Hello Readers!
I’m at a beautiful cottage on a lake northeast of Toronto, thinking about what it means to be “rooted in the land,” whether it is the Grey County, Ontario landscape where farmer Brenda Hsueh and her partner Skyler Radojkovic raise sheep; Saratoga Springs, NY, where Brooke McConnell oversees the 166-acre Pitney Meadows Farm; or Humboldt County, CA, where for five generations, one family has stewarded Lone Star Ranch.
These are all farmers and pastoralists I have written about, who are living exemplars of what plant geneticist and biologist Wes Jackson and philosopher, educator, and writer Bill Vitek advocate for in their 1996 book Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place. In this, and other collaborative projects, they have argued for building polycultures over monocultures, emphasizing community health and wellbeing over maximizing profits, and for humility, care, and attention over hubristic one-size-fits-all tech solutions to our problems. By being rooted in the land—which involves getting to know it intimately—we can join the effort to regenerate it, and begin to repay the ten thousand-year carbon debt that humankind has accrued since the first farmer began tilling the soil.
Wes Jackson and The Land Institute
Wes Jackson, as many of you may know already, is the visionary co-founder of The Land Institute (TLI) in Salina Kansas, whose mission is to develop perennial grain crops that offer a far more climate smart, sustainable, and regenerative way to farm. Instead of annuals, which require yearly tilling that disturbs the soil and impedes both biodiversity and carbon storage capacity, perennials are nature’s way of taking the long view. They abide over many growing cycles and seasons, establishing broad and deep root systems. They co-exist in complex symbiosis with their diverse ecosystems, and prioritize longevity over seed production. Perennials play a major role in paying down that carbon debt I referred to earlier. (The 2025 PBS documentary Prairie Prophecy does a good job of encapsulating Jackson and TLI’s work.)
I write about TLI and Jackson’s work on the perennial grain Kernza in my book, Reaping What She Sows, yet only learned about Vitek and his body of work with Jackson recently, through one of my book promotion trips. It was my third visit to Middlebury College in Vermont, at the invitation of the college’s fantastic Japanese Club (J-Club to members). I was there to give a talk on Japanese craft sake, and was looking forward to seeing some students I’d met last year who were either graduating seniors this year, or in one case, a graduate who had stayed on in the community to work.
J-Club and The Knoll
This time, though I wanted to be in touch with another cohort of student life: students involved in The Knoll, a magical place that serves as a hands-on educational garden for students and helps feed the college community. It features an outdoor meeting place for labyrinth walking and pizza making, and a spiritual center anchored by a large stone bench blessed by the Dalai Lama himself. I ended up doing two talks, one on craft sake, and another on Reaping What She Sows.
On my first afternoon in town, J-Club president Claudia Lopez (a Texas Latina who speaks and translates Japanese texts!) introduced me to Megan Brakeley, the associate director of The Knoll who seemed to embody a rootedness in both Middlebury’s land and community. She introduced me to numerous students who were preparing beds for vegetables and tiny pots for new seedlings. We were on land that, since time immemorial, has served as a meeting and exchange site for the Western Abenaki people. Part of the garden’s harvest, I learned later, goes to the Nulhegan Food Security Programs of the Abenaki Nations.
In a 2023 essay marking the 20th anniversary of the founding of The Knoll (Growing With the Knoll: Twenty Years in the Garden, available here for free download), Brakeley wrote, “If we approach soil and land as teachers, even as kin, how do we act in reciprocity and serve as actors of regeneration? When we talk about connected human histories on the land, how far back do we go—and whose stories count?” It was touching to me that in addition to a place where students can put their hands in the soil and learn skills that can feed and sustain them for a lifetime, they were also learning to honor the land and the generations that had so faithfully stewarded it before them. The spiritual dimension of the afternoon expanded as we began our tour of the grounds—green and gleaming under a bright spring sun—with a meditative walk through the labyrinth.
Brakeley, a 2006 graduate of Middlebury who went on to earn an MA in environmental management from Yale, guides Knoll interns and oversees all programming, as well as the educational garden. One program she especially wanted me to know about was the New Perennials Project, which, like Rooted in the Land, sprang from the collaboration between Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson.
The two men met in 1991 when Vitek was teaching philosophy at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. He had moved from pure philosophy to adopting a more practical approach, teaching medical ethics then agrarian ethics. He read Aldo Leopold, learned to milk cows, and became enamored with what he calls “the working landscape.” For an environmental ethics class, he invited the environmentalist, activist, and author Bill McKibben to speak at Clarkson and for the same speaker series, Wendell Berry. Berry could not make it, but recommended his close friend Wes Jackson.
The New Perennials Project
The philosopher and the plant geneticist began a conversation that has lasted for 35 years, and given birth to a series of close collaborations, including the books Rooted in the Land and The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (2010). The day we spoke, Vitek pointed out that it was Jackson’s ninetieth birthday. The New Perennials project is their latest effort together. It’s funded by a Rockefeller Family Fund grant they received in 2018 to integrate the concept of perenniality—emphasizing roots and relationships and shifting from short-term annual to long-term perennial thinking. The Middlebury project also dovetails with The Land Institute’s Perennial Cultures Lab.
The New Perennials Project, in a fashion that turns out to be typical of Wes Jackson, involves nothing less than rethinking education itself. In a 2010 conversation with him, Vitek recalls Jackson saying to him, “We need to rethink the college curriculum; it’s all geared to making us into people who take from the earth, extractionists.” Vitek said to his friend, “What part of the curriculum?” Jackson’s reply was, “all of it.”
