Look carefully at this picture.
The smiling faces belong to friends of ours at the annual Prairie Festival held by the Land Insitute in Salina, Kansas.
And the 350?
That’s spelled out in roots, the incredibly long roots of perennial plants of the kind that once anchored the prairie before they were plowed up for annual grain crops. The folks at the Land Institute, led by one of our all-time heroes Wes Jackson, are figuring out how to grow grain with roots like that–perennial crops that would not need to be plowed under every fall. It’s one of the great wild-card strategies for the world that comes after cheap fossil fuel, and there’s nobody we’d rather have on board!