By TIM UNRUH
Nearing a half century since he co-founded The Land Institute southeast of Salina, Wes Jackson remains staunchly hinged to a “long view” of reducing climate change.
Despite being decades from mission accomplished, a celebration looms later this month in downtown Salina, with the world premiere of a documentary, “Prairie Prophecy,” starring Jackson.
A red carpet event is planned April 26 at the Stiefel Theatre for the Performing Arts that includes the 90-minute feature film, meeting the cast, Executive Producer and Director Michael Johnson, and the inspiration himself, in the flesh.
It’s part of Kernza® for Kansas 2.0: Wes Weekend.
Soil’s grand guardian is set on using perennial polycultures and natural systems agriculture to mimic the prairie, reduce or eliminate tillage, and slash carbon emissions.
“Wes Jackson, one of the most important environmentalists of the 20th and 21st centuries, spent his life pioneering a bold new approach to agriculture that challenges humanity to rethink its relationship with the Earth,” according to the film’s promotion on the Stiefel Theatre website.
But as the seasoned Kansas Wesleyan University Coyote admits, his unwavering mission requires much attention.
“When I first published on this, I said, ‘This is gonna take 50 to 100 years,’ and we’re not yet at 50. Most people’s time frame isn’t until the next election,” Jackson lectured during a March phone interview.
He was in a humble, relaxed, and jovial mood, showing more interest in other topics than his own storied career.
Regardless of this journey’s stage, promoters have determined it’s time to train a few hundred thousand more lumens on Jackson’s lifelong pursuits as dirt’s Dalai Lama.
The still dedicated and learned 88-year-old entrepreneur, Darwinist philosopher and PhD in genetics, chuckled at the notion that a red carpet will pave the way to the 90-minute film in downtown Salina.
Jackson is interested in the to-do list, but would prefer others with vital roles take a stroll on such a hallowed crimson walkway — from the Watson Room into the Stiefel lobby.
“There are many extraordinary people involved in the long view. Those are the ones who oughta be walking on the red carpet,” he said, “if there is a red carpet.”
Jackson confirmed viewing a “rough cut” of the documentary, but won’t yet offer an opinion.
“For now, I refuse to comment. It’s like somebody asking ‘What do you think of your kids?’ I want to know what other people think,” he said. “I don’t know what my opinion is until I’ve talked to my friends. Time has to pass before you know whether it’s good or not.”
Jackson announced his attire at the premiere will be “something between a tuxedo and bib overalls.”
While more accolades await Jackson for his life’s work, he’s still hard at it, perfecting the planet through inspiration to return to Nature’s intentions; maybe more with brain than brawn these days.
After years of work on “Prairie Prophecy,” Johnson remembers the 80-plus year-old intellectual showing off his rugged abilities during filming.
“He would stray off camera, pick up a hay bale and toss it, but we weren’t quick enough to capture it,” Johnson said. “I tried to keep my 60-something-year-old body in step with him. Even the Energizer bunny looks lazy next to this guy.”
Among Jackson’s “most impressive” traits to some is the way he communicates.
“He’ll break into song, Shakespeare, scripture or a poem,” Johnson said.
Jackson is proud to remind listeners of his memorization of every book in the Bible and all United States presidents through the Truman administration.
Earth’s future is constantly in his crosshairs. Prairie Prophecy Executive Producer and Producer Kelly Sallaway’s favorite Jackson quote drives that philosophy home: “If you are working on something you can finish in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”
The feature-length movie is a major happening during a weekend jammed with attractions, beginning April 25 with tours at The Land Institute, Kansas Wesleyan University’s Heartland Rift Community Resilience Hub next door, and Quail Creek Family Farms a few miles north; a film and other events from downtown Minneapolis, KS, and the next evening in the heart of Salina.
A free screening of the short movie “Beer Saves the World!” courtesy of Perennial Films, will be shown Friday night at “The Farm & The Odd Fellows” coffee cafe, brew pub and event center in Minneapolis, the Ottawa County seat.