“That’s how he thinks,” Vitek says. “Wes says his work is focused on trying to solve the problem of agriculture. Not “problems in agriculture.” And he believes that both the agricultural and educational systems were misguided from the beginning and still are, and need a complete overhaul. He might say the same about our food system. Not that we have to eradicate the one to allow the other to exist; we have to put great effort into nurturing the alt food system, which requires young people who have received a perennial education, who think in terms of resilient, interdependent polycultures, not monocultures, and the greater good of the community rather than the enrichment of the few.
At Middlebury, the New Perennials Project works to flatten the teacher-student hierarchy, offers a horizontal rather than vertical learning experience, and cultivates reciprocity, interconnection, intergenerational learning, and community. Nature becomes both teacher and classroom, and walking—that slowest and most essential form of travel—shows the way to the creation of deep-rooted interconnectivity between people and place.
Grading is kept to the bare minimum. Instead, students and faculty work and walk and think together as they consider the question “What does perenniality look like, and what must it become, outside of agriculture? Beyond the classroom students work as New Perennials interns, publish their writing, and participate in a community roots fellowship program that has placed students in jobs at the local newspaper; a hand-operated press devoted to promoting civic engagement and democratic ideas; an elderly or a teen service organization, a land trust; or a community theater, to name just a few options. New Perennials is also a publishing platform that has issued a series of terrific pamphlets, books, anthologies, and videos.
Vitek and his colleague Marc Lapin designed a course called the “Perennial Turn,” exploring agriculture and culture, encouraging students to engage with the natural world, put down roots, and harmonize with the rhythms of place. Vitek has created additional winter term courses called “Walking Body, Walking Mind, Philosophy on the Hoof,” “Plants are Us!” and “Get Radical!: Pamphlets and Broadsides Past and Present.” The ever-present question is “what does perenniality in the classroom mean?” One answer is de-emphasizing rote “reading, writing and arithmetic,” instead focusing on deep roots and relationships, and emphasizing regionalism over globalism. Where annuals are the loners of the garden, beginning life over again each year, perennials are the ancient sages of the meadow, deeply interconnected with all living microorganisms in their orbit.
What is the classroom equivalent of the perennial grove that has “ninety seasons, or four thousand, or the aspen grove that has been alive for eighty thousand years?” Vitek asks. It begins with an invitation for students to slow down and take a break from the competitive pressure cooker of the rest of their academic lives. Vitek wants them to know that at about the two-decade mark in years they know a lot. They, too, can be teachers. And their teachers aren’t just humans. In the Perennial Turn course and over a 12-week term students identify and spend an additional two hours a week outside of class with a non-human “interlearning partner,” a tree or a plant or a place. This helps erase the notion that only humans can be the teacher, or expert in the open-air room. You can learn more about the learning philosophy of the course and the interlearning exercise here
In the New Perennials Spring 2026 newsletter, a student in the Perennial Turn course observed, “Perenniality is no longer just a botanical and agricultural term. Food sustains us, and perennial agriculture will help in that regard. However, I’ve realized that it is perenniality itself which sustains life with rootedness, longevity, community, material minimalism, deep thought, and joy.”
After its first eight years of life at Middlebury, the New Perennials Project philanthropic backers have extended its funding for another two, and Vitek hopes that there might even be a few years more beyond that. But by definition, this period of setting down roots must eventually take on a self-sustaining life of its own. The perennial seeds he and his colleagues have planted have become seedlings. “The hope,” he adds, is that “they will take their roots deeper ” and will continue to grow and thrive.
In the meantime, I’m confident students will still be tending and learning from the land at The Knoll. Brakeley, in her 2023 essay, wrote of the “infinite starting points for people to engage with The Knoll … it’s a place to learn about geology, environmental justice, and scything (while knocking out a physical education graduation requirement!)—and it is also a place to gather a handful of flowers for a beloved, to lose oneself in the labyrinth, to remember to lie in the grass and be held by the earth, listening to the rustle of poplar leaves overhead.”
The great thing about this, and all farms, is that, as she points out, “All of these points of engagement are equally valid, significant, worthy, and honored.”
As always, if you like this article, please subscribe to this Substack, and if you like Reaping What She Sows, by all means please leave me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!
Other News and Notes:
Next week at noon EST on August 5, I’ll be bringing you my next Substack Live video with Atlanta, Georgia’s own Chef Kevin McGee. He’s a plant-based chef and founder of the food sovereignty organization Urban Oak Initiative and its shared commercial kitche The Food Studio.Please stay tuned for that!
I highly recommend this Planet Money podcast titled “Big Lettuce Meets Small Intestine.” No doubt you’ve heard about the massive Cyclospora outbreak that’s affected more than 11,000 lives in the Midwest. The show details the perils of the Big Lettuce, and all Big Produce supply chains. Regulations that are still being written, lack of FDA enforcement, and a simple dearth of knowledge about how harmful microbes end up on produce makes all of us vulnerable. AND they are a huge incentive to buy as local and low-input as possible!
Focusing on agriculture-related environmental issues is an important way to win votes, especially in Iowa, where the country’s high and climbing rate of cancer has been linked to nitrate run-off from chemical fertilizer. For more, check out this Politico article, “‘Cancer Doesn’t Care What Party You Belong To’: Poisoned Water Is Turning This Rural State Bluer.”
Marion Nestle, an icon of the good food and nutrition movement, has come under attack by MAHA, despite being a champion for reaching out across the political divide to find common ground with the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.-aligned movement. Many have leapt to her defense, but Raj Patel’s was the first I’ve read that points out MAHA’s fascist turn. He advocates “rejecting MAHA in toto,” noting that this is where he parts ways with Nestle. Perhaps he’s right, and we can find other means of coming together, as with the Iowa farm run-off and cancer fight. But it saddens me to see this argument—well reasoned and compelling as it is—put forward. I’m curious to know where you stand on this issue; please let me know.
In the meantime, stay safe, all, and see you next week.