photo by: University of Kansas

Silflower (Silphium integrifolium) at a field research site at the KU Field Station.

With a multimillion-dollar federal grant, University of Kansas researchers will be studying a big idea for how farms might prevent crop diseases from spreading: Act less like a farm and more like a prairie.

Many farms are what’s called a monoculture, where there are rows upon rows of the same kind of crop. If a pathogen affects one plant on the farm, it can easily spread to others close by, because they’re all the same type of plant.

But that’s less likely on the prairie, where different plants that resist different types of pathogens are growing right next to one another.

“When we look at nature in (a) prairie system, we find that pathogens are controlled in two ways,” said Jim Bever, a KU Foundation Distinguished Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “One is with genetic resistance … and the other one is when there’s many kinds of crops together.”

Bever and his collaborators want to make it easier for farmers to mimic what the prairie does. Earlier this month, KU announced that they had received a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the federal program on Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases, and they’ll be using it to study the effects of both breeding crops for genetic resistance and planting them in multi-species mixtures, in what’s called a perennial polyculture.

photo by: University of Kansas

Jim Bever

To test the idea out, Bever and the team will be looking at a plant called silflower, which is an oilseed crop in the sunflower family that’s native to the Great Plains. The team will breed the plant for genetic resistance and plant it together with other species, then see what the effect on its disease resistance is.

They hope that the results will give some insight on how to scale polyculture techniques up for larger farms.

“The steps down the road (are) sort of engineering how that can be implemented in a productive way across a larger landscape like we have in Douglas County,” Bever said.

But that’s not as straightforward as it may seem, Bever said, because large-scale agriculture as it exists now is based around monocultures — being able to plant and harvest a lot of the same crop all at once with specialized mechanical equipment. Bever said it’s not realistic to expect that perennial polycultures will suddenly replace that method of farming.

“But it’s something that we can aspire to when we understand the biology that drives high productivity in these planting systems,” Bever said. “Then we can engineer a solution that will take advantage of that biology, and that will take additional effort, but that’s something we can get to.”

The research could also showcase the ecological and financial benefits of growing perennial crops, which come back year after year, instead of annuals, which only last for one growing season and have to be replanted each year. Bever said that farmers often till the soil for planting, which can reduce the biodiversity and fertility of the soil and can also lead to sedimentation problems in waterways and reservoirs.

“The promise of perennial crop production is that we could plant once and then harvest many, many times and harvest each year without having to replow or replant,” Bever said. “And there should be savings for the farmer and savings for the environment.”

Several other institutions are collaborating with KU on the project, including The Land Institute in Salina, the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The field research sites for the project will be located in Lawrence and Salina, and the research will span from the beginning of 2025 to the end of 2029.