Continuing the theme of the last post, here is a bit on the other end of my father’s life:
After they retired from the farm, my father found a way to live for 28 more years. Most of the credit goes to the informed and watchful care of my mother, who went back to school at 57 to get a nursing degree. He spent his retirement much as he had spent his teenage years, minus the drinking. He walked downtown every day to play cards and play pool, mowed the lawn and watched television. I am almost the same age as he was when he retired and that sounds horrible to me, but it suited him. Finally, in his mid-eighties, all his health problems caught up to him, till his world revolved around the dining room, which held his lift chair, the commode, his hospital bed and the dining room table. Once a week I would get him into the bathroom to sit for a shower. The demands of his care became more and more onerous till we worried for my mother’s health. She was losing weight, not sleeping well and developing a hernia from helping my father.
The three brothers had a good talk as we walked off Christmas dinner, 2005, to discuss the matter. What could we do to help our mother more, or get our father to the nursing home he needed for his advanced care? Earlier during the fall of that year I had been visiting when my father had broached the subject, “Marian, you need to put me into a nursing home. Taking care of me is killing you,” he said in an anguished voice, and then he looked to me for support. He had waited until I visited so that he would have a chance to make his case. Though he was obviously scared at the prospect of a nursing home, he felt he needed to take a shot at lessening the load on my mother.
My mother looked as if she had been slapped in the face and responded before I could say anything, “Why in the hell do you want to go to a nursing home? They won’t take half as good care of you as I do. You’ll just lay there wishing someone would help you. No one can take care of you the way I do!”
“I know that, dear, but taking care of me is wrecking your health. You have to put me in a nursing home so you can get a break and get some sleep,” he said with tears in his eyes.
Not a chance. My mother’s life was made normal and meaningful by caring for Lester, and she was perfectly willing to shorten her life to do it. She gave six or eight reasons why the nursing home was a bad idea, from poorer care, to the expense, to how it would really be harder on her to drive back and forth to the nursing home. Neither Lester nor I could say a word. With that background to our Christmas conversation all the three brothers could come up with on our walk was that we would all try to help my mother more. It was her right to shorten her life to take care of Lester.
A few weeks later I got a call from my mother about 6:30 in the morning. Of course the first thing you say after an unexpected phone call at that time of the morning is to ask, “What’s wrong, Mom? Is Dad all right?”
” Bobby, get in your vehicle and come here right away. Your Dad had a (very short pause while she weighed her response) a kind of seizure. Come now!”
I kept asking questions while I threw some clothes on but continued to get evasive replies, so I hopped in my pickup to drive the 35 miles to Webster, where my parents lived. About halfway there I called back to ask whether the ambulance was there yet and my mother replied: “Just don’t have an accident! We will talk when you get here. Hang up the phone and watch the road.”
I drove 80 mph in the early morning light without seeing another vehicle the entire way and burst into the house breathlessly, “Where’s the ambulance??? Where’s Dad?”
“Just sit down Bobby, so we can talk.” And as I walked over to the hospital bed to sit down I saw my Dad in the lift chair, deader than a fucking doornail. He was a greenish gray color as the blood was draining to lower points in his body. My mother handed me a stethoscope and instructed me to listen to his chest.
I did, of course hearing nothing, and turned towards my mother, “He’s dead, Mom, there’s nothing there.”
“Nothing at all? Ok, now we can call the ambulance. A few weeks ago he went into a diabetic coma. I revived him, and he was more angry at me than I can ever remember. He said he was ready to die; I needed to be able to let him go, and he made me promise never to resuscitate him again If there’s no sound from Lester’s heart the coroner will just pronounce him dead peacefully and the ambulance crew won’t feel they need to perform CPR. Dial 911.”
The ambulance crew bustled in a few minutes later, and sure enough they immediately pronounced him dead. They told my mother and me to wait in the kitchen to spare us the sight of them manhandling him on the gurney, but it was unnecessary by then. My father’s spirit was gone and he was a sack of potatoes. My mother and I did the business we needed to do, called the immediate family and sat down at the kitchen table in exhaustion.
“That’s done. But now what will I do?” my mother asked.
I can only dream of being as tough as they were. It’s a lot to live up to.
The farm where I grew up, and where the restoration is, was homesteaded in 1892 by my grandfather, an energetic young man of 21 or 22 at the time. His parents had emigrated from Norway in 1868, two years before he was born, so he grew up speaking Norwegian, but he was definitely American in spirit and ambition. Most of northeastern South Dakota had been homesteaded about 1880, but a triangular area stretching to North Dakota had been an Indian reservation until it was taken away from the Dakota tribe and opened for homesteading. My grandfather, often referred to as JR (no “Dallas” jokes, please) built a 900 acre spread by 1905-1910, which was one of the largest and most prosperous farms in the area, always on the forefront of new innovations. My father, Lester, was the ninth of fourteen surviving children, and the youngest boy, born in 1912. As the “baby boy”, and being bracketed between three additional siblings who died as infants, he was the favored child, at least according to some of his older brothers. When he was about 12 his parents moved to Watertown, the largest town in the area, to retire early while leaving management of the farm to three of the older brothers.
In Watertown Lester learned to smoke, drink, play a wicked game of snooker, and generally run wild. He must have scandalized his strict Methodist parents and driven them crazy. The snooker came in handy when he quit (or was kicked out of) school and made pocket money and cigarettes by playing “for the house” at the American Billiards Parlor. He took great pleasure in regaling me with stories on how he set up and won bets playing traveling salesmen while leaving them believing he had just been lucky. The salesman would curse his luck and make Lester promise to play him the next time he was in town so he could win his money back.
So how did Lester end up with the farm rather than his older brothers? The depression hit, and my grandfather had to take the farm back from his sons at the age of 60. Lester spent the next ten years working for his father, many other farmers in the area and traveled the western half of the country to find work like many other young men during the depression. This included two trips to California and a spell tending bar in Havre, Montana, the grist for many other stories he told while we milked the cows. Meanwhile, the older brothers found other farms to buy or moved away, until only Lester was left. The carnage of the dust bowl in the end gave him the farm, just as the carnage of unprepared homesteaders had built the farm for his father. How the wild-ass ne’er do well of a kid brother ended up with the home place obviously stuck in the craw of a couple of the older brothers, according to my mother, though being good Norwegians it only came out in passive aggressive behavior many years later.
