How farming perennial plants can help us in times of climate change, food insecurity and social division
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“Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods” (Island Press, 2026) edited by Liz Carlise and Aubrey Streit Krug
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Climate change is threatening modern life in ways we are still finding, from food security to the economy to everyday living. It has been labeled a “threat multiplier” for its potential to complicate geopolitical relationships. And our efforts to adapt as a global society face obstacles brought on by inequality.
“I’m really feeling the weight of so many crises,” said Liz Carlisle, a professor in the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara. Between trying to slow down emissions and tackle future climate change while trying to handle the effects we’re already seeing and heal the deep divisions in our society, she said, coming together to solve a collective challenge like climate change is a herculean task.
But Carlisle, whose research focuses on food and farming, said there is a way to make inroads into the problem, and the solution could be right under our feet. In her book, “Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods” (Island Press, 2026), Carlisle and co-editor Aubrey Streit Krug assert that relying more on perennial crops can help ease the many difficulties of adapting to a changing climate.
“I came to perennial foods because I see these foods and the movement building around them as this really promising solution that can help us to tackle these collective challenges,” she said.
Farming for resilience
Perennials are already a staple in most people’s diets. Consider that nuts and fruits come from trees and shrubs, which produce year after year without the tilling, uprooting and replanting required for annual crops like wheat, corn and soy. The key, said Carlisle and Streit Krug, director of the Perennial Cultures Lab at The Land Institute in Kansas, lies in their roots: Perennial plants invest more energy into developing their root systems than their annual counterparts, allowing them to regenerate and persist. Not only can they be an abundant source of food, the way they are grown minimizes climate-warming emissions. Globally, agriculture and industrial food systems currently produce about 16-17 billion metric tons of carbon each year; that’s about a quarter to a third of global carbon emissions.
Through a collection of more than 30 essays and poems, Carlisle, Streit Krug and their contributors build a picture of the perennial food movement in the United States and abroad. Some are farmers who plant perennial crops. Others are academics with specialties in ecology and climate adaptation. Several are Indigenous, with an intimate knowledge of the crops that have sustained their people for millennia. All are lovers of the land and assert that perennial farming is easier on the Earth, not only producing a diverse array of foods but also helping to keep conditions balanced and resilient, while contributing to culture and a common cause.
“I came to perennial foods because I see these foods and the movement building around them as this really promising solution that can help us to tackle these collective challenges.”
“I feel like I have this incredible privilege of getting to know these really inspiring people who are working from all these different and rich cultural traditions and have a rich set of motivations as well, around the future of their communities and their health and environmental concerns,” Carlisle said. From the plains of the United States to the pampas of Argentina, from the grasslands of Australia to the highlands of Turkey to the fields in Uganda, the tellers of these stories reflect on the relationships of their communities to the perennial plants of their regions. One of the goals, according to her, is to demonstrate that there’s a place in the perennial food movement for everyone, from farmers looking for a less intensive way to grow crops to consumers seeking to be more Earth-friendly with their choices.
Runoff containing fertilizer from upstream farms, as in this image of the Mississippi River Delta, creates toxic algae blooms off the coast which depletes oxygen in the water and kills marine life, impacting local seafood production and tourism
“I certainly don’t think we should eliminate annual plants as a food source, but when I look at the share of perennials in our managed ecosystems and our farms, you can see that the way many of us are farming — often with nothing but annuals — is not as resilient as what nature is doing,” Carlisle said.
In addition to producing food, the ecosystems in which perennial crops are grown confer resilience in other ways. Because perennials produce year after year, the labor, cost and energy that goes into tilling the soil is reduced, which maintains soil health and reduces erosion and the need for fertilization. Deep-rooted perennials also can help manage flooding and these same deep roots can store massive amounts of carbon underground. In their native environments, these plants are also able to withstand the droughts and heat stress that could take down shallower-rooted plants.
Easy strategies
It’s not difficult to join the perennial food movement, according to Carlisle. “A really easy first step is thinking about who locally is growing tree nuts and fruits in sustainable and regenerative ways.” These crops are widely available throughout the U.S. and most of the world, which could make for simple food decisions.
