SALINA, Kan. – As I drove here from Kansas City, rain fell nearly all the way and pooled in wide fields of crops. Eventually the water would run off, carrying away precious top soil and leeching chemical fertilizers into the ecosystem.

But when I got here, the clouds occluded, stifling the downpour. So Wes Jackson, visionary prophet of our agricultural future, drove me a short distance from his office at the Land Institute (www.landinstitute.org) to a billowing prairie field that, he said, had never, ever been plowed. Its deep-rooted bluestem, Indian grass, switchgrass brush and who knows what other perennial plants (Jackson knows) had soaked up the rain, and the field had become a spongy model of how farming eventually should look.

“That out there,” he said, pointing to what the first white settlers of this fecund land would have seen, “has answers to questions we have not learned to ask.”

If a prime concern of religion is the protection and maintenance of human life – and it is – then it also must care profoundly about the Earth and its atmosphere, which suckle and sustain that life. At the moment, that Earth is host to more than 6 billion people (a figure that has doubled in less than 50 years).

But Wes Jackson wants us to know this: We have been doing agriculture wrong for 10,000 years. For most of that time, the costs of planting annual crops from seed were bearable. But those costs – in environmental degradation, fossil fuel depletion and other damage – are finally reaching unsustainable levels. If we can’t figure out a new way to farm, we’re in big trouble.

Jackson and the Land Institute he founded in 1976 are proposing a return to an old model to help us do exactly that. Instead of fields full of a single annual crop – corn, say, planted and harvested with big machines and fertilized with chemicals – Jackson wants us to learn from nature. He wants us to copy the prairie field full of perennials. So he and his staff, working on a remarkably small $1.5 million annual budget, are trying to create perennial crops that would have deep, sustaining roots but also large seed heads that would yield abundant food for a hungry world.

The Land Institute staff is getting there, but it’s a slow process. Scientists here have perennialized several crops, and are beginning to work on corn, a project Jackson, now 69 years old, expects to take most of 50 years.

“Rocket science is simple,” he says. “This is complex.”

Jackson, who holds a doctorate in genetics, seems skeptical of many forms of religion, but he frequently uses religious language to describe the crisis humanity faces.

For instance, when he talks about how humans moved from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers who began planting annual crops to replace perennials, he says this: “That’s the biblical fall (of man).”

And because Jackson thinks not in minutes or hours or even years but in decades and centuries, he also tends to speak in expansive ways that take the future into account. Pointing to a field of cross-bred crops that the Land Institute is testing, he says, “The future of humanity may even be there.”

American agriculture has been a marvel. It has fed not just the nation but much of the world by growing single crops in large fields – annual monocultures, as Jackson calls them. But we can’t get by that way forever, sucking nutrients out of the land, replacing them with chemicals and constantly plowing up and losing precious top soil so we can plant annual crops with shallow roots.

The Land Institute’s answer is to develop a system with the same ecological stability of the prairie but with a crop yield similar to what we get from annual crops. Jackson calls it “Natural Systems Agriculture.”

Slowly, Jackson is getting support from scholars and agriculture experts, though many such persons have dismissed him as a nutty stargazer. And, indeed, it’s not yet clear whether anyone will beat a path to Jackson’s door if and when famine begins to sweep the globe as our current system of farming exhausts itself.

But Jackson believes farmers will move to his “perennial polyculture” system “if we have a compelling alternative.” And when they do change, “it will represent the first and most basic and necessary step toward a sustainable future.” Which is to say, toward protecting and sustaining the divine gift of life.

Bill Tammeus is a columnist for The Kansas City Star.