href="http://www.microbiomejournal.com/content/2/1/1">
 published research
 </a>
 that looked at the relationship between environmental microbes and babies in the neonatal intensive care unit at Magee-Womens Hospital of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
 

 Babies are typically colonized with the bacteria that prime their microbiome when they are born. But the premature infants in a neonatal unit are a special case—they are underdeveloped and often must be treated with antibiotics, which means their microbiomes may have a slow start. Although neonatal units are kept as sterile as possible to help prevent the babies from getting sick, the Berkeley researchers found that the microbes on various surfaces in the Pittsburg unit—mostly associated with human skin—were highly genetically similar to those in the gastrointestinal tracts of premature babies who lived in the unit during the first month of their life. The environmental microbes were likely colonizing the infants, just as a mother’s microbes would typically infiltrate their bodies during birth.
 

 Similar scans of other hospital rooms, from where patients sleep to where they are treated, may reveal similar ways that people and the built environment swap microbes.
 
<h2>
 Vast Samples
 </h2>

 Larger projects are on the way. The
 <a href="http://hospitalmicrobiome.com/">
 Hospital Microbiome Project
 </a>
 , for example, recently wrapped up a year’s worth of data at the Center for Care and Discovery, a new hospital associated with the University of Chicago. Samples were collected daily in ten rooms virtually identical in terms of layout and ventilation.
 

 “This is 15,000 samples in one environment with daily resolution across a year,” says Jack Gilbert, a microbial ecologist at the University of Chicago and one of the project’s leaders, “It will be one of the most microbially characterized environments on Earth.”
 
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<figcaption>The Center for Care and Discovery at the University of Chicago
 
 </figcaption>
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 Gilbert’s team was able to start data collection after the hospital was built but before patients arrived, to see how the people changed the environment. The group also worked with building scientists including Brent Stephens from the Illinois Institute of Technology, who characterized key features of the building and designed ways to collect a broad range of environmental data that may play a role in the life of a microbe.
 

 “What do we need to know about the building we’re sampling from a microbial perspective? There is a bunch of evidence that shows humans are a huge source of bacteria, and a lot of that is pretty new,” Stephens says. “So perhaps the number of people in these environments is important. And as far as survival on surfaces, we know that both temperature and humidity have a big influence on microbial communities.”
 

 To collect all that information, Stephens’s team put several types of data loggers in each of the study rooms to measure temperature, humidity, pressure, and light. They also added infrared sensors to each doorway that, along with carbon dioxide sensors, could estimate how may different people entered the room on a daily basis.
 
<aside class="pulledquote">
 Preliminary results show a huge boost in microbial diversity after the hospital started admitting patients.
 </aside>

 Coupled with the genetic information that will identify specific bacterial species and their locations, the environmental data might reveal how these factors influence the microbes’ presence and growth.
 

 Although a paper on the study likely won’t be published until at least 2015, Gilbert says the preliminary results show a huge boost in microbial diversity after the hospital started admitting patients, which is no surprise. Early results also suggest that the microbes in a hospital room might not only depend on how long a patient stays in the room but on what treatments the patient receives—how they are treated with antibiotics, for example, or whether they are going through chemotherapy. These different microbial ecosystems may influence how hospital-acquired infections spread.
 

 “We think that the rest of the microbial community in the hospital impacts how pathogens are transferred in much the same way as when a pathogen that finds its way into a river suddenly finds itself surrounded by soil bacteria and often is outcompeted and unable to survive,” Gilbert says. “We think the same occurs in hospital environments. If there is a rich microflora, the pathogen can’t compete. But if that microflora is absent due to sterilization of the facilities, for example, it finds it can persist for a lot longer.”
 

 It’s possible, then, that less sterile rooms could reduce the prevalence of harmful microbes. “More work has to be done to validate the hypothesis, but at least now we have the context of a very richly characterized hospital,” Gilbert says.
 
<h2>
 The Future of Hospital Design?
 </h2>

 Of course, some parts of the hospital will always require careful sterilization, such as operating rooms. And in general, infection control is a major goal throughout any hospital. “We’re trying to kill all the pathogens,” says Nancy Iversen, the Director of Patient Safety and Infection Control at Billings Clinic in Montana. “That’s what we’re after in hospitals, we’re trying to kill them all and keep microorganisms out of the air and provide protected environments for our at-risk patients, largely because of outbreaks.”
 