There is much to celebrate, now that Kernza®, a perennial wheatgrass, has made some necessary strides toward joining the mainstream of feeding folks; claiming space on a growing number of menus in homes, restaurants, and breweries.
It was a natural for “Prairie Prophecy” to premiere in Salina, said Sallaway, of Scottsdale, AZ.
The film is co-promoted by The Land Institute, Sustain-A-Grain, a major promoter, distributor and developer of Kernza® products, Kansas Wesleyan University and San Diego-based Perennial Films, which specializes in environmental documentaries.
“Prairie Prophecy” is “about the life and life’s work of Wes Jackson,” according to the Stiefel Theatre website.
“He deserves a movie,” said Sallaway, who wonders if Jackson shares DNA with Albert Einstein and Will Rogers.
“Wes is definitely a character,” she said.
Jackson superlatives are splattered like spring bugs on windshields when admirers expound on his wisdom and prowess. “Prairie Prophecy” is one more fine example.
“It is truly a love letter from Micheal Johnson to Wes Jackson,” said Tammy Kimbler, chief communications officer for The Land Institute.
“In a gracious way, it really personifies what Wes means to many generations of people whom he inspired,” she said.
There are many stars in the effort to carry the story forward, but the deep roots lead back to the burly bespectacled Kansas thinker.
“What’s so cool about the Wes Jackson documentary is that it’s really a bridge to the origin of The Land Institute, to the movement that was inspired, but also the future,” Kimbler said. “This is an amazing passing of the torch to a whole new generation.”
Those include Sustain-A-Grain, a key distributor and marketer, KWU, “new iterations of the Land Institute,” she said, and many others in Kansas and around the world, where all sorts of perennial crops are being developed and studied.
“It’s a fabulous affectionate collage of Wes’s most impactful ideas, about reconciling the human economy with nature’s economy. Those are the foundations of The Land Institute,” said Rachel Stroer, president of the nonprofit research center at 2440 E. Water Well Road.
“It’s nice to have that memorialized in this film,” she said.
Another goal of “Prairie Prophecy,” Johnson said, “is to
raise awareness about all the non-profits that are featured and to perhaps make it easier for them to raise money.”
The film’s main cast has 10 people, but there are “scores” of others, Sallaway said, including AmeriCorps and university volunteers.
Jackson’s master plan hasn’t wavered; to let natural systems agriculture ease some ills of this globe now populated with 8 billion people, and counting. That number has doubled since The Land Institute came to be.
In his decades of leadership, Jackson introduced a “Prairiebilly” vocabulary that was hatched while growing up on Kansas River bottom ground north of Topeka.
“I wanted to know about the whatisness of things,” Jackson said during a March 5, 2024, interview by Rex Buchanan, for the Kansas Oral History Project, also introducing “oughtness,” which translates to “doing things the way they ought to be done,”
During a speech at one of the Prairie Festival gatherings at The Land Institute, Severine von Tscharner Fleming, founder and director of Greenhorns, referred to Jackson as an “enigmatic Sphinx.” Such characters are defined as mysterious protectors who are difficult to interpret, symbolizing mystery, power and ancient wisdom, as listed on a number of Internet sites.
Born June 15, 1936, the youngest of Howard and Netty Jackson’s six kids — firstborn Margaret was 22 at the time, and Elizabeth was 20. They grew up on Route Six, Topeka, on the north side of the Kansas River, and farmed with horses until late in World War II when a tractor graced the operation.
“I remember the last mule leaving the property,” Wes said.
The Jacksons ran a “diverse farm, with cows, horses, and chickens,” he added. “We had lots of watermelons, sweet potatoes, cantaloupes and beets. It was kind of a truck farm. Dad was a meticulous record keeper and was up on state and chamber of commerce topics.”
Wes Jackson admitted to being an inquisitive lad who constantly peppered folks with questions.
“I heard my dad say to me once, ‘I don’t know anybody like you,’ ” he said.
Jackson wasn’t quite 18 when he ventured to Salina and enrolled at Kansas Wesleyan University, aiming to play football and run track. He lettered in both.
“I came 71 years ago this spring,” he reminisced. “Without Kansas Wesleyan, I would’ve been a different person.”
