This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg.

People often vacation to the beach, and they talk about the ocean as this great vista,

with all of the life teeming under the surface.

And my father uses the same metaphor for the prairie.

Rachel Storer grew up in Kansas, among prairie grasses and fields of waving wheat.

Across the world, wheat production and other annual grains account for 70% of the land used for agricultural purposes.

Monoculture crops, like wheat, are often grown in enormous single species plots and provide sustenance for millions of people.

But they also lead the problems.

The problems in agriculture are nitrate leaching, soil erosion, farmer debt,

loss of soil organic matter, herbicide resistance, overproduction, pesticide poisoning,

and the list goes on.

Strohr is the acting president of the Kansas-based Land Institute. Her organization works to promote regenerative agriculture,

a rejection of monoculture farming in favor of investing in seeds

that come back year after year and a reduced dependence on chemical fertilizer. The Land Institute itself

breeds new varieties of perennial seeds. One, called Pernza, is something they hope will

replace traditional wheat in everything from cereals to crackers to beer and bread, all the while

helping to restore nutrient balances in the soil

and clean the air we breathe.

And so what we want to do is solve the problem of agriculture,

which means to create an agriculture that is as regenerative

as the natural systems that built the soil upon which our food systems depend.

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