Lester charmed a pretty, young Polish-American girl, my mother Marian, who worked in the county USDA office and they married in 1942, They raised four kids on the farm and generally lived the life of a mid-20th century yeoman farmer. The aggressive/progressive characteristics of my grandfather skipped Lester, however, so we did everything the hard way. If a job could be done by manual labor he felt it was silly to spend money on a labor saving device. Every rock was picked, every hay bale was thrown, every bushel of grain was shoveled and every bit of snow moved by hand. Every bit of manure was moved out of the barn, shoveled into a wheelbarrow and stacked outside the barn to freeze until we could spread it on the fields after it thawed in the spring. And twice a day the ice had to be chopped and thrown from the stock tank so the milk cows could go outside to drink.
This wasn’t unusual in my area, though I would sometimes listen wistfully to stories my classmates would tell of trucks with hydraulic hoists or bale accumulators which allowed a tractor to pick up and stack bales or especially the farms which had chain conveyor gutter cleaners which would scoot the manure out the door into a manure spreader pulled by a tractor which could start in the winter. Yet somehow all this labor was supervised by my father with a light touch. Work was mostly fun, and while many of my classmates had labor saving technologies that we didn’t, it was always in the service of doing even more work; in farming more acres or milking more cows. By the time I was ten years old I knew how good I had it, how gentle a taskmaster my father was, how easy he was on us emotionally. He was a softie. He cried when Old Yeller died in the movie; he cried in my company once when he felt my older brother was very unhappy; hell, he cried when he had to kill a cat that was eating our chickens; he was a kind man.
Much of the reason for this post is simply to reflect, but there is relevance to the theme of this blog. One result of the way my father saw the world is that he didn’t break every acre of prairie he could, he let some that his father had broken go back to grass. He didn’t stuff extra cattle on the pastures, which is why I have the good prairies to enjoy and collect seed on. Rather than take on more stress he didn’t try to buy the last 300 acres of grass from my grandparents estate (grass that I would love to manage now). He told me the story of the neighbor to the southwest, an alcoholic old Irishman trying to scrape a living off 240 acres of rock and gravel. Lester was continually asked for favors, giving him some wheat for seed, some hay or oats for his skinny cows or help with fieldwork. Finally, the neighbor, in despair, told Lester that since he could never repay him for all the favors Lester should put a lien on 80 acres that adjoined ours. and it would then eventually be ours. Lester waved it off, said the debt really wasn’t that much, and refused the land.
When I graduated from college I came back to help on the farm as Lester’s health failed. The hard work (and perhaps the hard living when he was younger) had worn him down and at 65 he was no longer able to take care of everything. A farm sale was imminent. He talked me out of farming, as a smart young man like me could find a much easier way to make a living, but said he was just selling the livestock and equipment; the land would still be in the family. He rented the ground to a couple my age, aggressive, smart people who needed a break because the gentleman’s father was very difficult to work with. And eventually, in our forties and fifties, my wife and I were able to buy the farm while the same neighbor still farms it over 40 years after Lester retired. In the end Lester just asked me, “So are you going to buy the place or not?” after 20 years of dissuading me from buying it. That deserved an hour’s answer or a few second’s answer, and I knew that if I hesitated he would probably offer it to the long term renter. “Yes,” I said, “how should we work this out?”
So all the stories on hunting, trapping, playing snooker, threshing crews and runaway teams are wrapped into the need to do right by the farm. I may or may not have become a good farmer. but I damned well plan to be a good steward.
Lester, in his late 70’s. Smiles came so easily to him that he always took a good picture.
I have a treasured memory of a sparkling winter day with the temperature hovering near zero and absolutely no wind. Anderson Lake was about a mile west of the farm, so I drove as close as I could, about a half mile away. I then spent the rest of the day wandering on the lake, listening to the deep booms caused by the expansion of the ice, a disconcerting sound until you realize you are walking over at least 30″ of solid ice. It was also the rare winter where the ice surface was smooth enough to skate and slide across, even in winter boots. For several hours I slid, observed the shoreline along the lake and investigated the pattern of vertical cracks extending through the mass of ice. I ended the afternoon laying on my back listening to the ice music and feeling the deep vibrations.
Another memory is of the only time I brought a girl home from college to meet my parents on the farm. Patty was a town girl from Rapid City, an area disparagingly referred to as “the banana belt” for its comparatively warm weather. Weather forecasts were not as accurate 45 years ago as now but I am certain the forecast was not good. At the age of 19, though, I doubt any forecast would have mattered to me. Our journey began in a driving snow and steady wind, but soon we drove into a full scale blizzard, fighting low visibility and snow drifts on the road. First we tried to drive into our farm from the east, but had to turn around two miles from home when we found three foot drifts across the county gravel. “No worries”, I said, “we will just backtrack, swing around to the west and come in on the tar road which runs a couple miles west of our farm.” This try ended six miles southwest of our place when we ran into a stretch of drifts behind a long shelter belt. I was a little concerned now, but backtracked once more, found a passable highway which took us north of the farm, gunned my boat of an Impala through many drifts, and finally buried my car in snow only a quarter mile from home, just in time to be picked up by the neighbors out running around on snowmobiles.
We were home, safe and dry, and I hoped I had impressed Patty with my resourcefulness and bravado. Unfortunately I think Patty didn’t see this so much as a grand adventure, but more an example of suicidal stupidity. I was unaware of this, though, as she spent the weekend in the house with my mother sewing a dress, while I spent the weekend shoveling out the car and the farm. A young man is invariably clueless, and I was wondering why she had no interest in joining me outside to learn about our farm. She seemed to have no interest in the dairy cattle, the snow or anything I was doing with my father and brother outside. She was pleasant, though cool, as we drove home in brilliant winter sunshine on Sunday. but I thought little of it, Then, before our relationship got any farther, she decided to return to her old boyfriend. He was going into the military, which obviously was much safer than being around me, and we drifted apart. “Ses la vie”.
I used to truly enjoy the power of winter, but damage from my cancer treatments has taken such experiences away from me. My trachaeostomy doesn’t allow me enough air to expend the energy needed to tromp through deep snow or to fight against a bitter wind. The exhilaration of being out in a blizzard is lost to me forever. I have become a “weenie” who shrinks from the challenge of majestic winter weather, and it has become difficult to know what to do with my time through a long, tough winter.