After completing a bachelor of arts degree in biology, Jackson added a master’s in botany from the University of Kansas, and his PhD in genetics from North Carolina State University.
Jackson was a biology professor at KWU and established the Environmental Studies Department at California State University at Sacramento, resigning in 1976
“Text book-only thinking is part of the reason I quit academia,” Jackson said. “I was a tenured full professor in California, in the hotbed of the environmental movement, and yet I come (back) here.”
The Land Institute alternative school and research center, opened later that year with an educational system that connected science, sociology, political science, religion and literature into one “silo … using the prairie as a model,” according to the Oral History Project.
“It was a different way to think about what counts,” Jackson said. “We only had six to eight students (at a time), and they learned to use both mind and hands. Humans need food, clothing, shelter and transportation.”
Early contributions came from attorney John Simpson, and Sam Evans, CEO and partner at Evans Grain, both of Salina. It was enough to pay the tuitions of the first seven students, Jackson said.
His “epiphany” to begin the heralded push for change came on a field trip in 1976 to the Konza Prairie near Manhattan.
“I had been reading a (federal) General Accounting Office study, and it looked like soil erosion was as bad as the 1930s,” Jackson said. “I thought ‘with thousands of miles of terraces, grass waterways, action with the purpose to stop erosion, how can this be?’ ”
Food of the day snared his attention.
“I looked at all the major crops, 12 different combinations of plants we eat, and none of them were perennials. They were all annuals, and yet there were all these perennials in nature,” Jackson recalled. “So I thought ‘Why not?’ I set out to deal with those major crops.”
But the scientist also knew of the rule that to get perennials with big roots to be also blessed with high seed yield was believed “not possible.” It shoved Jackson into the multi-decade mission.
“The plant will either allocate resources to the seed or the root, so I challenged that tradeoff theory,” he said.
Now it’s history.
“That scientific debate has mostly been laid to rest,” Stroer said. “Because of research at The Land Institute, the tradeoff is not a concern or problem,” Stroer said. “The success of Kernza® and especially what perennial rice has achieved in Yunnan China, have shown you can have both high yields and robust perennial plants.”
Progress is happening, and you can see it by comparing the growth size of Kernza® kernels over the past decade or so.
“Plant breeders are never satisfied with the rate of progress,” said Lee DeHaan, PhD, lead scientist in The Land Institute’s Kernza® domestication program.
“We’re continually finding new ways to speed up the work,” he said. “We’re increasing yields fast. We’re catching up rapidly, but I’m not going say I’m satisfied. We are recording steady increases in seed size and grain yield. I’m hopeful in a couple decades we’ll be matching wheat for yield in this region.”
Another goal is extending the life of Kernza® plants from replanting every four years, which is typical, DeHaan said.
“We recognize that longer would be better to realize more benefits,” he said.
Kernza® is just one of the cures for an ailing planet. Research is underway around the globe to perennialize other grains, such as legumes, oilseeds and sorghum.
The Land Institute has contributed money and encouragement to research perennial rice development in China.
“They have yields comparable to annual rice. That reduces input costs, so their profits could be really compelling, helping farmers’ bottom lines,” DeHaan said. “We now have evidence with one crop that we can deliver these benefits.”
Meanwhile, Sustain-A-Grian co-founders, Brandon Schlautman, of Henderson, NE, and Brandon Kaufman, of Moundridge, KS, and other team members, are aggressively promoting Kernza®.
They must convince farmers to plant it, while also coming up with more uses, such as in food and livestock feed; help farmers grow, harvest, store, and process it, according to the company website.
“We’re trying to work with The Land institute and other partners and continue to educate about Kernza® and other sustainable grains,” said Schlautman. He doubles as the lead scientist in perennial legumes at The Land Institute.
“We need to continue to grow Kernza® acres in Kansas, but to be able to do that, we have to improve the knowledge and desirability of it,” Schlautman said. “There has to be more market outlets for the grain.”
Change is slowly marching toward Jackson’s dream, but much more improvement is vital.
