What is the purpose exactly? Everything I can find about it is just hand wavey "its good for the environment because reasons".
Prep soil -> Plant -> Wait -> Harvest
Perennial grains would allow you to do the prep and plant once, and then repeat the last two steps multiple times. Prep, Planting, and Harvest are all similar orders of magnitude of labor, so if you can get ~ 5 years from a single planting, you could work an area of land with less than half the total labor.
Less soil prep and planting (with heavy machinery) means less soil erosion, less microbiome destruction, healthier soil.
That's not required at all. Most grain is grown no-till, you seed directly through the residue of the previous crop. This is the typical problem, people researching solutions to problems that don't actually exist. Why are agricultural researchers completely unfamiliar with basic farming practices?
>you could work an area of land with less than half the total labor.
And get less food from it because the grain has such a low yield. You're burning fewer gallons of diesel per calorie of food produced to grow normal wheat than any of the perennial grains they have come up with so far.
>Less soil prep and planting (with heavy machinery) means less soil erosion, less microbiome destruction, healthier soil
But we solved that problem decades ago, solving it again but worse isn't very useful.
>Most grain is grown no-till
I don't think this is accurate for wheat.
> food produced to grow normal wheat than any of the perennial grains they have come up with so far
A brand new innovation is less efficient that an existing tech that has existed for centuries? Crazy.
> But we solved that problem decades ago
We've solved soil destruction? What?