Posted on June, 6, 2024 at 10:19 am
Ross Bishop farms over 600 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat in Jackson. He was an early adopter of sustainable farming practices so when he heard about kernza, a wheatgrass developed by The Land Institute in Kansas, it was a natural fit.
“I wanted to grow it because of the roots,” Bishop said.
Kernza’s roots can reach 10 feet deep, which increases soil health, improves water quality, holds the ground in place to reduce erosion and sequesters carbon. Bishop planted his five acres of kernza on a hilly field that’s more susceptible to erosion. He said the crop has kept that soil in place.
Agriculture accounts for 10% of America’s greenhouse gas emissions, much of that coming from the cultivation of annual crops, including grains. Private companies, federal and state governments, researchers and farmer groups have been testing and funding ways to farm in more environmentally sustainable ways. There are a slew of emerging crops that could naturally support that effort and many of them are perennials like kernza.
Kernza is a very small, very fine grass seed with an earthy flavor that tastes similar to bran or nuts. The only perennial grain grown in Wisconsin right now, it’s produced on a small scale for a niche market of bakers and brewers. When consumers find kernza in a cookie or a beer, many don’t know what to make of it.
Farmers like Bishop are eager to grow perennial grains given their environmental benefits, but they need someone to buy them. Bishop’s harvested kernza is sitting unused in a wagon.
“I can't sell it so it's not making me any money,” Bishop said.
Two Wisconsin environmental organizations, along with researchers, are aiming to build and grow the market for perennial grains like kernza. Clean Wisconsin, a Madison-based nonprofit, and the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute in East Troy are embarking on a two-year grant-funded initiative to connect farmers like Bishop to local businesses.
The grant project is holistic, aiming to develop best practices for growing kernza, enable in-state grain mills to process the crop, and help Wisconsin brewers, bakers and other end users to incorporate the ingredient in their products.
Nicole Tautges, agroecologist and farm manager at Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, has been growing and studying kernza for seven years. The environmental benefits of a product don’t necessarily go very far in the marketplace, she said. “We really need to figure out how businesses can use it regularly enough,” she said. “Once that happens then more growers are going to jump in.”
For this perennial wheatgrass to transform from a niche grain to a commercial commodity, innovation in the marketplace is required, Tautges said.
“We really need more business owner champions of kernza,” she said. “We really need the marketplace to grab hold of it.”
Standing on a metal staircase, brewer Tyler Senz leans over the top of Lakefront Brewery’s massive mash tun and pours six 50-pound bags of kernza flakes into a starchy concoction that will eventually become beer.
Huge blades at the bottom of the vessel stir the kernza with hot water and 792 pounds of malt. Next the oatmeal-like mixture moves through the brew kettle and is filtered and hopped. After a few weeks in a fermentation tank, it will become 15 barrels of kristalweizen, a light wheat lager.
Lakefront Brewery has been experimenting with kernza for the last year.
“Unique ingredients are always fun to work with,” said head brewer Luther Paul, who started brewing 20 years ago.
The kristalweizen is Lakefront’s second “test batch” of kernza beer, which the brewery will sell only on draft in its beer hall on the Milwaukee riverfront. Paul said the perennial wheatgrass brought some spice to the first lager.
“It was a little bit different than your typical barley or wheat flavors … it had a little bit more edge to it,” he said.
In order for the brewery to scale up its use of kernza and eventually brew it in commercially distributed 200-barrel batches, the brewers have to learn what it tastes like, how it works with other ingredients and see how customers respond. It’s beer R&D.
“From there, we can work with it more and decide different things to do with it,” Paul said.
Lakefront Brewery has “a long history of innovative ingredients,” said founder and owner Russ Klisch. Though no longer certified, Lakefront was once one of the first organic breweries in the country. Klisch helped found the Wisconsin Barley and Hop Co-op to source local beer ingredients, and created a line of gluten-free craft beers.
Klisch predicts it will be another 10 to 15 years before kernza becomes a mainstream brewing ingredient. That’s in part due to cost — it’s almost 20 times more expensive than the other malt ingredients he buys — but also because in-state processing for the fine grain is hard to come by. Briess Malting, a milling company in Chilton, usually works with large (50,000-pound) batches. Briess did Lakefront Brewery a favor by processing the kernza into flakes for the two test batches, about 1,200 pounds.
