Category: <span>Speculations on Natural History</span>

Speculations on Natural History

Progress Part 2

Last spring I wrote a post with lots of pretty photos showing a group of early blooming forbs I was seeing in my restoration and called it “Progress”. Soon after that I took a series of pictures which I meant to be reflective of density of seedling establishment specifically in an area where I had seen almost no perennial seedlings the year before. Before I get to the pictures I will once again show my map of seeding zones on the restoration.

Zones 1 and 2 got enough seed from the original seeding to have little need or room for the additional seed I have since spread. Zone 4, on the other hand received almost no seed in the original seeding, grew up to Canada thistle, and is being managed to control thistles. Which brings us to Zone 3, a gravelly, very xeric soil which got almost no seed from the original seeding. It has been topdressed repeatedly with supplemental seed and is where the most interesting things are happening (and is where I spend most of my time when I am out at the restoration).

So what was I seeing last summer? What I was seeing on most of Zone 3 was wonderful progress in establishment of seedlings from the many times I spread supplemental seed. Here’s several pictures from June. They show many crowns of perennial grass and seedling forbs. When I closely examined the areas I estimated 25-30 species in a 5′ diameter circle.

All these shots were from the southwest part of Zone 3 on a hilltop

Not everything that is green in these pictures was planted by me of course. There are plenty of opportunistic weed species to go with the native plants, and the fact that these hills were barren for almost two years allowed many weeds to establish. Much of the area was a jungle by the time it was mowed in mid-July. Still, I don’t want to diminish the excitement that I felt when I realized that all the money and work was turning into something with potential. During the year the restoration raised a family of sharptail grouse, was used by upland sandpipers, various grassland sparrows and dickcissels; and was visited by countless bees of many species.

I think I have one more year of hard work spot treating thistles and then we will see what this becomes. I will be watching particularly for reproduction of the forbs. Many grasses are almost immortal because of clonal reproduction by root and crown, and that can allow them to “choke out” or at least outlive the forbs. I don’t think that this will happen on most of the restoration for a variety of reasons, but am hoping to learn the management techniques to combat this, foremost of which will be the use of fire and grazing. The gravelly soils will benefit the xeric adapted forbs as there is less chance of an impenetrable sod forming, allowing seedlings to establish. There is likely always going to be room for a new generation of seedlings, especially with grazing.

Sawtooth sunflower, Helianthus grosseserratus
Symphyotrichum sp., probably oolentangiense, sky blue aster

Something similar was seen in the wet area of the northeast patch on Zone 2. The aster is from a mesic area above the wetland in the northeast part of the restoration, and was one of several blooming this fall. The revelation was down in the wetland itself shown in the first picture. This is a particularly robust specimen of sawtooth sunflower growing on some subirrigated soil, close to 10 feet tall. This picture was taken in mid-September, not June, so it’s hard to pick out all the different species in the riotous growth, but I was thrilled to see not just what I planted, but rushes and sedges that were either already there or traveled in from nearby wetlands. This is an area where farming was commonly delayed or was left fallow because of excess moisture the past 20 years. How heartening it is to see the rich site producing biomass and using some of the nutrients that were potentially being leached or transported downstream. This is reflective of several acres of the restoration, and a similar site to the wetter area on the 20 acres of new restoration that I seeded last fall where I hope to see the same results.

Restoration ecologists and conservationists often speak in dry tones about ecosystem services, and I have written about the services I hope my prairie provides in past posts. There is something more we need to feed the soul, though, even the soul of a boring old Norwegian farm boy. With all my health problems it can be difficult for me to feel joy these days. On most days a sense of quiet satisfaction would be the high point of my emotional day. Yet I can find joy in my prairies, and in my restoration. And there is great satisfaction now, after three years, to feel there is something developing that can be a legacy.

A reasonable question to ask is: A legacy recognized by who? My daughters, certainly, but the circle is steadily widening. There is Ben, who has helped on the project from the start, of course, but there are perhaps 8-10 other people who have helped gather or spread seed now who have a vested interest in the success of the restoration. A young woman interning with the Nature Conservancy used my land as a site in a research project. I am now cooperating with another young woman who works for Ducks Unlimited. And then, much to my surprise, I had a couple other visitors last summer. My advisor from my MS program, Paul, and an private crop consultant, Kim, who lives 90 miles west of here, were guests at a barbeque I sponsor every year for a group of agronomists to allow a time to brainstorm or just let off steam, and both really wanted to see the restoration. Paul’s son, Leif, who now works for the Nature Conservancy, came along to the gathering, and was certainly interested in what I was doing. But I was very surprised at the interest of Paul and Kim. One would assume that both would feel that the highest use for land is farming, as that is where both spent their careers, but they took a short tour of my restoration and agreed that it was a project of great worth. So if it can also be a vehicle to allow old farmer/agronomists to dream and ponder, then the reach of my prairie widens, and there is another sort of ecosystem service provided.