 While Iverson is intrigued by the implications of the built microbiome and the role of beneficial bacteria, she worries about patient safety. Plus, she adds, there are plenty of potential snags involving regulatory guidelines: “How would you get patients to enroll in studies where you didn’t disinfect traditionally under regulator standards—what the Centers for Disease Control requires, what these other bodies require regarding measures you take during construction and cleaning and air flow?”
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/operating-room.width-990_hNIlFz4.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Operating rooms are among those that will always require sterilization.
 
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 Still, research on the built microbiome is already influencing how some architects think about building design. “The lens I use in looking at buildings has gained a new dimension since becoming part of this research,” says Jeff Kline, an architectural researcher and building scientist at the BioBE Center at the University of Oregon. “Now I’m understanding, at least a little bit, about how architectural decisions about building form, organization, materials, and systems, especially ventilation, provide mechanisms that affect the composition of indoor microbiomes.”
 

 Kline adds that the research is too new to be applied to building design now. But there are intriguing possibilities for the future. Operating rooms and neonatal intensive care units may need to remain sterile, says Eisen from microBEnet, but it could be beneficial to allow a more diverse microbial ecosystem in, say, the room where a patient sleeps. There may also be better ways to control temperature, humidity, and airflow to encourage beneficial bacteria, or strategies to keep patients on intense antibiotic treatments away from those with compromised immune systems.
 

 “I don’t think we know enough now about building microbial ecology to really say exactly what is going on or exactly what the optimal strategy is for design,” Eisen says. “But I think it’s fair to seriously question the strategy of trying to kill everything when there is no doubt that one of the worst places to be if you don’t want to get sick is a hospital.”
 
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 Photo credits: Matt Wood/UChicago Medicine, Robert Kozloff/UChicago Medicine, UygarGeographic/iStockphoto

Hospitals are designed to minimize specific pathogens, but soon we may manipulate a building's entire microbiome.

Modifying crops like wheat could help boost yields by extending the growing season.

The Quest for Everlasting Agriculture

It’s a cycle nearly as old as human history. Plow, plant, harvest, and repeat. It worked for our ancestors, and it’s working for us now, though with ever more problems, from obliterating soil nutrients to encouraging erosion. And things may get worse in the future, too, when climate change threatens—whether through drowning or drought—to topple our food production system at the moment we’ll need it most: In less than 90 years, the world’s population could
 <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1257469">
 crest between 9 and 12 billion
 </a>
 , and that will test the limits of farming.


 “Soil quality around the world has become degraded,” says Sieglinde Snapp, an agroecologist at Michigan State University. “So how are we going to feed more people with higher quality food? How will we provide more protein? And the big question is: how are we going to feed 9 billion in a sustainable way with degraded soil?”


 There are myriad possibilities. Among the options is raising the output of current farming techniques using
 <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/fewer-pesticides-farming-with-gmos/">
 genetic modification
 </a>
 ,
 <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/more-food-with-microbes/">
 specialized fungi
 </a>
 , or
 <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/tech/farming-with-robotics-automation-and-sensors/">
 precision agriculture
 </a>
 . But another ambitious idea is to extend the growing season, which will involve rewriting much of the book of agriculture. In other words, if we were to redo the agricultural revolution today, what would it look like?

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 For untold generations, farmers have plowed their fields and planted their crops in the spring, harvested them in the fall, and done it all over again the next year. But in the last several decades, agricultural experts have been experimenting with eliminating the spring planting by developing perennial crops, essentially revising thousands of years of selective breeding.


 To see how perennials could help, just visit a farm in the Midwest in the dead of winter. You’ll likely find fallow fields scattered with dead plants. Some of them may be covered in snow. But under the surface, the frozen soil has locked in key nutrients and water. When the spring thaw begins—but before it’s dry and pliable enough for planting the next season’s crops—the warming fields will begin to lose some of their moisture and nutrients, which end up draining into ditches, rivers, and streams or seeping into the atmosphere. From a farmer’s perspective, the combination of these soil changes, the longer days, and the springtime rains add up to a lost opportunity. If only they could start growing sooner.