“If you eat meat, another step is to think about who’s producing meat locally from perennial pastures as opposed to from confined animal feeding operations,” Carlisle continued. “That’s a huge step toward perennial landscapes and it has a lot of co-benefits as well.
“As we move forward, what we need to do is develop a much wider array of crops that are better adapted to diverse environments under diverse circumstances,” she added. “We want to be food secure today, but we also want future generations to be food secure, and farm in a way that’s not undermining the very resources that make farming possible.”
Key protein SYFO2 enables 'self-fertilization’ of leguminous plants
Most plants allow fungal microorganisms to enter their root cells and provide them with carbohydrates in exchange for a better supply of nutrients and water. Only leguminous plants like peas, beans, and clover enter into an additional, mutually beneficial symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria. The alliance with so-called rhizobia enables them to supply themselves with the nitrogen they need for their growth from the air.
Within the context of the Enabling Nutrient Symbiosis in Agriculture (ENSA) project, funded by the organization Gates Agricultural Innovations, a team of researchers led by Prof. Dr. Thomas Ott, professor for cell biology of the plant at the Faculty of Biology and a member of the Cluster of Excellence CIBSS – Centre for Integrative Biological Signalling Studies, succeeded in demonstrating for the first time that SYFO2, a poorly studied protein found in the roots of legumes and other plants, plays a key role in the ‘self-fertilization’ of legumes, because it enables rhizobia to enter the root cells. As soon as the bacteria have been entrapped by the root hairs of the plants, SYFO2 initiates the reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton – the key step for enabling bacteria to enter the root cells and infect them from within. As a result of the infection, tiny nodes form along the plant’s roots, where rhizobia fix nitrogen from the air and make it available to the plant.
The international team succeeded in demonstrating this process using a combination of imaging, molecular biological, and genetic methods. In addition, the scientists were able to activate the tomato’s own version of SYFO2 by introducing a regulatory factor of the root node symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, the transcription factor NIN.
The study, titled ‘Nanodomain-localized formin gates symbiotic microbial entry in legume and solanaceous plants’, improves our understanding of how the tomato’s own symbiosis-related genes can be controlled. It lays the groundwork for future efforts to enhance beneficial plant–rhizobia interactions and to transfer nitrogen-fixing abilities to crop plants – with the long-term aim of reducing the need for fertilizer. The findings were published in the journal Science.
Foundation for key process identified
‘Most legumes have developed sophisticated mechanisms to allow cellular entry of symbiotic bacteria’, says Ott. ‘In this study, we identified the molecular foundation for a key process in which the plant switches from “catching the bacteria” to “opening the door” for them’. The study received additional support from CIBSS researcher Prof. Dr. Robert Grosse, director of the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Faculty of Medicine.
Furthermore, the researchers were able to show that SYFO2 is required in some plants that do not enter into symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria for the initiation of the most common and evolutionarily older type of symbiosis: the mycorrhizal symbiosis between plants and fungi. Against this backdrop and in view of the successful activation of the protein in tomato plants, Ott summarizes: ‘This result is especially interesting, because it shows that genes normally involved in mycorrhizal symbiosis can be redirected to help engineer bacterial nitrogen-fixing symbiosis in plants.’
More information:
- Publication: Lijin Qiao et al. (2026). ‘Nanodomain-localized formin gates symbiotic microbial entry in legume and solanaceous plants.’ Science 391, 1036–1045. DOI:10.1126/science.adx8542
- Prof. Dr. Thomas Ott is professor for cell biology of the plant at the University of Freiburg’s Faculty of Biology and a member of the Cluster of Excellence CIBSS – Centre for Integrative Biological Signalling Studies.
- The study was realized within the context of the Enabling Nutrient Symbioses in Agriculture project, funded by the organization Gates Agricultural Innovations.
Go to Gates Agricultural Innovations
Go to the Nutrient Symbioses in Agriculture project
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