On July 28, an Associated Press photographer found David Mueller down on one knee in a field outside Halstead, Kansas, rubbing a single seed out of its husk between his fingers. You'd have to lean in to see it. It's smaller than a wheat kernel. The plant it came off of is Kernza, a trade name for intermediate wheatgrass, a wild cousin of wheat that the Land Institute, a nonprofit up the road in Salina, has spent years breeding into something you can harvest and mill.
The odd thing about it is that it doesn't die. Wheat, corn and soybeans go in every year. Every year somebody works the ground, buys the seed and makes the passes with the tractor. Kernza you plant once, and it comes back the next year and the year after that, for some number of years nobody can promise you yet.
Mueller's 12-acre field went in five years ago, AP reported. Counting everything he's seeded since 2018, he's put in close to 100 acres of it. Around that, his family farms about 600 acres of corn and another 600 of soybeans, replanted every spring like anybody else's. The photographers come for the Kernza. The corn and beans are most of what's out there.
His reasons are a farmer's reasons. Some of his ground drains poorly, and he's been using Kernza to work on it and to build organic matter back into the soil. That's the rotted plant material that makes dirt dark and crumbly, the stuff that lets a field take in a rain the way a sponge does instead of shedding it like a parking lot. He figures the crop wants about a third of the fertilizer wheat needs, and fewer trips across the field. And he's plain about what all of it has to add up to:
"Ideas are great, but you need to make money."
AP ran his photo under a headline about perennial grains as one answer to extreme weather. In that story Mueller doesn't name a drought or a flood that drove him to it. He talks about soil. Anybody who has farmed where springs come in wet and Augusts come in dry can connect the two on his own. Ground with living roots in it all twelve months, roots that hold the dirt down and drink up a hard rain, is ground you want under you when a season goes bad. Whether the grain growing on top of those roots pays its way is another matter. The answer is in a contract and a stack of field trials, and neither one is tidy.
One company on both ends of the deal
Mueller buys his Kernza seed from a company called Sustain-a-Grain. Sustain-a-Grain has also agreed to buy his crop, at a price set before the crop is grown. The same outfit sells him what goes into the ground and buys what comes out of it.
Without that arrangement there'd be no crop worth talking about. Last year the University of Wyoming Extension, the university's farm-advice service, put out a bulletin working through Kernza economics, and it tells growers not to harvest the grain unless they already have a sales contract in hand. Wheat you can haul to the local elevator, the grain-buying point that posts a price every morning, and take whatever's on the board. No elevator anywhere posts a price for Kernza. Grow it without a buyer lined up and what you've got is a bin full of an ingredient almost nobody is shopping for.
And buyers are scarce. Brandon Schlautman of Sustain-a-Grain hears from plenty of farmers who want in, and according to AP, "he turns away almost all of them because the market isn't developed enough." There aren't enough bakers, brewers and food companies buying Kernza yet to take more grain than the company already has coming.
For a small company, that's sensible. Sign up every caller and it ends up holding grain it can't sell, and maybe the whole business goes under with the growers tied to it. Out in the country, though, the effect is plain enough. The new crop that's supposed to help farmers ride out rougher weather lives, for now, inside one company's order book, and the company decides who gets a page in it. The farmer down the road who read the same AP story and dialed the same number most likely heard some version of not yet.
Beyond seed and a set price, the terms of Mueller's deal aren't public. Sustain-a-Grain's grower pages don't post a sample contract, and the published accounts don't give his price. He has said Kernza sometimes brings five to ten times what wheat does per pound, which tells you what premiums he's seen, not what number is written on his paper.
Anyone who has ever signed for a truck or a mortgage knows what a neighbor would want to read before putting his name on something like it. First, how long the contract runs. A planted Kernza field, which farmers call a stand, is supposed to last several seasons, and a contract that runs out before the stand does leaves you right where the Wyoming bulletin told you not to be: standing in a field of grain with nobody committed to buy it.
Second, what counts as good grain. Kernza has to be cleaned and stripped of a tough outer hull before it can be milled into flour. A research project funded this year, with Sustain-a-Grain taking part, is still working out how to grade it: how wet the grain is, how heavy it is for its size (the measure farmers call test weight), how much weed seed and stem and dirt rides along, and how much gets lost in cleaning and hulling. If the people writing the quality standards are still writing them, a contract had better say something about what happens when a load comes in light or dirty.
Third, who eats a bad year. If the plants thin out, or a storm flattens the harvest, does the deal guarantee a quantity, a revenue, or just a price for whatever shows up?
None of that means Mueller's terms are bad. He may be perfectly happy with them, and a company in a young market has its reasons for keeping its terms to itself. It's only that the risk lives in those terms, and from outside the deal you can't tell who's holding it.
