Perennial grains could lower the carbon footprint of farming, and help slow global warming.
SALINA, Kansas Ebony Murell and a few interns meticulously sort 99 kinds of silphium. It’s a wild relative to a sunflower. And the biologists at the Land Institute an outfit devoted to finding out how science can make farming more planet-friendly want to unravel the plant’s secrets for tolerating bugs and diseases.
“We don’t know what all of these traits mean in terms of plant defenses,” Murell said. “Any or all of them could matter.”
The thousands of data points collected about bug resistance make up just one small part of the larger goal of developing the wild silphium into a perennial crop farmers can plant and harvest for seed oil.