This has made the opportunity to enjoy truly nice winter days more sweet. I am compelled to make the most out of any day gentle enough to allow me to spend time out in the world. I had such a day the last week of November. The temperature was near 50 and the wind was light. There might not be another such day until April, so even though I was on antibiotics fighting a lung infection I headed west up on to the Prairie Coteau. Deer season had just begun, an event I no longer participate in, but I like to see who is out hunting by my farm.
I parked near the prairie which had a prescribed burn in 2018, and walked to the top of the nearest hill. My only goal was to view the vista and smell the air. It turned out that I should have had a deer license, as I immediately kicked up a doe and a large buck from a bedding area on the next hillside. I hunted this farm for 30 years and this would have been the best chance I ever had to get a deer on this prairie. The young lovers pranced gaily away, ready to produce another generation to bound over these hills, which pleased me greatly.
That was inspiration to continue my walk. I am considering a land swap with a neighbor, trading 20 acres of farmground bordering the south side of this prairie to 20 acres to the east. I would then restore the prairie on the land to the east, which would provide connectivity to grass on the next quarter and set up a more practical grazing unit for future management. As I sauntered around I considered the possibilities. The land I would trade has been in my family about 120 years, and it will take several more walks to get used to the idea.
With the afternoon going so well I then went down to the linear wetland in the prairie to the patches of sawtooth sunflower (Helianthus grosseserratus) that I had found the past summer. I gathered a gallon of seedheads in an old plastic grocery bag I found in the pickup which I spread on my restoration when I felt better. And with that I decided that a sick old guy needed to wrap up his excursion and head home to rest. There is a long winter ahead, but I was able to be out this day. If experiencing joy provides sustenance to one’s immune system (and I believe it does), good health was sure to follow.
Postscript, January 13
This text above was written in early December when the landscape looked like this at the restoration:
Though the temperature has broken 32 a couple times since then, the post refers to what was the last nice day of fall/early winter. I have had few days since where the weather has allowed me to go for a good walk. Thus, there have been too many days of incarceration in the house and I once more am fighting a bronchial infection. Opportunities of all kinds in life are legion, but precious nonetheless; any day that the intersection of my health and the weather allows a sojourn in nature must be grasped; hell, it needs to be leapt upon and throttled. I will never again get to spend several hours on a cold clear day listening to the music of the ice, and I hope to hell I never fight a blizzard for hours in my vehicle, but someday soon I will walk in the prairie again. In three months the pasqueflowers will bloom and I will be there.
The title was picked without consciously referring to the Buffalo Springfield song of the late 60’s, but as the connection occurred to me, it seemed strangely appropriate. There is much angst about how divided our country is now, but it was even more divided back then, with many demonstrations escalating into riots and violence. Still, the paranoia and the closing off of alternatives because “we” could never trust “them” enough to collaborate and cooperate is all too familiar. There is an aspect of this adversarial tribal identification between many in the ag economy and the environmental community. I have worked as a consulting agronomist for forty years, but with one foot in the other world. I have no tribe. So here are a few thoughts on this topic, using recent examples from my life, which I can then tie back to my restoration.
A few months ago my wife, Linda, was talking to a U S Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) employee in Minnesota who had recently moved there from another state, and he related his surprise and dismay at the rancor shown to him by many farmers. They were openly angry with FWS (and with the Minnesota DNR) because of a perceived hostility to farmers and actions those agencies took which they felt were in opposition to their making a living on the farm. To borrow a line from another song from the 60’s, “I’ve looked at life from both sides now,” and I think I can put myself in both sets of shoes.
From the farmers’ point of view, it starts with the casual denigration of the way we farm today, our farms referred to as industrial or factory farms, in opposition to the small, diversified farms of 50 years ago. I grew up on one of those farms, and while it was a good life there were many aspects which no one would ask us to go back to. The work was brutal, even for children, vacations were unknown, and serious accidents were normal. I have a memory of being in church as a teenager and suddenly being struck by the number of physically damaged men, with fingers or even arms gone, hunched over with chronic back injuries. My father, who was without one finger from an accident and had a bad back his entire life from an attempt to stop a runaway team of horses was a good example. Public policy supports farmers financially on one hand, but limits them in other ways. A couple years ago Minnesota mandated perennial filter strips along waterways on all farms in the state. Without going into details, this mandate could easily cost an average size farm $5-10,000 per year in expenses and foregone income from those filter strips. Add in the competition for land from FWS and DNR purchased for wildlife areas, the problems landowners have with hunters trespassing on their land and fights over drainage issues, and some farmers feel besieged. We all are stuck seeing the world through our own eyes, and we like to see ourselves on the side of the angels, in this case feeding the world while caring for the land, and it is difficult to reconcile that with feeling you are viewed as a villain. The lament is, “Why am I viewed as a bad guy?”
On the other side, the FWS employee wonders what the hell he did to get yelled at. Visiting with someone about a voluntary easement for a fair price doesn’t feel like an aggressive or a hostile act. Buying land from willing sellers, which supports the land values of farmers, supports their balance sheets. The filter strips which limit silt and chemicals from impacting water users downstream furthers an important societal goal a farmer should understand and support. As an employee of FWS he is trying to build a richer and more abundant world to live in for farmers as well as everyone else. Most farmers hunt and fish, and all profess to love the land and the environment. But once again the lament is, “Why am I viewed as a bad guy?”
Still, we are all parochial and selfish; we are all weak vessels. We tend to group those with whom we disagree into a faceless group we can rail against or ignore, and a couple negative experiences indict an entire group. Witness how the 9/11 terrorists and ISIS became the face of Islam in many people’s minds, which is a bit like seeing violent neo-nazis or members of the KKK as emblematic of all Christian Americans. Thus has it always been, but I will forego other examples of these divisions to look at examples showing another path.
Recently I talked to a Farm Credit Services (FCS) loan officer about financing another potential project. He is my age, and very much a peer, having also grown up on a remote hill farm. He has made a good career for himself as a knowledgeable and very hard nosed banker. He also farms the land he grew up on and he was very interested in my prairie restoration and my conservation projects. He shared some of his ideas for his farm as he nears retirement, which includes putting several parcels into the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) both for the soil and water conservation aspect and as wildlife habitat. He smiled and said, “As we get older we think more about the legacy we are leaving, and hope we leave things better than we found them.” The CRP program will pay him rent, but it would be easier, and probably more profitable, to continue farming the land. Yet my conservative banker friend was very pleased with the idea of a small sacrifice to improve the environment, and pleased that an FCS loan might facilitate my conservation project.
