CHAPTER 16
What is the most valuable part of the prairie? The fat black soil, the chernozem. Who built the chernozem? The black prairie was built by the prairie plants, a hundred distinctive species of grasses, herbs, and shrubs.—Leopold 1949
Natural areas restoration is a realm of ecology destined to become the single most important environmental effort of the future.—Schramm 1990
We conclude that restoration of tallgrass prairie vegetation can restore SOM [soil organic matter] lost through cultivation and has the potential to sequester relatively large amounts of SOC [soil organic carbon] over a sustained period of time.—Matamala et al. 2008
Perhaps the current diminished condition of the tallgrass prairie is a blessing, a unique opportunity for our society to come together and begin the healing process with prairie restoration.—D. Smith 2010
[L]and-use change in a region experiencing rapid and extensive grassland loss is likely to significantly increase the number of contaminated private drinking water wells.—Keeler and Polasky 2014
Our results suggest that restoration of high plant diversity may greatly increase carbon capture and storage rates on degraded and abandoned agricultural lands.—Yang et al. 2019
A FEW YEARS AGO when the pup and I lived in south-central Minnesota, we had a seven-inch rain. The creek that ran through our small property jumped about eight or nine feet overnight and the water in the creek was the color and consistency of a chocolate milkshake. Living at the top of our watershed, the only damage was a foot of water over the driveway for a few days. Cities to the north and east of us did have some flood damage when all the water in all the creeks flowed downstream.
The afternoon following that overnight rainstorm, the pup and I visited a Waterfowl Production Area just a mile to the east of our house. There were no signs of run-off around the edges of the area and the wetlands simply filled up with crystal-clear, clean water. That water just sat there. Some of it percolated down into the soil, recharging groundwater supplies. Over the following weeks, some of it evaporated up into the air. The rest provided habitat for ducks. What that water didn’t do was run horizontally, cause any erosion, or add to any potential flooding issues downstream.
In The Land Ethic, Aldo Leopold writes that “one basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value.” While Leopold may be correct that individually each species has little economic value, collectively the prairie can have significant economic value to everyone, not just those who most love the prairie. And in that, we have a new audience and new advocates for prairie conservation.
Acre for acre, some of the largest grassland restoration programs have been in the Federal Farm Bills. In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act. (None of them are actually named “Farm Bill.”) This act contained the Agricultural Conservation Program, or ACP, which paid farmers to plant cropland to perennial grasses. In 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Agricultural Act, which included the Soil Bank program. In 1985, the Food Security Act contained the modern Conservation Reserve Program, CRP. Across the Midwest, CRP greatly outnumbered acres of remaining prairie in most states. For instance, Iowa has approximately 29,300 acres of native prairie (Samson and Knopf 1994). Iowa’s peak CRP enrollment in the mid-1990s was 2,203,800 acres.
One of the biggest issues with all these programs, from a conservation perspective, is that they are temporary. Millions of acres are planted with perennial grasses. The grasses are plowed under and planted back to row crops when the contracts end. However, the language used in these three Farm Bills points to new conservation opportunities and new messages to new audiences. We can look to the past to plot a new future for grassland conservation.
The conservation section of the 1936 Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act mentioned in the first paragraph “wastage of soil and moisture resources . . . soil erosion, is a menace to the national welfare . . . prevention of soil erosion . . . preserve natural resources . . . control floods.” Title I of the 1956 legislation is named the Soil Bank Act. The bill lists “soil erosion, depletion of soil fertility and too rapid release of water from lands where it falls.” In 1985, Subtitle D (Conservation Reserve) of Title XII (Conservation) lists “conserving and improving soil and water resources.” These programs weren’t primarily focused on habitat or wildlife. They were focused on soil and water health as well as a commodity market that was flooded with surplus grain. Those surpluses were driving prices down and driving many farms into bankruptcy.
The descriptions of the benefits of grassland restoration for water and soil in these bills laid the groundwork for the modern concept of ecosystem services. Restoring prairie for prairie’s sake, or for pollinators, or for pheasants or meadowlarks is a good thing. However, there are many in our society who just don’t care about these things and probably never will. Ecosystem services give the conservation community an opportunity to sell our ideas to a new and much larger audience.