Another barrier to kernza is that customers just don’t know what to make of it, Klisch said. Lakefront’s first test batch with kernza was named “Radical Root Lager” and Klisch said they “might have stuck out a little bit.”
“People just didn't respond to buying the beer,” he said. “They didn't know what kind of style of beer it was or we didn't educate them properly. I don't know.”
After a few weeks on tap in the beer hall, bartenders noticed customers would try Radical Root Lager for the novelty, but they weren’t coming back for seconds. The brewery then decided to change the name to “Pretzel Wheat.”
“It is technically a wheat and it does kind of taste like a pretzel,” Klisch said. “So we tried that and now it's selling three times more.”
Despite the first strikeout, Lakefront Brewery plans to continue experimenting with kernza and other sustainable, local ingredients. Klisch believes that over time kernza could become a signature Wisconsin product. If producers can grow it well and end users can implement it with success, visitors will eventually seek it out like they do other Wisconsin products like cheese, custard, brats and beer.
“If you can grow this locally, all of a sudden this becomes a local flavor for your operation or your state,” he said.
Paul, the head brewer, said climate change has created more instability in the supply chain for beer ingredients, which creates another incentive to source locally.
“Crops are up and down more and more with climate change,” he said. “It affects barley, malt, wheat and hops.”
Alex Heilman is the director of supply and trading for MAD Markets, a sustainable farming supply chain coordinator. Heilman focuses on finding “end-users” for kernza, businesses that could regularly incorporate the grain into their products — businesses like Patagonia Provisions, the food arm of the national outdoor clothing brand.
Buyers of a new ingredient usually start small, Heilman said. Like at Lakefront Brewery, they order a little bit, incorporate it in a test product — like beer, flour, or cookies — measure how customers respond and slowly build more capacity.
A huge part of Heilman’s work has been figuring out crop quality metrics for kernza. That means understanding which growing techniques work best for farmers, coordinating lab testing, and assessing how that data can be communicated to potential kernza users.
“I personally called every single kernza grower to find out how much inventory they had, how much was planted, what their management practices were,” he said.
“I would also have to call around to grain labs and say, ‘Hey, I have this new ingredient that you've never heard of and I need you to test it like you would test similar wheat.’… so that I can then understand what the crop quality is so that we can then take that and understand what's in a sellable condition.”
Currently, there are less than 2,500 acres of kernza grown in the United States, 196 of which are in Wisconsin. Consumers are interested in buying local foods and supporting sustainable agriculture, but Heilman says there’s still a long way to go in educating the public about kernza.
“Interest and actual demand are two very different things,” he said. “I think it's a crop that we still need to continue to promote … in order to have that interest be maintained. Having consistency and supply and material availability is also key.”
Two sheets of kernza chocolate chunk cookies rotate on a rack inside the oven at Simple bakery in Lake Geneva, overseen by baker Michelle Noel.
Noel usually begins her workday before dawn, baking the dozen or so breads Simple sells in its shop and at farmers markets. She grew up on a farm in California’s Central Valley and values Simple’s effort to source locally.
The owners “care about the people that they work with and want to support the farmers,” Noel said. “I know firsthand what a big challenge that can be.”
Simple bakery, located in one of Wisconsin’s most frequented vacation spots, sprouted out of a cafe of the same name. Founders Tom Hartz and Young Cho aim to use local ingredients for as much of the restaurant’s menu as possible.
Simple began baking with kernza about two years ago, sourcing grain from the kernza plots at the Michael Field Agricultural Institute, about 20 minutes north. In addition to the chocolate chunk cookies, Noel makes a flat crispy kernza cracker and has begun sprinkling the bran on top of honey wheat bread loaves.
“We realized that we really liked kernza and really love just agriculturally, where that's coming from and what that can do for the environment and for the farmers. So we started trying to find different ways to utilize kernza in our bakery,” Noel said.
Just like at Lakefront Brewery, using kernza at Simple bakery comes with extra cost and labor. Kernza can cost $3-$5 per pound, Noel said, whereas other bakery ingredients cost just over 50 cents per pound. That added cost gets passed on to customers — Simple’s popular kernza crackers cost almost $8 a bag.
“You need a little bit of buy-in from customers,” Noel said.