 Which is why a relatively small group of scientists are developing year-round cereals and oilseeds, both key ingredients of the modern human diet. Most of these grains today are annuals, which complete a lifecycle once every year and must be replanted the next growing season. Depending on the farming method, the cycle may include tilling, sowing, and harvesting, which, when done regularly on the same plot of land, leeches nutrients from the soil and contributes to erosion. This system also requires more energy-intensive machines and materials, from fossil-fuel-burning farming equipment to synthetic fertilizers that push nitrogen back into over-taxed soil.

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 “The way we currently grow grains is very similar to how we started growing grains a long, long time ago”

</div>

 Perennial crops, on the other hand, could survive for many seasons, axing the annual cycle and lessening farming’s wear-and-tear on the environment. Some varieties could also have longer, lusher root systems that would sink deeper into the ground, helping maintain soil health and curbing erosion. They could even help the plants survive a drought.


 Such a system would allow for longer growing seasons, too, taking advantage of the late autumn and early spring months when fields usually lay bare. Assuming that perennial crops produced the same amount as their annual counterparts—a big assumption—this would provide additional food each year from the same plot of land. A shift from annuals to perennials, or a mixture of both, could benefit both the environment and food security.


 “The way in which we currently grow grains is very similar to how we started growing grains a long, long time ago, and the ecosystem of agriculture has not changed much over that period of time,” says Timothy Crews, an ecologist and the research director at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, where scientists have been studying perennial crops since the mid-1970s and actively breeding them since 2000. “We need to supplant purchased, high-energy inputs and mechanization inputs with ecological processes that achieve comparable or superior outcomes, which could build slow organic matter in cropping systems instead of maintaining or depleting it, which is what current agriculture does.”


 The trick, however, will be coaxing crops into simultaneously surviving year-round and growing plump and harvestable seeds. Plants, as we’ve discovered over the millennia, tend to prefer one or the other, not both. Though thanks to the work of Crews and a handful of enterprising scientists, that may be changing.

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<h2>
 Perennial Advances
</h2>

 Agronomists and botanists have been trying to create perennial crops since at least the 1920s, when Russian scientists started a program to breed perennial wheat. But over the past ten to 15 years or so, the field has grown significantly, says Lee DeHaan, a plant geneticist at the Land Institute. This is partly because more research groups have taken up the idea and those labs have had a chance to mature. In October, one of the first dedicated scientific meetings on the topic attracted around 50 such researchers to Estes Park, Colorado to discuss breeding and management strategies.


 For perennial crop researchers, advances in genetics have given them an unprecedented level of understanding and control over their subjects. “If you consider the early Russian work, they were working very blindly,” DeHaan says. “They could make crosses and observe the plants, but they had no way to know the genes or chromosomes involved.”


 Today, there are two main approaches to breeding perennial crops, both of which require genetic tinkering. Both, too, are numbers games. The first is domestication, where plant breeders try to tame a wild perennial plant. This requires planting and observing thousands or tens of thousands of individual plants and then selecting those with the most promising characteristics—large seeds that hang onto the plant long enough for a harvest, for example, or ears that contain many seeds. The next step is to crossbreed these winners in an attempt to capture their positive traits in the next generation. Software that tracks which individual plants possess which traits—a tool that was unavailable to the Russian scientists in the 1920s—helps guide decisions on which offspring make it to the next round.

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<img alt="Wheat Inspection" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/wheat-inspection.width-990_4BL1g9M.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Shuwen Wang, a perennial wheat breeder at the Land Institute, inspects a crossbred plant.
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>

 Still, domestication is numbingly slow and difficult work. Wild perennials tend to drop their ripe seeds earlier than tame ones, a trait plant scientists call “shattering.” It’s advantageous for wild varieties to shatter because it allows their seeds to germinate when they’re ripest, but it’s useless to a farmer who wants those ripe seeds to stay on the plant until harvest. And while many wild perennials can easily survive multiple seasons, Crews says, it has been difficult to increase their yields and grain sizes to anywhere near those of annual crops.


