A team of Central State University agricultural researchers have partnered with the Kansas-based Land Institute. The team is looking to domesticate a type of wild grain in Ohio with the goal of creating more sustainable farming practices and how to better integrate pollinator plants along with agriculture.
The Land Institute calls it silflower, also known as prairie rosinweed or prairie dock. The plant, which almost looks like a sunflower when it blooms with smaller yellow flowers, is actually a close relative to the sunflower and grows throughout central and eastern North American prairies.
What makes this plant special is that it is a perennial with deep roots that grow 12 feet down and can live for up to 20 years.
Ebony Murrell, an ecologist at the Land Institute, described the research similar to what farmers began doing 10,000 years ago all around the world, which was to domesticate grains like wheat, corn and barley.
She said perennial grains like silflower, however, are different and can curb agricultural gas emissions and replenish nutrients back into the soil.
“The main grain crops of the world that we rely on for our calories are annual crops,” Murrell said. “And that's one of the problems of agriculture, is that most of these annual grains require tilling the soil and replanting year after year, and that causes soil degradation over time.”
The agriculture industry in the U.S. accounts for about 11% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Conventional farming that requires tilling can lead to soil erosion and a reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Silflower, unlike corn or soybean, requires few to no inputs. It also does not require constant tilling since it is perennial — meaning it will grow back during the warmer seasons.
Marcus Nagle, a horticulture professor and one of the project researchers, said the plant also acts as a cover crop — similar to cover crops such as radishes, milkweed and legumes — that are planted not to be harvested but to naturally enrich the soil with nutrients.
“It's really deep rooted and pumps up a lot of nutrients from the subsoil. Not only that, but the carbon that it captures gets pumped down into the soil as well. And so that's a really good crop for carbon capture.” Nagles said.
Murrell said research on domesticating wild grains has been ongoing since at least the 1980s, though there is more urgency now.
“Climate change is a big concern these days. The consequences of it are becoming more and more real,” Murrell said. “We've been at it for some time now, but there's definitely a sense of urgency now to actually try to get some of these crops on the landscape, on working farms and see how we can get them to function there.”
Once grown, the silflower grain could be used as a protein substitute in non-dairy, vegan “meats” or for its seed oil.
For now the three-year research is in its early stages. The team is planting silflower seedlings along a handful of test fields with and without honeybees to see how the plant grows and whether it produces more or less flowers when there are beesnearby.
Alejandro Figueroa is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms.
