Lee DeHaan
Turning a forage grass into a grain crop, one generation at a time.
The record
- Standing
- active practice
- Based
- The Land Institute · Salina, Kansas
- The crop
- Kernza, the grain of intermediate wheatgrass, Thinopyrum intermedium.
- The role
- Lead Scientist for Kernza domestication, heading a full-time programme in the genetic improvement of intermediate wheatgrass for grain production, using modern DNA methods to accelerate yield, seed size and harvestability.
- Trained at
- Raised on a farm in southern Minnesota; studied plant biology at Dordt College in Iowa, then an MS and PhD at the University of Minnesota.
- Documented
- Ten generations of transition from forage to grain, with the structural and functional changes measured, published with colleagues from CONICET in Argentina.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Domestication is normally something that happened to a crop thousands of years ago and is described in the past tense. DeHaan is doing it in the present tense, on the record, with the intermediate steps published.
The work is unglamorous and cumulative: select for larger seed, for seed that stays on the head until harvest, for yield that does not collapse in the stand’s second and third years. Ten generations in, the changes to plant structure and physiology have been characterised well enough to publish as a study in their own right.
He became interested in perennial grains in the 1980s, when his father and older brothers came across Wes Jackson’s work — which makes him roughly the second generation of a programme designed to need several.
Where to read them
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.