 The second approach, and the more common one, is hybridization. Here, an annual crop is crossbred with a wild perennial counterpart in hopes that they will eventually produce a perennial crop. Hybridization offers a shortcut: annual varieties already contain the genetic recipe for high yields and big, harvestable seeds, and the wild perennials host the genetic code for longevity. Researchers can quickly identify genetic information that is linked to specific physical characteristics by using known stretches of genetic code called DNA markers. By snipping some tissue from a plant and extracting its DNA, breeders can see which genetic variations it inherited from its parents rather than waiting for the plant to grow and observing its traits, accelerating the breeding process.


 Unfortunately, hybrids are often sterile, and even if they do produce offspring, they don’t always pass on the desired traits. While a few offspring will be fertile, they can also be fragile. Sometimes hybrid embryos must be coddled in a lab in a process called “embryo rescue,” which involves growing them in special nutrients to ensure their growth. Even the most successful hybrids may then need to be cross-bred to bring them up to par.

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<img alt="Embryo Rescued" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/embryo-rescued.width-990_TKsyf7c.jpg"/>
<figcaption>A wheat embryo, sitting on the tip of the scalpel, is rescued from an immature hybrid seed.
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>

 Researchers across the country are trying both approaches and testing their results in the field. The Land Institute, for example, is domesticating wild sunflowers and wheatgrass—a variety they’ve named “kernza”—and their scientists are also developing a hybrid perennial wheat. Snapp, the Michigan State agroecologist, and her team conduct field research on perennial wheat in Michigan, as well as on the naturally-occurring perennial pigeon pea, a legume and a source of high protein, in Tanzania and Malawi. Still others across the world are working on rice, sorghum, corn, and mustard plants that don’t have to be planted every year.


 Andrew Paterson, a plant geneticist at the University of Georgia, is among the researchers working on hybrid sorghum perennials, including a project to cross an annual domesticated variety with a wild weedy sorghum called Johnson grass, which produces an extensive underground stem system called a rhizome. When the stems of a plant with rhizomes are cut, more grow in their place. Paterson points out that there are around nine or ten genetic variations known to be responsible for perennial characteristics like this in wild sorghum, and some of the same genes are also found in rice. That these two grains diverged from a common ancestor around 50 million years ago yet still retain such similar perennial genetic traits suggests that a wide range of crops which have distant common ancestors may also share the same features.


 “It looks like genetic control of perenniality is pretty similar in very different grain crops,” Paterson says. “So as we learn more about one, we learn more about all of them.”

<h2>
 New Plantings
</h2>

 Should researchers successfully develop perennial crops, it’ll be up to farmers to put them to work. Currently, philosophies differ on how crops should be planted in the future perennial landscape. The Land Institute envisions farmers sowing prairie-like fields with a mixture of perennials. And while this approach may help ward off pest insects and weeds, which more easily infiltrate a conventional field of a single crop, it complicates matters come harvest time. Currently, when a farmer cuts wheat, he knows he’s not going to be accidentally including corn in the harvest because each field grows a separate crop. Crews doesn’t think this will pose a significant challenge since the machinery to sort different seeds already exists, though it would likely need to be modified for this scenario.


 Paterson and others take the opposite view, suggesting that future perennial crops will simply be plugged into the current monoculture system, which would be easier to harvest with existing technology.


 Still others suggest a mosaic approach, which would include both monocultures and mixed fields as well as a combination of annuals and perennials. The idea is, in part, a practical one since large-scale monocultures already exist and probably aren’t going anywhere. “There’s corn and soybeans out there on millions of acres of Midwestern landscape. They’re not going away,” says Donald Wyse, an agroecologist at the University of Minnesota. Wyse oversees several projects that aim for year-round field coverage, including both perennials and annual winter crops, such as hazel nuts that could be swapped out with an annual summer crop. “It’s going to come down to what we can put in mixtures or in perennial monocultures,” he adds.

