Erica Shoenberger first learned about Kernza®, a type of wheatgrass, several years ago when she was working at a permaculture farm in Florida and sat in on a lunchtime seminar with Lee DeHaan, a lead grower of Kernza at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. “I was like ‘Oh my gosh, that is the coolest thing ever,’” Shoenberger says. “I had never heard of perennial grains before.”
Inspired to learn more, Shoenberger began researching graduate programs and reached out to Valentin Picasso, a professor in the University of Wisconsin– Madison’s Department of Agronomy. “He wasn’t used to people asking about Kernza," Shoenberger says. Fast-forward a few years and Shoenberger has a master’s degree in agroecology from UW–Madison and is now working on a PhD studying Kernza and nutrient management.
Growing the Local Market
A perennial, meaning it grows back year after year, Kernza is also known as a “dual purpose,” crop; you can harvest grain from it for human consumption—it can be used for brewing beer, baking and in dishes like grain salads—and you can harvest a highly palatable forage from it for animals. With its deep root system, Kernza also has a number of environmental benefits, including carbon sequestration, preventing soil erosion and improving water quality, giving it the potential to mitigate climate change. For these reasons some refer to Kernza as a “wonder crop,” but Shoenberger acknowledges that it comes with its own set of challenges, including a lack of a viable market for the grain in Wisconsin. “There are structural barriers that can make adoption difficult for the growers specifically,” Shoenberger says. “Farmers might feel like, ‘If I plant this instead of 20 acres of wheat or 20 acres of corn, I might have profit reduction.’” But Shoenberger believes knowledge is power. “A hugepart of being able to grow a local Kernza market in Wisconsin is having consumer demand and there can’t be consumer demand if people don’t know about it.” Despite the barriers, Shoenberger is hopeful and believes the Kernza movement will continue to grow in Wisconsin because of its environmental benefits and the grain’s delicious, nutty flavor. “There is so much promise,” she says.
Because of its perennial nature, Kernza can be an appealing crop for growers. (Kernza’s official website boasts, “Tastes great, less tilling.”) “Farmers can plant it once—the ideal planting time is in the fall—then they can harvest in the spring for a forage crop or let their cows or other animals graze the field, and then by August there is a full grain crop from the grass,” Shoenberger says. “You don’t have to do any more planting or anything and then [after harvesting the grain] there is low-quality forage which ends up being more like straw that farmers can harvest in October or November before it goes dormant for the winter and then the same cycle repeats again next year.” Kernza’s deep root system—up to 10 to 12 feet deep—can store carbon, strengthen soil and prevent erosion. Schoenberger says growers in Wisconsin’s Driftless region are excited about Kernza’s potential to stabilize fields in an area that is at high risk for soil erosion due to its slopes and topography.
Preventing soil erosion also helps to improve water quality, something that excites Nicole Tautges, an agroecologist with the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute in East Troy. “Studies have shown that Kernza reduces nitrate leaching from croplands by over 90% compared to corn and soybean, so we are getting 90% reduction in nutrient pollutants entering water bodies when you plant Kernza,” Tautges says. “That is the potential of what we are talking about here. It could be a big game changer if we think about strategic positioning of Kernza around vulnerable water bodies or around drainage areas of watersheds. It truly can act like a filter.”
Tautges, who has a PhD in agroecology and worked in a postdoctoral position with Kernza at the University of Minnesota before joining Michael Fields, says she has always been interested in sustainable agriculture research as someone who cares about climate change. “Perennial crops and perennial land cover, they really move the needle on a lot of environmental parameters that we care about in a way that other sustainable management practices like cover cropping don’t. That includes soil health and also carbon storage,” she says. “Very, very, very few practices can actually increase soil carbon levels underground and perennials are one of them.”
While Tautges is enthusiastic about Kernza’s environmental benefits, she also recognizes that farmers might be wary of growing the crop for economic reasons. “We are still not there with the profitability for farmers because we don’t have markets built up…yet,” she says. “We need to spend more resources on professional marketing. A big goal for us is sustained use. We need commitments from people who want a continuous flow of the grain so we can project demand and plan our supply accordingly.”
