Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

#RegenesisFact 7: A perennial rice variety developed by @NatureAsMeasure and Yunnan University is now on sale, fulfilling a dream scientists have pursued for a century. It has been harvested 6 times without resowing, with the same yields as annual rice. 🧵

Almost all the grain we eat comes from annual plants, that live and die within one year. Large areas dominated by annual plants are rare in nature. They tend to colonise ground in the wake of catastrophe: fire, flood, landslide or volcanic eruption that exposes bare rock or soil.

In growing annuals, we must keep the land in the catastrophic state they prefer. Every year, we must clear the soil of competing plants, puncture or turn it, and plaster it with the nutrients required to raise a crop from seed to maturity in a few months.

If we can produce our grain from perennials, we'd need to clear and break the land less often. They're also likely to be more resilient to climate chaos, as they have better-established roots and tougher structures. They could help form the basis of an entirely new agriculture.

.@NatureAsMeasure and its partners have been assessing thousands of perennial species that could replace the annual grains we grow, then selectively breeding the most promising species to raise their yields and improve their food and farming qualities.

Perennial rice is the first to reach full yield and be widely grown. Farmers in Yunnan are desperate for the seed, as the perennial crop means less soil erosion and less labour, in a region with a major erosion crisis and a major labour crisis. But many more are in the pipeline.

Perennial wheat, sorghum and other cereals, beans, sunflowers and other crops are all in development, and some are not far from being ready for commercialisation. The move towards perennials is one aspect of a Greener Revolution.

Sources: i. The Land Institute. Perennial Rice. landinstitute.org/our-work/peren…

ii. Huang G et al., 2018. Performance, economics and potential impact of perennial rice PR23 relative to annual rice cultivars at multiple locations in Yunnan Province of China. Sustainability (Switzerland), volume 10, issue 4. doi.org/10.3390/su1004…

iii. Yanming Zhang et al., 2011. Potential of Perennial Crop on Environmental Sustainability of Agriculture. Procedia Environmental Sciences,volume 10, part B, pp. 1141-1147. doi.org/10.1016/j.proe…