The other example I will relate happened several years ago. A pair of burrowing owls, the first that I have seen within 200 miles of here, set up housekeeping in an old badger hole in the road ditch two miles south of my place. The adjoining landowner is a gruff older farmer, recently retired, who rents his farm ground to the most aggressive young farmer in our neighborhood. There is little land in our township that is not farmed, quarter after quarter of corn, soybeans and alfalfa blanket the countryside. What these owls were thinking when they settled there I cannot imagine, much like a young family moving to a nice house in the middle of a barren landscape of warehouses. My wife and I worried that someone would take a potshot at them, whether out of fear they might be an endangered species which would limit their land management (a worry far out of proportion to the actual implications of harboring an endangered species) or simply out of the old country ethos that animals are there to shoot.
Yet every day we would drive by and meet the otherworldly stare of a burrowing owl. Usually one of the pair would lift six or eight feet in the air as we drove by, lightly dropping back to the earth after we passed. Soon we found that not only had the rest of the neighborhood noticed them, they had adopted them as the mascots of the township. The landowner had given strict instructions to his renter that the owls were not to be disturbed. Though this gentleman obsessively mows his ditches as if they were an extension of his front lawn, no mower was allowed near the owl nest. Other neighbors would sneak their vehicles past on the side of the road opposite the nest, trying to get a look at our new residents without disturbing them. The burrowing owls were a happening.
Unfortunately we then got a four inch downpour, and the runoff came down the ditch and flooded the nest. We never saw the owls again, and we are bereft of our interesting friends. The entire township mourned the loss of the owl nest. If that can occur in this very conservative, practical, Republican area, it can and does happen everywhere. Given a chance, people will accommodate the natural environment. People are always the problem and the solution; the joy and the sadness; the giver and the taker. Yin and yang. The eternal question is how to stack the deck so we get a little more yin and a little less yang.
This brings me back to the project of the year (not the one I was talking to the banker about), a small supplement to the 100 acre restoration that could have big consequences. I will probably devote an entire post to the project in the future, but here is a summary, along with a short discussion on how it fits into this post’s thesis.
My home section. The parcel labelled “trade land” in the 40 in the NW 1/4 will be traded for the 20 acre parcel to its northeast
In the northwest quarter of our farm, we own the northwest 40 acres and a neighbor owns the other 120. On our 40 is a 17 acre crop field and to the north of the crop field is 23 acres of native prairie and wetland that had a prescribed burn in 2018. The prairie has not been hayed or grazed for almost 50 years, and badly needs a return to more active management. The neighbor and I recently agreed to trade the 17 acre field of mine for a similarly sized parcel to its northeast, east of my prairie as shown above. The parcel I am trading for is very rough ground with a draw through the middle where water has run steadily for the past two years, a very awkward area to farm. In the trade he would receive better farmground, but I receive an area that I would do another prairie restoration upon, fence it with the existing native prairie, and graze in two or three years, when the planting was well established. This small action hardly seems significant, but as the CRP contracts mature, it allows it to be part of a growing group of pastures which could eventually reach 400 acres in 6-8 paddocks, surrounding about 300 acres of crop ground.
On the one hand (yin) this allows great flexibility in management for the benefit of the prairies, native and restored. Almost the only reasonable tool to fight bromegrass takeover in mesic sites is grazing, specifically grazing early and late in the season. All the tools of grazing intensity and timing to benefit native plants and discomfit invader species can be used. The scale is such that habitat connectivity, not just within my farm, but with surrounding grasslands, is significant. It will also provide a large reservoir of native plant materials to gather seed from, whether for further projects of mine or for sale. When added to the other ecosystem services the prairies can provide it becomes an encouraging conservation project.
On the other hand (yang) this becomes a sizeable and hopefully profitable grazing unit for the neighbor’s son, a young man who would like to increase the size of their cowherd, allowing him to farm full time. Between the 400 acres of grass and the potential for grazing cornstalks and cover crops, this could support a cowherd of about 100 head for a 6 month grazing season. Right now their herd of 100 cows gets divided into 6-7 small groups, including on two small pastures of mine, creating inefficiencies and complicating management. Their cowherd could be increased by 60-80 cows with little extra work involved in the grazing.
In other words, one plus one could equal three, the definition of synergy. Yin and yang in harmony; a loud affirmation that we are all in this together. I am now planning, gathering information and gathering partners pursuant to a fall seeding, and am excited to see what can be accomplished. And though I am tempted to wrap this up with another old song lyric I will show restraint and not weary you with another 60’s reference. For what it’s worth.
I thought it wise to get a list of the species that have been seeded in the restoration down somewhere other than a scrap of notebook paper, so here it is. First there is a list of the 99 species that have been gathered (mostly by me but with significant help from Ben Lardy and a few others) and spread over the field. In addition, and listed after, are the species that were seeded by the district to fulfill the CRP contract and a group of species that were purchased in small amounts. Identification was easy in most cases, but in a few cases my poor botanical skills mean that my ID was a guess at the species level. After the common and scientific names of the species that I gathered there is a number that is an indicator of the amount gathered. The code is: 1 = a lot, enough to provide a large contribution to the restored prairie, 2 = a moderate amount, enough to see throughout the restoration if establishment is good, 3 = a small amount, but still enough to establish new species scattered across the field, and 4 = a very small amount which I hope to see somewhere in the restoration eventually. The ratings are extremely subjective, but still give an idea of what was available and where I concentrated my energies.
Species in the original CRP seeding, not also gathered and listed above, and seed bought (mostly in very small amounts) and spread with gathered seed over the past two years.
Needle and Thread Heterostipa comata
Slender Wheatgrass Elymus trachycaulus
Western Wheatgrass Pascopyrum smithii
Canada Wildrye Elymus canadensis
Dudley’s Rush Juncus dudleyi
Large Beardtongue Penstemon grandiflorus
Showy Partridgepea Chamaechrista fasciculata
Grayhead Coneflower Ratibida pinnata
New England Aster Symphyotricum novae-angliae
Sneezeweed Helenium autumnale
Illinois Bundleflower Desmodium illinoensis
Fox Sedge Carex vulpinoides
Kalms Brome Bromus kalmii
Plains Bluegrass Poa arida
Hairgrass Deschampia sp.
