| Improving Perennial Plants for Food and Bioenergy, Inc. |
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NEW: Click Here to view IPPFBE locations and test sites on Google Maps.  Central Asian Apricots from the Thatcher Research Location Improving Perennial Plants for Food and Bioenergy (IPPFBE) is non-profit (501.c.3) corporation. We believe that there is great unexploited potential to develop perennial crops for the sustainable production of food and bioenergy on marginal cropland, steep or sloping range, or on fragile soils—land that is currently unproductive. We are breeding many different types of trees, shrubs, and grasses in our research locations, selecting for high yield crops that are frost-resistant, drought-tolerant, and disease-resistant. Our results have been very encouraging and we move ahead with enthusiasm. We hold that perennial trees, shrubs, grasses, legumes, and forbs adapted to land not suitable for sustainable production of cultivated annual crops, such as corn, wheat, or rice, will produce much of the added food, timber, fuel, and fiber needed to feed, house, and supply energy to the world’s poor and hungry.
Additionally, we have the ability to dramatically improve our environment, lifestyles, health, and future prosperity by increasing world biomass production to harvest excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This would ensure adequate supplies of more nutritious and health promoting food, reduce our addiction to and dependence on fossil fuels, enhance our environment, and mitigate many of the causes of climate change and its disastrous effects. The greatest opportunities for increasing biomass production involves planting billions of genetically improved trees and other perennial plants along with harvesting and replacing dead, dying and inferior plants with adapted, productive cultivars to obtain a high percentage of plants in their rapid growth phase.
 Genetic and other improvements would increase food and biofuel production, as well as mitigate many of the causes of global warming Perennial crops including trees, grasses, shrubs, legumes and other forbs will preserve and enhance our precious soil and water resources. Great opportunities exist for the genetic improvement and culture of hundreds of species of underutilized perennial plants capable of sustainable growth and production on the vast areas of degraded and other lands unsuitable for cultivated annual crops. |