There are some people who are never going to listen to, or understand, Leopold’s Land Ethic. Nor are they going to be moved to action by the poetry of any of dozens of outdoor writers and artists. They can only listen to dollars and cents. Today, we have numbers and data that speak to both a conservation ethic and economic self-interest, for the landowner, the neighbor, and society as a whole.
It’s hard to assign a dollar value to a mallard or pheasant, and more difficult to assign a dollar value to a grasshopper sparrow or a compass plant. We can put an economic value on using grassland restoration on a wellhead protection area to safeguard a city’s drinking water supply. We can put an economic value on the amount of carbon natural habitats absorb.
In the past, conservation has almost been seen as some sort of societal or personal sacrifice. Conservation is only for the elite who can afford it, according to some. Conservation sacrifices agricultural land, taking the land out of production, according to some. We have to “set aside” land for conservation, land that could be doing something productive and beneficial for society, according to some.
In other cases, conservation land is seen solely as wildlife habitat. This leaves some people who aren’t bird hunters, birdwatchers, or botanists asking, “what’s in it for me?” That’s a perfectly valid question.
We may be entering a new realm of grassland conservation. It may not be enough to restore prairie because native wildflowers are pretty or because some like to hunt pheasants in the fall. There are very good reasons to restore grasslands across the Midwest that benefit everyone. This is exciting because it creates new opportunities and new audiences to discuss grassland conservation.
The soils under prairies and wetlands are often black. They are black from carbon. Unfortunately, when prairies are broken and wetlands drained, and then these acres are plowed and disced by farm equipment each year, the soils release large amounts of the carbon they have stored over the centuries. If plowing under grasslands releases carbon, doesn’t it make sense that restoring grasslands and wetlands removes carbon from the atmosphere? It does.
Because each site has a different soil type, moisture level or precipitation pattern, growing-season length, plant community, and different management, it’s impossible to make the general statement that every acre of restored prairie removes a certain amount of carbon from the atmosphere. However, a number of studies show that grassland restoration does restore soil carbon and by default removes that carbon from the atmosphere (Knops and Tilman 2000; Baer et al. 2002; McLauchlan et al. 2006; Baer et al. 2010).
And we can even build on this story. For the last couple of decades, we’ve been using high diversity seed mixes in restorations to enhance bird and pollinator habitat. Turns out, those high diversity restorations store more soil carbon than low diversity mixes (Fornara and Tilman 2008; Ampleman et al. 2014; Yang et al. 2019). What we’ve been doing for one reason, pollinators and habitat, works perfectly well for other reasons, carbon sequestration. Everything is coming together.
The grass canopy holds large volumes of water during a rainstorm as droplets and a film of water on the leaves and stems. Go out to a prairie after a rain and dig down into the thatch. It’s quite often dry. Weaver (1954) cites studies that show big bluestem stems and leaves capture 12,770 gallons per acre or 8,173,500 gallon per square mile. During a two-inch rain in mid-July, big bluestem captured 51 percent of the rainfall on the grass leaves (O. R. Clark 1940). This water will evaporate once the storm passes or slowly percolate into the soil. What the water won’t do is rush downstream and cause flooding.
The porous soils beneath grasslands can absorb and store large volumes of water. When soil is annually disced or plowed, the channels and pores in the soil collapse and become compacted. Weaver (1968) reviewed studies that compared run-off and erosion from a prairie and bare area with similar slope and soil type. Run-off from the prairie was “nil” while runoff from the bare area was over 20 percent. Related studies found no soil erosion on prairies, but topsoil loss ranged from five to twelve tons per acre on cropland.
In northwest Minnesota at the Glacial Ridge National Wildlife Refuge, one of the largest prairie restorations in the Midwest, grassland and wetland restoration significantly reduces peak run-off in the flood prone Red River Valley as well as helps recharge groundwater supplies (Gerla 2007; Cowdery et al. 2019). Research at the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in central Iowa, another landscape-level restoration project, showed multiple benefits of the restoration to ground- and surface-water hydrology (Schilling and Drobney 2014a, 2014b). Grassland and wetland restorations across the Midwest presumably have the same effects.