Marsh Muhly Muhlenbergia glomerata
Compass Plant Silphium laciniatum
Pale Spiked Lobelia Lobelia spicata
Boneset Eupatorium perfoliatum
Creamy Milkvetch Astragalus racemosus
Butterfly Weed Asclepias tuberosa
Culver’s Root Veronicastrum virginicum
Mountain Mint Pycnanthemum virginiatum
Western Spiderwort Tradescantia occidentalis
Nodding Onion Allium cernuum
Canada Onion Allium canadense
Wild Mint Mentha arvensis
Sullivant’s Milkweed Asclepias sullivantii
Purple Giant Hyssop Agastache scrophulariifolia
Marsh Betony Pedicularis lanceolata
False Aster Boltonia asteroides
Flat-topped Aster Doellingaria umbellata
Heart Leafed Golden Alexander Zizia aptera
Prairie Aster Symphyotrichum turbinellum
Heart-leafed aster Symphyotrichum cordifolium
Sky Blue Aster Symphyotrichum oolentangiense
Marsh Muhly Muhlenbergia racemosa
Prairie Sunflower Helianthus petiolaris
American Sloughgrass Beckmannia syzigachne
Sweetgrass Hierchloe odorata
Bluejoint Calamagrostis canadensis
Wood Lily Lilium philadelphicum
Great Blue Lobelia Lobelia siphilitica
Prairie Coreopsis Coreopsis palmata
Virginia Ryegrass Elymus virginicus
Rough Dropseed Sporobolus compositus
So, that adds up to 145 species. I think I’m missing 1-2 species found or bought in very small amounts, but all the major players are here. I haven’t started a list of species found in the restoration yet, but will next summer. It’s gonna be fun.
Near the end of the year I thought it an opportune time to summarize the past couple years attempts to bring a prairie restoration to life on my land in Day County, South Dakota. Much of the work that was done in 2017 and 2018 has been discussed in other posts, but it seemed worthwhile to integrate that work with what has been done the past year in a single post.
Over the summer and fall of 2017 I planned for and received a contract to put 154 acres into the continuous CRP program, split between the wetland restoration program (CP 23) and the pollinator habitat program (CP 42). Much of the CP 23 CRP, 54 acres, was on my northeast quarter, following a linear wetland that bisects the quarter. This was seeded to a diverse mix of native species (about 25 species) by the conservation district in November of 2017. I was not attempting to do a comprehensive restoration on this land because the shape of the tract meant issues with pesticide drift were inevitable. Thus, I had limited goals for the services this land would provide.
The remainder, 100 acres on the southwest quarter where I planned to do a more complete restoration, were not able to be seeded at the same time because of concern I had for herbicide carryover on a few acres which had been spot-treated for tall waterhemp control in the soybeans in July, 2017. The spring of 2018 was late and wet, and it was mid-June before the field was seeded by staff of the Day County Conservation District with their drill. There were three different seed mixes for three different range sites: xeric, dry mesic and mesic. Each mix had 30-35 different species purchased through Milborn Seeds in Brookings, South Dakota. In addition to the official seed mix I spread seed that I had gathered the past growing season from adjacent native prairies I own, seed that had been gathered by Ben Lardy, a Pheasants Forever employee working in Day County and a variety of small amounts of seed that I had purchased from Prairie Moon Seeds in Minnesota. These were spread in appropriate areas about the same time.
I realized that the timing of the seeding precluded the seeds undergoing stratification, a period of cold needed to overcome dormancy, so my expectations for what I would see that summer were modest. However, even my modest expectations were dashed by what I observed. It became evident that the mixtures of seed had bridged in the drill box, and large areas had not been seeded. Perhaps 40 acres were showing no seedlings, 30 acres were showing scattered seedlings and 30 acres were already looking well established by Labor Day last year (most likely those 30 acres had received 70-80% of the seed). Most distressing, the largest empty area adjoined a native grass pasture where Dakota skipper (Hesperia dacotae) butterflies had been found. One of the main drivers for the project had been to extend the habitat for these skippers and so far I had nothing for them.
Approximate boundaries of management zones after original seeding.
Zone 1: 30 acres of dry mesic soils which have an excellent stand from the original seeding
Zone 2: 30 acres which showed scattered seedling growth by fall, 2018. The two main areas include both the wettest and the most xeric soils on the field. Thus, even though I have it listed as one zone it is actually managed as about four.
Zone 3: Zero stand on about 25 acres of mostly xeric soils in the heart of the restoration.
Zone 4: Zero stand on 15 acres of mesic soils adjoining the farm field.
During the summer and fall of 2018 I gathered substantial amounts of seed from my prairies, as well as several other prairies owned by friends, and augmented that with seed gathered by Ben Lardy. After evaluating what we had, I added to that with seed purchased from Milborns, primarily grasses. In November we spread this on Zones 2 and 3, with emphasis on Zone 3 near the skipper habitat, adding 20-25 seeds per square foot. On Zone 4 we spread primarily purchased seed, including what Milborns calls “Native Harvest” mix, seed harvested directly from a native prairie. All this would receive a full stratification over winter, putting the fall seeding on track to jump out of the ground in 2019. And in order to put the maximum effort in improving Zones 2,3 and 4 I had to accept that Zone 1 would be what it was.
Over the long winter of 2018/2019 I thought about all the problems of the 2018 seeding, all the weak spots and all the mistakes I had made. I decided that it was worthwhile to continue to provide even more seed to provide a veneer of redundancy to cover some of those mistakes. Here is the plan those winter musings became.
First, I was still concerned with the barren hills on Zone 3. Here is what it looked like in late May, 2019, a year after seeding:
Gravelly hill. The larger plants are wormwood sage.The green background is Zone 2.
Though I had worked very hard to cover this area with seed the previous fall I bought and blended about 15 species, all with minimal seed dormancy, to attempt to get more seedlings started on the gravelly hills. Ben brought the broadcast seeder out once more and we spread another 15 seeds/square foot on the 25 acres of Zone 3 and 15 adjacent acres of xeric soils of Zone 2.
During the summer and fall of 2019 I once more obsessively gathered seed from my prairies. Building upon the knowledge gained the past two seasons, and upon what turned into a good year for seed production, I was able to make more efficient use of my time, both in knowing locations to find various species and in having a better feel for the “Goldilocks” timing for harvest. I was able to gather 8-10 new species and gathered much larger amounts of 15-20 species that I had gathered minimal amounts of in 2018. It was a very successful and enjoyable venture.