In order tobake withkernza, it needs to be ground into a flour, which the bakers at Simple were doing themselves with a portable mill no bigger than the average kitchen appliance. Noel said the in-house mill often got clogged or overheated and took a good bit of time to use.
“We got down to a pretty good process but we were just barely able to keep up with our crackers and cookies,” she said.
Recently, Simple has been able to get milled kernza, thanks to Rooster Milling in East Troy. Michael Fields has been helping Rooster with the equipment and technical assistance needed to clean, dehull and mill kernza grain.
“It's exciting to be part of something new and different,” said miller Andy Rowntree. “It comes with challenges.”
Because it's more expensive to process kernza than other grains, Rooster Milling tries to batch the few kernza harvests it gets to decrease the need to pass that cost on to the farmer and up the supply chain. Especially since Rooster knows it is kernza farmers’ only in-state option.
Mill owner Graham Adsit said although it's a bit of a pain to mill kernza now, the speed of research and crop advancement for the wheatgrass gives him hope.
“That rate of improvement is probably unparalleled,” he said. “There's no modern equivalent.”
Valentin Picasso is a University of Wisconsin-Madison plant and agro ecosystem sciences professor who has been researching kernza and other perennial grains in an effort “to increase sustainability of farming systems and resilience to climate change.”
“There's a big need for new ways of doing agriculture,” Picasso said. “There's a big need for reducing environmental impact, mitigating climate change. Farmers, researchers, students, consumers, everybody is really concerned about that problem. (Kernza) is a potential solution.”
Picasso has been working with the relatively novel grain in Wisconsin for nine years, trying to understand the optimal planting, fertilizing, and harvesting conditions for the crop as well as its dual use capability. Part of what makes kernza an environmental wonder is that its grain can be harvested and the leftover stems can be used for forage or bedding for livestock.
Having a two-for-one crop means farmers can save time and money on land, fertilizer, fuel and seed. Kernza is also a perennial, so farmers plant it once and the grain comes back year after year, saving time and fuel costs compared with grains that need to be replanted annually, and the carbon emissions that come with them. Picasso said kernza is the only perennial grain grown in Wisconsin right now.
“All the other grains, you plant them, you harvest them, and then they die and so you get bare ground,” he said. “That's where you have risks for soil erosion and nutrient leaching and water contamination.”
Picasso is a leading researcher in the kernza field. Over the last decade he’s seen interest grow and more people come aboard. He said it's exciting, there’s momentum, but it’s essential that research and farmers keep working together.
“This is a new crop that has a lot of potential,” Picasso said. “There's a lot of research that is needed in order to understand how to manage it and how to improve the production methods.”
Four years ago, Erica Shoenberger chose to do her graduate studies at UW-Madison because of Picasso’s work with kernza.
“I don't know that he was too used to people knowing about it at that point,” Shoenberger said with a laugh. “It's more widely known now.”
Shoenberger got a grant to set up a Wisconsin Kernza Grower Network, and she regularly touches base with the dozen or so Wisconsin farmers growing the grain to find out what’s going well and what isn’t. She’s also measuring the environmental outcomes of a perennial crop like kernza.
“We're measuring carbon dynamics and trying to see if and how much carbon kernza can accumulate, how it affects the nitrogen, and the pH, and nutrients and all kinds of metrics in the soil to understand, are there measurable benefits?” Shoenberger said.
She and others studying kernza have found that crop yield declines over time. Her research is also exploring what support and technical guidance farmers need to grow this crop commercially.
“The biggest challenges are really concentrated in harvest and post-harvest,” she said. “Kernza seed is very small, and so farmers have to mess around with their combine settings a bit.”
Once kernza is harvested it needs to be transported, processed and delivered to a user. Wisconsin is still developing a few of the links in the kernza supply chain. For a while the nearest processors for Wisconsin-grown kernza were in Minnesota and South Dakota. Shoenberger said keeping each step of the supply chain in-state is part of what makes it a “climate-smart” crop.
“This is your neighbor farmer who grew this stuff,” she said. The aim is to “tell that story and really keep it Wisconsin grown, Wisconsin processed and Wisconsin sold.”
“The community around kernza is one of my favorite things,” she added. “It's an innovative and creative and kind of risky community of a bunch of people that really care about improving agricultural systems and are willing to step out of the norm to make those things happen.”
That includes Ross Bishop, the farmer with the wagon full of kernza. This summer he’s hosting a field day for othe