Grasslands not only store and absorb water, they clean it too. Go to an unburned prairie during the summer and lie on the ground on your belly. What you’ll see is this incredibly complicated network of living and dead grass and forbs, leaves and stems crisscrossing in a dense and chaotic pattern. Then go home and pull the air filter out of your furnace. It looks very similar.
Across the Midwest many lakes and rivers are polluted with nitrates and phosphates, from several different sources. When nitrates and phosphates reach local lakes, they cause algal blooms. When the algae dies, the bacteria that decompose the algae consume all the oxygen in the water, potentially killing many of the fish and other aquatic life. Over an eight-year period of prairie restoration at Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge, groundwater nitrates in the uplands declined by 80 percent (Tomer et al. 2010).
When nitrates get into drinking water, they cause a number of human health issues, most infamously, blue-baby syndrome. On page fifteen of the Minnesota Department of Health’s Minnesota Drinking Water 2015 Annual Report for 2014 there is a photo of a group of individuals, several wearing orange hunting shirts, at the dedication of a state Wildlife Management Area. One of the highlighted ways to protect water quality and public health is to restore prairie. If grassland conservation and restoration becomes a human health issue, grasslands have a whole new set of friends. This also creates a potential for new sets of partnerships in the conservation world.
These ideas also give us a new context for planning restoration efforts. If we restore prairie over there, we’ll create some wildlife habitat. If we restore prairie here, on a Wellhead Protection Area, then entire communities will support the effort. DWSMA, short for Drinking Water Supply Management Area, is an acronym every prairie advocate needs to understand and start using frequently. DWSMAs and Wellhead Protection Areas are areas where a large percentage of a local community’s water comes from. They are often sandy soils that allow water to percolate downward. Sandy soils are often not the best agricultural soils. Do we just want more wildlife habitat from our restorations that will be supported by birdwatchers and bird hunters? Or do we want our restorations to provide wildlife habitat, potentially reduce downstream flooding, reduce nitrates in drinking water, and help the local community protect their drinking water? Now how many local citizens and local politicians are supporting the restoration efforts?
There are social, economic, and political implications to these issues. We now have the knowledge and data to do conservation smarter and more strategically. We know where on the landscape we can restore grasslands to meet “stacked benefits.” One action, grassland restoration, can have multiple positive outcomes, if the conservation community has the right conversations with the right people to get them on board and then does the conservation in a strategic way that everyone, or almost everyone, can support.
The most important part is having those conversations early on in the process. Let people know what the plans are, even before they are plans. Get their input and get them involved in the process as early as possible. The conservation world doesn’t need anyone thinking that someone is sneaking around, being cryptic, or trying to hide the ultimate goals. Showing everyone how they benefit from the proposed work, and how many different people or groups benefit, makes the process much easier and less contentious.
We can take the conservation message to a much larger audience and build a wider base of support for grassland restoration. The conservation message morphs from those who like to hunt pheasants to those who like to drink water and don’t like flood damage, which is most people.
Similar principles about location apply within fields. The Prairie STRIPS (Science-based Trials of Row-crops Integrated with Prairie Strips) project in Iowa demonstrates field-level conservation practices that are beneficial for water quality and agriculture (Schulte et al. 2017). Their research shows that by strategically planting 10 percent of a field with strips of prairie grasses and forbs, run-off decreases by 32 percent, nitrogen loss declines by 82 percent, and phosphorus loss declines by 89 percent. Soil erosion declines by 95 percent. The researchers developed ways to locate the strips in each field in order to maximize the benefits while taking into account the size of a farmer’s equipment and to be minimally disruptive to farming practices within each field.
With modern farming equipment, farmers can measure inputs such as fertilizers and yields at harvest almost square yard by square yard. Farmers are losing money on approximately 6.2 million acres of farmlands in Iowa almost every year (Brandes et al. 2016). Several companies have recently developed “precision ag” tools that allow farmers to analyze each field and determine the most and least profitable areas of each field. These tools show that in-field profitability increases dramatically when farms plant only the most productive ground and don’t lose money on the least productive acres.
