Post Carbon Fellow Wes Jackson’s work was featured as part of this article on the story of Kernza.

From the article:

In the early 1980s, Jackson persuaded Robert Rodale (son of J.I. Rodale, founder of the Rodale Institute, one of the oldest organic-farming organizations in the country) to search for a perennial that could substitute for wheat. The Rodale Institute rooted through seed banks and tested nearly 100 candidates gathered from around the world, before landing on a species called Thinopyrum intermedium, a wheatgrass first collected from Turkey and Afghanistan. Relative to other wild grasses, this one had seeds of a decent size and shape—not shrunken, discolored, or bristling with the needle-like awns that can make grasses hard to harvest and thresh. And there was some evidence that it may have been eaten by humans several millennia ago.