Wanting to “walk the walk,” Tautges and her colleagues are growing Kernza on 20 acres of their own farmland at Michael Fields, a nonprofit organization with 200 acres of land researching alternative crops. Tautges says she now has 2,000 pounds of Kernza grain sitting in a shed which she has been turning into flour using a small mill; the flour is sold on Michael Fields' website when available. “Someone said to me, ‘See the value chain, be the value chain,’” she says with a laugh. As one of the only retail outlets selling Kernza flour, Tautges is planning on shopping it around to bakers and brewers.
On the Menu
Annemarie Maitri and Mark Pavlovich, bakers and co-owners of Bloom Bake Shop in Madison, baked loaves of Kernza sourdough bread last summer when they received a five-pound bag of the flour. “The smell coming out of the oven is incredible, like cinnamon with deep flavors of honey,” says Pavlovich. Because Kernza doesn’t have as much gluten as traditional wheat flour, Pavlovich used “a supporting cast of glutinous flours” so the bread could keep its structure in a Scandi-style loaf. Despite using about 25% Kernza flour, “the Kernza still dominates… which is impressive considering it was the minority grain in composition but it still punched through in smell and flavor,” Pavlovich says. “People still come in and ask for [the bread.]” While Bloom has run out of Kernza flour for now, Pavlovich is eager for more. “I would love to try it in more products,” he says.
Scott Manning, brewmaster and co-ownerof Vintage Brewing Co. in Madison and Sauk City, started learning about Kernza out of his own curiosity when he was approached last summer by artist Tory Tepp about a potential brewing collaboration using Kernza from his test plot at a farm close to Vintage’s Sauk City location. An artist-in-residence with the Wormfarm Institute, Tepp was looking for a brewery partner to craft a beer for last fall’s Fermentation Fest. “By coincidence his farmer host for the project was William Gasser, the same farmer who picks up my brewery’s spent grain to amend his dairy cattle’s feed,” Manning says. A fan of Fermentation Fest and curious about brewing with a new ingredient, Manning agreed to brew a Kernza beer, a mellow amber ale they call “Z’Quester” Toasted Kernza Amber. “I went for a relatively neutral and malty style to push the Kernza’s mildly nutty, cereal-like flavor to the forefront, and left the hop bitterness medium/ low to not distract from the grain’s innate character,” Manning says.
While Vintage already had a relationship with Gasser as they provide him with “spent grains” at no cost—“it’s of no further use to us but pig and cattle farmers cherish this byproduct as an additional feed source for their animals,” Manning says—brewing a beer with local Kernza brought this connection to the next level. “It's quite rare and special to have brewed a beer with grain grown five miles away, and then returned the same grain, once used, back to the same place for use again. I can't think of a tighter circle of life for a brewing grain on the commercial scale,” Manning says.
Whilden Hughes, a farmer at W. Hughes Farm G.P. near Janesville, started growing Kernza on his land as part of a water quality project with the DNR. “Water quality has always been something that I have had a real interest in, I have spent my whole life next to the Rock River,” he says. Hughes was also interested in Kernza’s benefits as a perennial crop. “Coming from a family farm that is predominantly small grain crops and annual vegetables, the perennial aspect has been really interesting for me to witness,” Hughes says. “It has a transformational aspect to it in that it requires a fraction of the fuel, tillage, soil disruption and chemical inputs that modern commercial-scale agriculture uses. It’s also a fraction of the yield, so there is an asterisk to that statement.” Echoing Shoenberger and Tautges, Hughes says there is currently almost no market for Kernza in Wisconsin. In order for farmers to grow it, it has to make sense. “It has to earn its place on the farm,” he says.
To help create demand for the grain, Hughes helped found Perennial PromiseGrowers Cooperative, a group of growers who are pooling their resources to reach out to companies who might be interested in purchasing Kernza. It was through the cooperative that Hughes recently made a connection with Lakefront Brewery in Milwaukee; a Lakefront Kernza beer using Hughes’ grain is now in the works. “You have to start somewhere. Hopefully by the end of it we will have a much more sustainable, much more regional grain shed,” Hughes says. “It’s just the beginning of the story.”
To find Kernza products online, Tautges suggests checking out the following website:
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