Using these tools, farmers can precisely determine where they frequently lose money. These are acres that are ideal to be put into grassland. In most cases, these may be relatively small areas within any one field. However, if every farm in a township used these tools and strategically planted grass on their least productive acres, that could be a significant amount of grass. Those acres can be planted to grassland for the direct economic benefit of the landowner. A lot of those acres are sandy, allowing for rainwater to percolate into the groundwater, or the acres are low areas that could be restored to wetland and capture water. Restoring these acres might provide a private benefit to the landowner and a public benefit to the community. Decisions for private and personal profit can have larger societal benefits. That’s a very different story than the traditional “conservation as sacrifice” storyline.
Prairie Spring
OUR SHADOWS STRETCH almost to the edge of the western landscape as the sun crests the east. It’s April in northwest Minnesota. It is tundra cold this morning, but the top layers of clothing will be coming off in an hour or so. Everyone is officially ready to declare the long cold miserable winter over.
Ignoring calendars, day length, and other arbitrary measures, there are two sure signs of prairie spring. The first is the pale lavender bloom of the pasqueflower, inconspicuously hugging the ground, hidden in the grass to avoid the April wind. Pasqueflower is subtle, blooms for a short period of time, and is almost invisible for the rest of the year.
The second sign, a brown, striped bird, remains hidden for most of the year also, a “child of the sullen winter grasses,” as William Quayle wrote. But at this time of year, the deep resonant booming of the prairie-chicken echoes across the landscape and can be heard from two miles or more. There is nothing subtle about an April prairie-chicken.
As we walk closer, my four-footed survey partner and I can see them out in the field, the white rump feathers and bright orange sacs on their necks make as stunning of a visual exhibition as the auditory display we’ve been listening to for the past several minutes.
The pioneer literature is full of somber descriptions of these displays. John Madson, one of the poet laureates of the prairie, stated that “it is a lonely wild sound made by a lonely wild bird. . . . In all of modern America, there is no more lost, plaintive, old-time sound than the booming of the native prairie chicken” (1982). Other writers describe the sound as “dirge-like strains” or “a long, loud, mournful note.” Paul Johnsgard (2001), who has written more about prairie birds than anyone else, said the sound reminds him of the “melancholic aspect of some lost soul seeking forgiveness.”
These birds look neither sad nor mournful. Those orange sacs on their neck and the combs above their eyes fluoresce as the sun crests the eastern horizon. Hamlin Garland was one of the few members of the pioneer generation that took a different view of the prairie-chicken. To him, “at the mellow boom, boom, boom of the prairie cock our hearts quickened, for this, we were told, was the certain sign of spring.”
In recent years, heavy breaking plows have been gouging into the earth, flipping the remaining native prairie and Conservation Reserve Program fields rootside up at nearly unprecedented rates. We have more room for king corn and less room for prairie-chickens, pheasants, quail, mallards, songbirds, and all the other species that call the prairies home. The prairie world is wounded, and some of us take those wounds very personally. Those losses are painful.
That tension between living in Leopold’s “world of wounds” but not doing it in Hamerstrom’s “sepulchral atmosphere” is never more evident than on these mornings. After all the destruction of habitat we’ve seen in recent years, the pasqueflowers are still blooming on the hilltops and gravel ridges. There are still prairie-chickens in the field in front of us. There are fewer birds than there could or should be, and every year we lose another booming ground or two in our survey area. But some birds are still hanging on. The birds are still holding out hope, because they don’t know what else to do on a spring morning. As Emily Dickinson told us, “hope is the thing with feathers.”
If you ever need an uplifting experience or a sense of renewal, ever need something to revitalize the will to continue the fight for these habitats and all of the birds that call these grasslands home, spend a morning watching prairie-chickens, in the words of Leopold, “booming from the mists of nowhere.” If they haven’t given up, if they still have faith for future generations, then we should have that same faith. I have to keep fighting for these birds and their habitat, because, like them, I don’t know what else to do.
As my Grandma’s King James says in the thirtieth chapter of Psalms, joy cometh in the morning.