Gene Logsdon: Pancakes from Perennial Wheat!
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Gene Logsdon, author of many agrarian classics, including All Flesh is Grass and The Contrary Farmer, is coming out with a new book this fall about everyone's favorite subject that nobody wants to talk about: poop! The book is called Holy Shit; Managing Manure to Save Mankind. It's informative, inspiring–and Logsdon takes every opportunity to make poop jokes, so it's funny to boot. Recently, Gene tried a newly developed variety of wheat developed by The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.
From Gene Logsdon's blog, The Contrary Farmer.
I hope I don’t sound too self-important when I announce an historic moment in our kitchen. Carol just made pancakes with flour from a new and startling source. Wes Jackson, the celebrated plant geneticist, author, farmer (and years ago a fairly good football player), has been experimenting for decades now with the bold idea that perennial grains can be developed to take the place of annual grains, thus revolutionizing agriculture by making it unnecessary for so many millions of acres to be cultivated annually. I raise my forkful of wheatgrass pancake and I salute you, Mr. Jackson…
The work of developing perennial grains at the Land Institute is enormously fascinating, involving growing, harvesting, recording, classifying and then crossing thousands of individual plants. Annual plants obviously had to have developed from their wild perennial ancestors. Now it is a matter of reversing that process in a way that results in a perennial that yields as much as today’s annuals.
Holy Shit is available for pre-order now.
