Wes Jackson
Wes Jackson is one of the foremost figures in the international sustainable agriculture movement. In addition to being a world-renowned plant geneticist, he is a farmer, author, and professor emeritus of biology.
Wes Jackson, the co-founder and president emeritus of The Land Institute, earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Kansas Wesleyan University, a master’s degree in botany from the University of Kansas, and a doctorate in genetics from North Carolina State University.
He established and served as chair of one of the country’s first environmental studies programs at California State University-Sacramento. In 1976 he left academia to co-found The Land Institute, a nonprofit educational organization in Salina, Kansas. There he conceptualized Natural Systems Agriculture—including perennial grains, perennial polycultures, and intercropping, all based on the model of the prairie.
Wes is widely recognized as a leader in the international movement for a more sustainable agriculture. He was named a Pew Conservation Scholar in 1990, a MacArthur Fellow in 1992, and received the Right Livelihood Award in 2000. Life magazine included him as one of 18 individuals predicted to be among the 100 important Americans of the 20th century. Smithsonian in 2005 included him as one of “35 Who Made a Difference.”
Jackson is the author of New Roots for Agriculture (1980), Altars of Unhewn Stone: Science and the Earth (1987), Becoming Native to This Place (1994), and Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture (2010). Nature as Measure (2011), and Hogs Are Up: Stories from the Land, with Digressions (2021).
With Wendell Berry he co-edited Meeting the Expectations of the Land: Essays in Sustainable Agriculture and Stewardship (1985). With Bill Vitek he co-edited Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place (1996), and The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability and the Limits of Knowledge (2008). With Robert Jensen he co-wrote An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity (2022).
Wes Jackson is a visionary, searching for an agricultural paradigm that mimics Nature’s prairie. Forty years ago he said, “This is going to take 50 to 100 years.” Research at The Land Institute is ahead of schedule: Their scientists have developed the first perennial grain in the history of homo sapiens, the first new grain crop in 4,200 years. Trademarked under the name Kernza®, it is now being grown commercially on a limited scale. Patagonia Provisions’s new beer, Long Root Ale, was the first Kernza® product to enter the retail marketplace. Researchers at The Land Institute are also working to develop perennial wheat, perennial rice, perennial sorghum, and silphium, a wild perennial relative of sunflower, with more to come.