Most of my 2019 harvest, cleaned and ready to go
Once more Ben brought out the broadcast seeder and after blending my gathered seed with some additional grass seed it was spread over all of Zone 3, all but the wetter areas of Zone 2 and a few adjacent acres of the Zone 1. About another 10-15 seeds per square foot were spread.
We spread a different seed mix over Zone 4, the 15 acres on the east side next to the farm field. It had been too wet to seed in the spring, but I had also been neglecting that area for another reason. A bad infestation of Canada thistle had established itself during the summer of 2018, and I feared that any additional seeding was futile until the thistles were controlled. I had the farmer who rents my farm ground spray the 15 acres in late June with Widematch, a common wheat herbicide with excellent thistle activity. Then in November I purchased a 14 species blend of native species with tolerance to Milestone, another excellent thistle killer. Hopefully I can get some forbs established through the weeds, and if not I will at least have a 15 acre native grass border to provide a buffer between the farm field and the restoration.
That brings us to today. In total, 145 native prairie species have been seeded, with perhaps 100 seeded in significant amounts. Zone 1 has its original CRP blend of 30-35 species and the density of plants is such that it will be very difficult to establish anything more (remember this area likely got more than a 2X seeding rate to start). Zone 2 filled in pretty well last summer, and is likely to fill in completely this summer, hopefully including much of the gathered seed that was spread a year ago. Zone 3 still looks like hell, but by the end of the fall I could find new perennial prairie seedlings every spot I looked (and I looked at hundreds of spots). And Zone 4 is a big question mark, but it will at least have a diverse grass cover.
CODA
Life is frustrating for all of us because it so rarely matches our expectations. I have certainly been frustrated by the poor job done on the original CRP seeding. Even now after several remedial seedings it is nowhere near my vision for a prairie restoration. However, I must not let the act of looking back come at the expense of doing my best today. I like the Buddhist take on this universal dilemma. To paraphrase: “Suffering is universal and caused by our desire for life to be different than it is; yet there is a path beyond suffering through changing how we think about and act in the world.” I read a book about 20 years ago called “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” which compared Eastern thought to the physics of relativity and quantum mechanics. Two things stand out from my memory of the book. The first is that everything is always interconnected and changing. The second is illustrated by the way chapters were labeled. Each chapter was Chapter 1. We are always beginning again, and what we are doing is always important because each action changes the world. So today I begin again, as I will again tomorrow. We boldly and bravely go out every day to remake the world.
I know the title is a bit much. There was no physical or verbal abuse, just abuse to my spirit and self esteem.
The background begins in 1976, when I was an undergraduate student in the park management curriculum at South Dakota State University (SDSU). I received an internship from the South Dakota Division of Parks to develop and run interpretive programs for a new nature center opening near Sioux Falls. I had the opportunity to work with volunteers from the Biology Department at Augustana College who would help with school groups coming to the park. One of these interns was Dave Ode, a junior biology major, who was several years older than me as he had done a stint in the service. Though I was ostensibly his boss it soon became evident that Dave knew more than I did about the natural history of the area so I had a wonderful resource, and soon a good friend.
In 1979 we both entered MS programs at SDSU, Dave in botany and I in agronomy. Though we didn’t regularly hang out, we renewed our friendship and at graduation both received interviews for the same job. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the South Dakota Department of Game Fish and Parks (SDGFP) were cooperating on a position to develop what I believe was called the Natural Heritage Program, an attempt to research and document the natural attributes of every state. I assume that TNC funded the position and SDGFP provided an office and logistical support. When Dave and I realized that we were applying for the same position we decided to drive out to Pierre together for the interview.
We arrived at a house rented by a friend of Dave’s, a cavernous old house his friend was caring for in return for cheap rent. It was too expensive to heat more than a few rooms, however, so Dave and I changed into our interview suits in a huge, unheated dining room. I have a great memory of two pale skinny Norwegian farm boys in their underwear trying to jump into some dress clothes before frozen body parts began to fall off.
At the SDGFP offices I went in first for my interview, facing Doug Hofer, the director of the Parks Division and two very serious TNC employees. We shook hands, made about fifteen seconds of small talk, and the assault began.
Recently I had gone through a very tough oral defense of my master’s thesis with an adversarial professor. That was a walk in the park compared to this interview. Questions were technical and succinct, scripted and delivered in a clipped voice. Doug Hofer threw me a couple softballs, but then I received a series of botanical and ecological questions entirely outside my experience. As soon as it became clear I didn’t know the answer to one question my fumbling attempts would be cut off with the next question. The easiest question I remember went something like this: “Name as many plants as you can from the riverine environments of the northern Black Hills, scientific names only please.” At least I could rattle off a few species as an answer. The other questions all ended with some variation of, “I’m sorry, but I’m not really familiar with that concept,” which was a polite way of saying : ” I don’t know what the hell you are talking about.”
However, the magic of being a young man is resilience; nothing sets you back for very long. At the end of the interview, which they had mercifully cut short, I put in a plug for my friend, Dave Ode. I told them that I had no illusions about my suitability for the position, but that the next interviewee was someone special, who I had worked with and could unreservedly recommend. I’m not sure if I thought if they would care about my opinion, but I didn’t really give a flying you-know-what whether they cared or not. I felt compelled to speak up for Dave. I mouthed a “good luck” to Dave as we traded places and sat down to push my eviscerated innards back into my body cavity while I waited.
After an hour or so (my interview only lasted 20 minutes) Dave came out smiling and relaxed, shaking hands with everyone. As soon as we were out of earshot I asked, “Tough interview, huh? What sort of questions did they ask you?” He looked at me somewhat perplexed and said, “Not much really; We mostly visited about the goals of the program and discussed ideas to reach those goals.” My response was something like “???????!!!!!!!!!???????”
After I lost my wounded outrage, and after a bit of reflection, it was obvious they knew they would hire Dave before we came for the interviews. He was the only qualified candidate, something that may have contributed to their sour moods when they interviewed me. The pool of conservation professionals was very shallow at that time and TNC did not carry the cachet it does today. They would give me one chance to prove my resume wrong, and when it was evident that my resume properly characterized me as a poor candidate for the position I was kicked to the side of the road. Dave not only had the proper degree, he had serious botanical chops, laying a stack of publications, both technical and popular, that he had contributed to on the table as he entered the interview room. I am certain he had glowing recommendations from researchers they knew or knew of. Hell, he was and is just a helluva guy.