What the test plots say
Then there's the matter of how much grain a field like his will make, and for how long.
The latest look across several states came out in June in Agronomy Journal, a crop-science journal. University, USDA and Land Institute researchers grew eight strains of Kernza at seven sites from Minnesota to Utah, all on rainfall alone, and harvested them from 2019 through 2022. The site nearest Halstead was Salina.
In pounds per acre, the way a Kansas farmer would figure it, the Salina plots averaged about 430 at the first harvest, about 230 at the second and about 180 at the third. That's the pattern growers have been warned about: a strong start, then a long fade as the stand gets older.
The trouble is the other sites didn't follow it. At Waseca, Minnesota, the second harvest came in at better than triple the first, then fell back near where it started. At Williston, North Dakota, the third year beat the second. The particular site in the particular year explained about 44 percent of all that bouncing around; location by itself explained about 27. And a trial like this can't pull a summer's weather apart from the plants' age, because a field's third harvest always comes in its third summer. A thin year might mean the stand is wearing out. It might mean the spring was dry.
Minnesota has kept the longest records. A 2024 analysis pooling 13 experiments in that state found yields dropping from the second harvest year on, roughly 180 to 200 pounds an acre each year. More nitrogen, thicker planting and better varieties raised what a field could produce, but none of them stopped the slide. The authors kept their conclusions at home, pointing to cold winters, damp springs and a short growing season as reasons not to lump Minnesota in with warmer, drier ground to the south. Nothing in that published work lays out how a Kansas stand ages over the long haul.
Mueller may be holding the closest thing to an answer. The multi-state trial mostly quit after the third harvest, and one long-running Minnesota experiment at St. Paul went four years. His 12-acre field has been in the ground five. He's farming out past the end of most of the published curves, on Kansas dirt, and the best record of how a stand ages around here may be whatever his harvests have weighed out. Like his price, that isn't public either.
Figuring Kernza against wheat on a napkin
The Wyoming bulletin built a budget for an imaginary unirrigated farm in the southeast corner of that state. It set five years of Kernza, cut for grain some years and hay others, against wheat planted every other year with the ground left bare in between to store moisture, which is how dry country grows wheat. Kernza scratched out a small profit on land the farmer owned and lost a little on rented land, where the rent eats the margin. Wheat lost money on both. That result assumed a buyer, a way to get the grain cleaned, and $2 a pound for grain already cleaned and hulled.
Halstead is better wheat country than that. Kansas State University runs unirrigated wheat test plots near Newton, a short drive east, where wheat averaged 47 bushels an acre in 2025, about half what it made the year before. A bushel of wheat weighs 60 pounds, so 47 bushels is around 2,800 pounds, several times what any of the Kernza plots managed. Kansas farmers got an average of $6.84 a bushel for winter wheat in August. Multiply last year's test-plot yield by that price and you get about $321 an acre before costs. That's research plots and a statewide average price. It's a yardstick, not anybody's check.
Now Kernza. At $6.84 a bushel, wheat brings about 11 cents a pound. Five to ten times that is 57 cents to $1.14. At Salina's third-harvest yield of about 180 pounds, that's $100 to $205 an acre. At the first-harvest yield of about 430 pounds, it's roughly $245 to $490. Take off less for fertilizer and diesel than wheat would cost, add whatever the hay brings, and you've got a range you could drive a combine through sideways. Even the top of it sits well under Wyoming's $2. Some of that gap may be the difference between grain straight off the field and grain cleaned and hulled, since nothing published says which kind of pound Mueller's premiums are figured on. Either way, the Wyoming result leans on a price higher than anything his numbers point to, and the real figure is sitting in a contract nobody outside the deal has read.
What the napkin does show is the shape of the bet. Early in a stand's life the grain might hold its own against wheat, and as the stand ages it probably falls behind, at a rate nobody has published for south-central Kansas, for a price only Mueller and his buyer know. He can afford to find out partly because Kernza is a sliver next to 1,200 acres of corn and soybeans. A farmer whose whole place rode on it would be reading the same numbers with a tighter stomach.
The farmers who called after him
Mueller's oldest field is already telling him how a Kansas stand ages, one harvest at a time. Whenever his contract comes up, it'll get renewed or it won't. Further out, it comes down to whether enough bread and beer and breakfast cereal gets made from the stuff that Schlautman can start saying yes to the farmers who keep calling.
Those farmers don't get their picture in the paper, and nobody drove out to see what they planted this spring instead. Mueller is the one we can see, kneeling with that little seed in his fingers, because he has a buyer on paper. Whether the rest of them ever get a field like his depends on how much Kernza the people downstream decide to buy, and on what the next round of contracts says about who carries the bad years.