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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/hand-harvest-3.width-990_yllqs3d.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Workers harvest crossbred wheat for analysis.
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>

 To a degree, mosaics already exist, it just depends on the scale at which you look for them. Look out of the window the next time you’re in or flying over the Midwest. There, the farmland is a patchwork quilt interrupted by occasional stands of trees and shrubs. A mosaic that includes perennials could break farmland up even more, with smaller patches containing a wider variety of plants. These perennials might be grown on parts of a farmer’s field that are usually left unplanted, where they would provide both environmental and economic benefits. For example, Wyse says, some perennials could be not only food crops, but also oilseeds for making biofuels, forage for animal feed, and raw materials for other commercial products like cosmetics. If these perennials were planted around the edges of larger single-crop field, they could recreate, on a small scale, the region’s once extensive prairies while also giving farmers something to sell.


 “Deliberately planned landscapes like mosaics are the future, and perennial grains offers an option for mosaics that we don’t have now,” Snapp says. “Not all farmers can afford to have strips of prairie in their fields to provide sustainable grasses. It’s better to have practical options that also provide something they can sell or eat.”

<h2>
 Making Space
</h2>

 Regardless of how perennial fields will look—whether they’re blankets of monoculture, edible prairies, or a patchwork of both—we’ll still have to determine how they fit into our current food system. After all, we’ve been cooking and baking with many of the same grains for generations.


 In some places, we can glimpse this future. Kernza, the wheatgrass from the Land Institute, is already on limited menus. It’s in the pancake mix at Birchwood Café in Minneapolis, for example, which has been cooking around 50 pounds of the grain each season over the past two years. The Free State Brewery in Lawrence, Kansas made a pilot batch of a kernza saison beer several years ago, and WheatFields, a nearby bakery, has been experimenting with kernza bread for the past five or so years.

<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="Breeding Preparation" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/breeding-preparation.width-990_n8KTCni.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Wheatgrass heads are placed in paper bags during breeding to ensure pollen is only transferred between selected plants.
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>

 The grain’s largest commercial debut is forthcoming from Patagonia Provisions, a cousin of the clothing company, which is rolling out a line of environmentally-conscious foods. According to director Birgit Cameron, the company is experimenting with kernza both as a whole grain and ground into flour, and they plan to have a product out within the next two years.


 So how does it taste? Most people who have cooked or brewed with it want to try more, as long as they can get their hands on supplies. (The grain has a much lower yield than annual crops.) “The kernza is popular—it’s very nutritious, it cooks well, and it has good protein content,” says Marshall Paulsen, the head chef at Birchwood Café. “I hope to keep cooking with it.”


 To move the crop, and others like it, from farms to more restaurants, bakeries, and breweries, however, will require a herculean shift not only in plant genetics and farming practices, but also in how grains are bought and sold. Our most common grains and oilseeds—wheat, corn, soybeans, oats, rice, and canola—are traded on the global commodities market, where prices fluctuate based on activity on various futures exchanges. Bringing a new crop into that system is virtually impossible because there is literally no button or bin for it in the grain elevator, says plant geneticist Stephen Jones, who heads, among other things, research on perennials at Washington State University.


 To explore another model, Jones opened the Bread Lab at WSU around three years ago to facilitate smaller local markets that will support new perennials and other crops that don’t fit into the current system. The lab has a resident baker as well as visiting chefs, brewers, and millers to experiment with new crop varieties. It also helps pair up different businesses to speed along commercialization.


 The Bread Lab model allows for more leeway in the distribution and use of perennial crops. The lab is growing, for example, a perennial wheat that has a blue-green tint inherited from its wild relatives. “It’s really pretty, but there’s no commodity stream for that,” says Colin Curwen-McAdam, a graduate student who works on plant breeding and genetics in Jones’s department. “If you’re working in the traditional commodity sense trying to make these commodity grains, now we have to put them in the commodity box, which makes your job even harder.”


 In a way, the Bread Lab is a microcosm of the perennial crop world. Everything there is up for grabs, from commodities markets to the crops themselves. “It’s a brand new crop type,” Curwen-McAdam says, “and it’s completely unwritten as to what that can be.”

<div class="newsletter"></div>

 Photo credits: Scott Seirer/Land Institute

To feed a world of more than 9 billion, we may need to rewrite the book of agriculture using perennials.

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Brooke Borel

Articles

Manipulating the Unseen Microbial Ecosystem—The Future of Hospitals?

The Quest for Everlasting Agriculture

Editing Out Pesticides

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