Dave did a wonderful job managing the Natural Heritage Program and then slid into the position of the state botanist, a job he held until he recently retired. Now he hunts a lot, works on some projects, and I hope will continue to give me advice on my restoration project. It is a luxury and a pleasure to have such a knowledgeable friend to lean on. Sometimes qualifications, intelligence and class win through. The consolation prize is that I got to enjoy being an agronomist for 40 years. There are many paths; we just have to keep our heads up to watch for them, and gratefully accept what life has offered.
About 50 years ago there was some gravel mined from a small pit in the corner of my prairie restoration field. I don’t think there was a seeding made afterwards, but it soon grew up to bromegrass, with a few willows and cottonwoods in the lowest area of the pit where there is a perched water table. I often use the pit to store my trailer and ATV and finally took a closer look at it last week when I was up gathering seed from the existing prairies. What I saw was a bit surprising.
The pit from 200 yards away. The water in the front is in the restoration; the gravel excavation was done in the hill behind.A group of leadplant (Amorpha canescens) on the edge of the cottonwoods in the lowest part of the pit.
While the majority of the vegetation that has reclaimed the disturbed area is bromegrass, there are about 20 native species which have found their way to the site from nearby pastures. Some of these are the typically weedy species which blow around and colonize bare spots everywhere, such as Missouri goldenrod (Solidago missouriensis) and heath aster (Symphyotrichum ericoides), but many aren’t. There is a sizeable colony of leadplant in a protected area under the edge of the excavated hill. There are many dotted gayfeathers (Liatris punctata) which have blown in and colonized some of the poorest soils. There are bits of big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) and plains muhly (Muhlenbergia cuspidata) fighting the good fight against the brome on appropriate sites. I found a couple prairie onions (Allium stellatum) which have somehow made their way over from my pasture. I even gathered seed for an hour or two from the gravel pit that I am spreading on the prairie restoration.
What will the gravel pit look like in 50 or 100 years? Will we have continued progress of the natives spreading from the prairies nearby, and from the restoration which now surrounds the site? Or will the brome push everything back out, perhaps advantaged by our increasingly wet climate. Even without the gravel excavation this is a xeric site, so it would be reasonable to hope that the more drought hardy native plants should have an advantage. Does this provide any lessons for the restoration field?
I think that one lesson is patience. Life will find a way to reach a new home. All the richness of our prairies developed over about 10,000 years since the glaciers melted and the climate stabilized at something approaching recent conditions. I am sure some researchers have determined about when our plant diversity reached maximum levels through pollen analysis, but my uninformed speculation would be that most of the plant community development occurred in no more than 2000 years. My restoration will be evolving to some sort of stability over the rest of my life, but will continue for long afterwards. I will obviously not know the final outcome of my restoration seeding, because there is no such thing. Which leads to the next lesson.
I need to be humble about my abilities to “create” a prairie. It has been suggested by multiple authors that those of us seeding restorations shouldn’t focus on the unattainable goal of a perfect, or an authentic restoration, but rather on the ecosystem services we wish to provide. What the hell would an “authentic” prairie restoration look like, anyway? Nobody truly knows. My stated purpose at the beginning of this process was to enlarge and buffer existing Dakota skipper butterfly habitat. That can fit under the broader umbrella of pollinator support. Then there are all the other insects, birds and mammals which will use the area (I have already been kicking up sharptail grouse and various sparrows, probably eating the weed seeds which I have grown. Carbon storage, water quality improvement and providing good habitat for bird hunters all add to the benefits. One benefit I personally care about is to increase the local genotypes of the xeric prairie species I have been gathering the seed of and spreading over the 100 acres. It pleases me to have an opportunity to give them a new home on the restoration prairie. I don’t think it helpful to have an image in my head that the restoration should match, because I doubt that I have enough imagination to see any image other than a pale approximation of the nearby prairie in my pastures. Rather, I will hope to see what develops over the next couple years and manage for my enjoyment, and to achieve some of these goals.
And this leads to the third lesson, which is that I already should be planning for management on the restoration. The gravel pit has developed some species diversity and distribution without any management. Could we have done better with active management? I will probably find out in a few years, because the gravel pit will probably get burned with the restoration field in a few years. In eight years, when the CRP contract has ended it will likely become part of a grazing system with the adjoining restoration. In the meantime I will be doing some weed control, both mechanical and chemical, and perhaps some remedial seeding. But I need to remember the second lesson, humility, as well. Perhaps the changing climate means that brome and Kentucky bluegrass are integral parts of the restoration 100 years from now, or perhaps some invasive grass that has not even yet reached South Dakota. I am 64 years old with health issues. I may not even see the end of the CRP contract and management will then move to other family members or to someone who buys the land, something over which I will likely have no control. In the meantime I will humbly do my best to guide the management to accomplish some of the goals I mentioned and perhaps some other goals I haven’t yet discovered. Its going to be a lot of fun!
Plains muhly working its way into a disturbed areaA lonely switchgrass plant in a sea of brome
Hard times are coming. Time is short. Be ready or accept the consequences.
I am not trying to riff on a revival style preacher, but I had the opportunity to spend several days last week on my prairies and there is almost an ominous feel to the countryside. The growing season is not over; hopefully we have a month or more with green, but the landscape is tired. The native grasses are turning various shades of tan and bronze; leaves have damage from diseases, insects and hard weather. Most wildflowers are done blooming, and many have senesced and are disappearing. Goldenrods and asters, the flowers of fall, are still blooming, along with a few sunflowers and gentians, hurrying to develop viable seed. With time short some plants just put their heads into the harness collars and pull for the finish. With some luck, there will still be blooms for 2-3 more weeks and the season won’t slip away too soon.
Silky aster (Symphyotrichum sericeum) and gray goldenrod (Solidago nemoralis)Aromatic asters on a hilltopSawtooth sunflower (Helianthus grosseserratus) along the edge of a drawDowny gentian (Gentiana puberulenta)
Some other denizens of the prairie are also feeling the weight of the oncoming hard times. For much of August our hills were covered with blooming stiff sunflowers (Helianthus pauciflorus). It appeared that I would be able to pick many bushels of heads for seed, but the maturing heads become an opportunity for some residents.