“We’ve gotta have more than Kernza® and other perennial species, for the reduction of soil erosion, (focusing on) an ecosystem concept, while depending less on monocultures. We haven’t made as much progress as we need to,” Jackson said. “Climate change is hanging over all of us.”
A history lesson often ensues in his writings and lectures, starting with the banes of reliance on annuals that ignore the lessons of Nature.
“The plow has destroyed more options for future generations than the sword,” he said.
Another damaging trend to Jackson, started when the Drake Well struck oil Aug. 27, 1859, in Titusville, PA, igniting the first oil boom in the United States, i.e. the flow of portable liquid fuels.
“Three of my grandparents were born before and one was in utero. Two of them held me in their arms,” he said, illuminating the the environmental downfall in some four generations.
In that relatively short time frame, climate change has been swift, he said, advocating that positive change needs to pick up pace.
“Are we just going to wait around until we get hotter and drier with more violent storms? I can’t predict the future,” he said. “In some way, we’ve got to respond and hope that our response is effective. We know we can’t go on. We’ve got too many people, and too much stuff, and this stuff, of course, is causing damage to the atmosphere.”
Asked if he’d like to be around when the world returns to a more natural state, Jackson replied, “It’s probably not a good idea to live forever, but I sure don’t like what is going on here and now.”
FACTOID:
Wes Jackson has a long list of accolades, including being awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. Genius Grant) in 1992. He was named among the “100 important Americans of the 20th century” by Life Magazine; one of the “35 Who Made a Difference” in the November 2005 issue of Smithsonian Magazine; Rolling Stones Magazine’s “100 Agents of Change” in March 2009, and “50 Kansans You Should Know” January 2011, in Ingram’s Magazine.
FACTOID:
“Prairie Prophecy” took San Diego-based Perennial Films, 2 1/2 years to make, said Kelly Sallaway, executive producer and producer.
“Michael Johnson, (executive producer and director), started years before; the minute he met Wes Jackson,” she said.
The 90-minute film will be re-cut to a one-hour show for public television.
FACTOID:
Here’s a list of events during Kernza® for Kansas 2.0: Wes Weekend:
Friday April 26:
• The Land Institute Community Tours 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. 2440 E. Water Well Road. Register at landinstitue.org.
• Spring Plant Identification Walk at The Land Institute, 3 to 4 p.m. p.m. Register at landinstitue.org.
• Visit the Heartland RIFT Campus next door, tour the grounds with the Community Resilience Hub team and the first cohort of Kansas Wesleyan University students; meet the animals and learn more about RIFT, which stands for Rodale Institute Farmers Training, a program in regenerative agriculture. Register by emailing [email protected]
• “Beer Saves the World!” starts with Happy Hour at 5 p.m.; film screening, 6 p.m. at The Farm and The Odd Fellows in downtown Minneapolis, KS, followed by a Q&A panel discussion, Second showing of the movie only is at 8.
Saturday, April 26:
• World premiere of “Prairie Prophecy” documentary. Doors open 5 p.m. at the Stiefel Theatre for the Performing Arts, 151 S. Santa Fe, Salina, KS. Film begins at 6. Tickets are $25. As of April 11, more than several hundred were still available. Box office is open from noon to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, and tickets may be purchased around the clock at stiefeltheatre.org. Panel discussion and Q&A, 7:45 p.m.
• Following the movie, a Kernza® Pasta Buffet, — salad included —, is planned at Martinelli’s Little Italy across Santa Fe Avenue. Two kinds of Kernza® pasta were provided by Sustain-A-Grain. Cost is $10.
• Monday April 21 through Sunday April 27 Sample food made with Kernza® at local restaurants and a market:
Downtown Salina
• Ad Astra Books & Coffee House
• Barolo Grille
• Blue Skye Brewery and Eats
• Prairieland Market
• Seraphim Bread
• Renaissance Cafe (Assaria)
But wait, there’s more:
• Red Fern Booksellers in downtown Salina will feature books authored by Wes Jackson, Stan Cox, and others closely aligned with The Land Institute.
The learn more, visit landinstitue.org, or stiefeltheater.org.