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Nearly twenty years ago, Eric Rund took a risk on his farm in east central Illinois. He took 40 acres of land that wasn’t producing very good corn out of production to plant a tall grass called miscanthus, in hopes of earning a little extra cash and improving the health of his soil.
“Once it’s established, that’s it. You do nothing. No herbicide. No pesticide,” he said. “And it’s harvested the end of February, first of March, when we’re not doing anything anyway.”
Rund found a market for his miscanthus selling directly to turkey farmers to use as bedding, he said. It can also be burned for heat and power and used for building materials.
For him, the risk has paid off, he said.
“The last four years, it’s been the most profitable crop we can grow,” he said.
Miscanthus is a kind of perennial grass, meaning it grows back every year without having to be replanted. For decades, researchers around the world have been studying a variety called giant miscanthus as an option for farmers to grow for extra revenue and better soil health. Scientists say the grass has potential as a renewable energy source.
As interest in miscanthus grows in the U.S., many of those researchers gathered with farmers and policymakers in east central Illinois in October for the first international summit on the grass.
“It is my hope that together we build the economic infrastructure here for Illinois and the Midwest to really benefit from this technology,” said Emily Heaton, a crop sciences professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The argument for miscanthus
Giant miscanthus is a naturally occurring hybrid of other miscanthus species. Heaton calls it the “mule of the plant world.”
“It is really big,” Heaton said. “And it can’t reproduce on its own.”
Researchers have found the tall grass with feathery, white plumes grows well alongside soybeans and corn. And when harvested it can be used as a renewable energy source.
It could be a good option for farmers looking to diversify their revenue streams while facing tight margins. Miscanthus is harvested in the winter, so it doesn’t compete with the harvest season for soy and corn.
“There are now over 20,000 acres of miscanthus in the United States. Some of those are here in Illinois,” Heaton said. “There’s a large growing expansion in the eastern shore of Maryland where it’s used for poultry bedding.”
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which hosted the summit, has been studying miscanthus for more than 20 years, Heaton said.
“We’ve really done the work to see how does this crop compare to the other really productive crops we have in Illinois, like corn and soybean,” she said. “Now we’re ready to start reaching out and working with our industry partners to say, ‘Does this make sense to use miscanthus to complement our existing commodity grain system?’”
Miscanthus is also good for the environment, said Toby Kellogg, a scientist at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. The grass’ deep roots improve soil health and prevent soil erosion. And it doesn’t need a lot of fertilizer, a welcome relief for farmers who have been facing high fertilizer costs this year.
“The other thing with a really big, dense plant is that if it gets dense enough fast enough, it really provides its own weed control, because it just shades things out,” she said.
Unlike other varieties of miscanthus, like the kinds often found on the side of the road or in front yards, giant miscanthus is not invasive, Heaton said.
“We know that it does not move more than about 1 foot,” she said. “So it can grow in the rows, but it does not move beyond that.”
And giant miscanthus is truly giant, often growing 12 feet tall. It’s bigger than perennial grasses native to the Midwest that can also be used for energy — like switchgrass, another type of grass that has shown potential as a sustainable aviation fuel.
“Switchgrass yields are still typically about 60% of what we get with miscanthus,” Heaton said. “And because the economics are the most limiting step right now for market adoption, we need to go with the crop that produces the most biomass per unit land area and per unit fertilizer.”
That doesn’t mean researchers aren’t exploring switchgrass and other native grasses as biofuel crops, she said.
“It’s not miscanthus over our native grasses,” Heaton said. “It’s miscanthus with our native grasses.”
Research paves the way
For decades, researchers have worked to determine the complete DNA of miscanthus and its parental species and to develop gene editing techniques, Heaton said. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is home to one of the world’s largest miscanthus germplasm collections, with entries from Russia to the equator.
“We can make tweaks within those genomes to make new varieties,” Heaton said. “And we can now routinely transform the plant to make new versions of it that we can then test in controlled environments.”
Andy VanLoocke is an agronomy professor at Iowa State University studying miscanthus. His research has found the grass to be a very reliable crop.
“At the end of the day, weather, soils, fertilizer rates and that sort of thing, for the most part, it had about the same amount of yield as what our colleagues in Europe are getting,” he said.
His research also found that unlike corn and soybeans, which are impacted almost immediately by drought, miscanthus can weather drought without its yield being impacted for the first year.
“We’ve found that the biggest impact [isn’t] necessarily the year that the drought occurred, like you would get with corn and soybeans, but the year after or even the year after that,” he said.
Even then, miscanthus is still very stable, VanLoocke said, and knowing how drought impacts it can help farmers plan ahead.
“I think understanding that when you’re planning for the next year’s harvest that you might actually have less productivity than you had this year will be good for the people taking in the biomass,” he said.
Katarzyna Glowacka, a biochemistry professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is studying the chilling tolerance of miscanthus, or the way it survives in low temperatures. She hopes her research will help develop cold tolerant varieties of corn and other grains, she said.
“The chilling tolerance in C4 grasses, in this warm season grasses is rare,” she said. “And miscanthus gives us the opportunity to study, to really find this mechanism.”
Glowacka hopes that once they identify the chilling tolerance mechanism in miscanthus, that researchers will be able to apply that knowledge to develop cold tolerant varieties of other grains, like corn, she said.
Miscanthus is grown around the world, and there are varieties that grow well in the cold, Glowacka said. But they’re much smaller than the varieties that grow in warmer climates.
If researchers are able to create a bigger cold tolerant variety of miscanthus, farmers will be able to plant it sooner, she said.
“And with miscanthus being perennial, when they start two weeks earlier, we can really increase the biomass,” Glowacka said.
Taking a risk
Researchers are eager to collaborate with policymakers and farmers on miscanthus research and economic development, Heaton said, including how to expand the number of acres of the grass in the Midwest.
“Farmers are very interested in miscanthus,” she said. “They have the same questions for miscanthus that they have for other crops: Tell me about the markets. Tell me about the infrastructure. How does my contract work? Who’s my buyer?”
Miscanthus has to grow for two to three years before it can first be harvested, which is time and dollars for farmers.
“Somebody has to be able to take that piece of land out of production for the couple of years while the thing is getting established,” said Kellogg at the Danforth Center. “And depending on how their cash flow is, they just may or may not be able to do it.”
Illinois State Sen. Paul Faraci has been a champion of miscanthus in Springfield, Illinois. Betting on a new crop can’t be a risk farmers take alone, he said.
“I think it has to be a shared risk,” he said. “In order for there to be buy in from the legislative body, there’s going to have to be a shared risk, and there’s going to have to be some element of, ‘Here’s the payoff.’”
For farmers interested in growing miscanthus, Illinois farmer Eric Rund advises they ensure there’s enough of a market for their crop and that they are in it for the long haul.
“You gotta believe in what you’re doing, too,” he said. “It’s harder. It’s something to learn again.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
