Welcome to the KernzaCAP Compendium, where we've gathered key outputs from six years of collaborative research, outreach, and innovation around Kernza® perennial grain.
KernzaCAP was a USDA-funded initiative to advance the research, production, awareness, and commercialization of Kernza®. The project comprised partners from 10 universities, more than 30 organizations, and over 100 individual collaborators. Together they worked across five objective areas: plant breeding and food science, agronomy and on-farm knowledge, environmental quality, supply chain development, and education, extension, and policy. A sixth team focused on intentional integration, making sure insights and momentum flowed across the whole project.
These teams worked to improve Kernza® varieties and agronomic practices, measure and model the crop's environmental benefits, develop educational pathways from middle school through graduate study, and build the business structures needed to support a thriving Kernza® marketplace.
KernzaCAP ran from September 2020 through August 2026, supported by a $10 million USDA grant, and was led by Principal Investigator Dr. Jacob Jungers at the University of Minnesota under the official title "Developing and Deploying a Perennial Grain Crop Enterprise to Improve Environmental Quality and Rural Prosperity."
This compendium serves as a record of KernzaCAP outputs. For up-to-date information on Kernza, see Kernza.org. Many of the resources in this compendium can be found in the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy.
KernzaCAP was supported by AFRI Sustainable Agricultural Systems Coordinated Agricultural Project (SAS-CAP) grant no. 2020-68012-31934 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.