A garden of stiff sunflowers and dotted gayfeather (Liatris punctata). Looks like a bountiful seed harvest to come.
I had always assumed that deer were the culprit, fattening up for winter by filling their stomachs with sunflower heads; and that may be true, but then I saw evidence of another, unknown suspect.
Whose pantry is this?And this is what is left after someone decapitated these plants.
Most likely, pocket gophers are storing the heads, or shelling out and storing the seeds, as there are usually mounds nearby, but my friend Ben Lardy suggested Franklin’s ground squirrels. Whoever or whatever is clipping and gathering the seedheads does so without harming the plants, which are still waving in the breeze, headless. Waiting for Ichabod Crane, I guess. In any case, I still hope to gather a substantial amount of stiff sunflower heads, though they aren’t ready yet. We will see what is left in a couple weeks.
This mystery of the sunflower thief is a good example of what draws me to these hills. I am increasingly protective of my time at the prairies and sometimes almost desperate for the opportunity to immerse myself in prairie life. My mortality is like a garment I wear these days, and fall has become very poignant to me. My breathing, and thus my stamina, is touchy. My trach means that I am always a half step from pneumonia. The days I spent at the prairie last week were warm and sunny, but now we are in for several days of cold fall rain reminding me of summer’s loss. But even with the rain I am drawn to the prairie hills. They call me with a gentle song: “Come to us. Abide with us. Join with our warmth and our life. Commune with us and become whole”
All the posts in this blog have so far referred to 100 acres in the southwest quarter of my home section that I have planted (and am still planting) as a prairie restoration. I have not yet mentioned that I have also seeded 54 acres in the northeast quarter to a diverse native mixture as well. This post will discuss the seeding, what I hope to accomplish with it and why I have made the decisions that I have made.
The easiest way to discuss this seeding is to refer to the aerial images below, because it tells several stories.
This is a blowup of a 30 year old photo of the quarter showing every acre farmed except the tree claim in the northeast corner. This was always considered the best farmground we had, growing wheat, oats barley, flax, rye, millet and alfalfa while I was growing up (before we became part of the corn belt). Even in very wet years my father would just be patient and all the acres would dry up enough to raise a crop. Over the past twenty five years that has not been true.
This is a map of the CRP planted of the quarter. There is now a linear wetland that starts in the northwest part of the quarter and bisects it as it continues to the southeast. The crosshatching are the acres now considered wetland by the Soil Conservation Service. The wetland then enters a marsh in our farmyard which is at the bottom, right of the picture. Part of this linear wetland has not been farmed for 20 years or so. The waterway hardly flows, as it is almost flat, but it has a perched water table that is near the surface in dry years and hovers several inches above the surface in wet years.
What caused the soil layering that creates the perched water table? A recent advance of the Wisconsin glaciation stopped just west of my farm. As the ice melted a large area of poorly sorted outwash sand and gravel was laid down to the east of the melting glacier, covering almost 200 acres on the west side of my farm. The meltwater also left about 40 acres of better sorted sand and gravel on my northeast quarter as the water flowed southeast towards the Big Sioux River. Layering in these soils is not consistent, but generally there is a layer of silt 2-3 feet deep over a layer of gravel 10-20 feet deep which covers older glacial till, When I was growing up there was never enough excess water percolating down to fill this gravel layer ( in which the water very slowly travels underground southeast to the Big Sioux River). It has often been full the past 20-25 years, causing the linear wetland. About 15 acres that had been excellent farmland 50 years ago is often not farmable.
Though the waterway was obviously developed from glacial water flowing east, there is a divide in the northwest part of the quarter where water now flows back west. As a teenager I had tried to determine exactly where my own “continental” divide occurred, but the grade is so subtle that it was impossible. As glaciers melt there are interesting changes in ground elevation as the ground rebounds as the weight of the ice is removed. Many times I have wished to be able to travel back in time to see the drama and spectacle of those geologic forces.
What does all this have to do with my decision to plant 55 acres back to grass? First, because of the newly created wetland acres I was able to enroll in the continuous Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) at a fair rental rate. I am retiring the 15 acres of wet ground plus about 25 acres of the droughtiest gravel soils, with only about 15 acres of the better crop ground going into CRP. The remaining 100 acres of the quarter are productive soils which will remain as farm ground. Second, as I wrote earlier, there is very likely a slow underground flow beneath the CRP and I consider the CRP a small step towards cleaner water entering the Big Sioux River and thence the Missouri and the Mississippi. Third, the grass habitat will almost finish a grass corridor between the grasslands which occur to my west and the grasslands along the Big Sioux River. I don’t know what species might be helped by this connection, but prairie grouse come to mind. Fourth, though I don’t hunt anymore, the CRP could provide an area for pheasant and deer cover, and an area someone might wish to hunt.
So why aren’t I looking at this as a prairie restoration? The main reason is the shape of the CRP acreage. It is narrow and surrounded by crop ground. Herbicide drift will inevitably affect forb species in this field. The conservation district planted this in the fall of 2017. Though the planting job here was better than the job on my restoration field, I have topdressed parts of it with a seed harvested from a native prairie in Minnesota, adding 15-20 new species to supplement the 20 that were planted earlier.
I am not going to use any of the seed I have gathered on my relict prairies on this field, however, nor any expensive purchased forb species. While I have committed to spending a lot of money on the 100 acre restoration, I feel the need to limit expenses elsewhere; I will go all out on the restoration on the southwest quarter and be a bit more conservative on the northeast quarter.
Finally, some of this will probably return to crop production when the CRP contract ends. I have nine years to evaluate options and put together a plan, but I am likely going to leave a very generous waterway and allow the farmer renting the crop acres at that time to break up some of the better acres of the CRP. The majority of the CRP will likely be fenced and become a pasture, probably joined with the farmplace to the south where a water source will be easy to develop.
Again, what do I wish for my 55 acre CRP seeding that is not quite a prairie restoration? I hope it provides water quality protection, a pathway for sharptail grouse and upland sandpipers and a nice area for deer to bed. I hope to see warm season prairie grasses turning various shades of bronze and gold in the fall. I hope to provide some habitat for a variety of insects. I hope it will provide grazing and allow rotation with my native pastures, allowing better management of the native grass. And I really hope to enjoy walking through it during the time I have left.
Speculations on Natural History