My dream, for several years, has been to have a retirement business of putting together a group of like minded people to buy, restore and monetize awkward pieces of land. I might elaborate on what I mean by an awkward piece of land another time, but in short it would include marginal farm ground. It’s a valid concept if you accept that you are doing it for fun and societal benefit rather than to actually make money. The trouble is that ten years ago when I started to dream on the possibilities I didn’t take into account the health issues we have as we get older, and the physical and sometimes existential fatigue that envelops us. There is a reason that people retire rather than work until they are 80. My dream business is a pipe dream, no more, and my own farm is more than I can probably handle. But there are many people like me who have a farm they grew up on and still cherish, often from afar. And perhaps I can inspire one to go down the road that I walked, and restore some prairie where they grew up. I have never seen myself as evangelical, but I now have the example to preach about. At least I will try to be a good example.

Speculations on Natural History

My New Restoration

I’ve alluded in the past to a new 20 acre restoration that I had planned to do. The planning is over now, as I was able to get it seeded the first week of November, right before I had my life changing surgery. You might say that this is the third iteration of a restoration that I have done, my third try at doing something great with the crappy soils on the west end of the farm where I grew up. My first attempt was a nine species planting made on 36 acres on the southeast side of Anderson Lake, a botched attempt if the goal was a prairie restoration. I just didn’t think big enough because I was mostly concerned with getting some cover over some unproductive, erodible farm ground. That was accomplished, but so much more could have been done. I have regretted my lack of vision ever since it was seeded and vowed to do better if I got another chance.

The second iteration was the 100 acres that most of this blog has been about. It’s still hard to evaluate its success after three years, as so much has been reseeded over the top of the original seeding. Actions that I take next summer, particularly on Canada thistle control, could mean the difference between something I am proud of and a project I have deep ambivalence about.

Still, much has gone right there. I have seen almost 100 of the 147 species that were seeded, including many that were gathered from my adjacent prairies. Many forbs that I really wanted to see are already common, such as slender penstemon, tall cinquefoil, black samson, alumroot and prairie onion. Others, such as pasqueflower, groundplum milkvetch and prairie smoke are more widely scattered, though I hope to find more in the future. It was a big undertaking though, and there were painful lessons learned.

And so we went forward with the third iteration . The Day County Conservation District brought up a drill and a base mix of 20-25 species was drilled over the entire site, and then the real fun began. I had purchased and gathered another 70 species, and spent two days spreading them over appropriate environments across the 20 acres. Some were combined in large enough quantities that my compatriot Ben Lardy and I were able to put them in a broadcast spreader and pull it around to appropriate areas. Much was spread by hand, which allowed us to get very specific as to where they went. At the end of the two days I was very satisfied that I had done my very best and was able to go to the hospital at peace with a project I had been working on for a year. Though parts of this have been written in past blog posts, it seems worthwhile to summarize the year’s work leading up to the seeding.

Home Section showing 100 acre restoration in lower left and new restoration in upper left
Close-up of the northwest quarter showing the trade. I now own and have seeded the restoration on the land in the upper right corner

The first step was getting the land. The 20 acres is part of a 120 acre inholding in my home section that an uncle and aunt of mine originally owned, the north half of the northeast quarter of the northwest quarter. Shown on the maps above, it had been prairie when I was growing up. There was a trail across it to our 40 to the west, and I have clear memories of riding across native grass as we went to work on the west pasture. It was broken out of grass in the early 80’s, but there was a reason it had been left in prairie until then. It is a truly crappy piece of farmland, outwash gravel hills surrounding a waterway that seeps and makes the only decent soils unfarmable. It clearly should never have been broken. Thus, a big reason to do this is to right an old wrong, and while I can’t make it what it was I can still do the right thing, which is to do the best that I can.

The next step was to plan out the seeding and to gather as much native seed as possible to use in the restoration. I wrote a blog post in mid-summer lamenting the lack of seedheads this past year because of a warm, dry summer. Unfortunately, that didn’t change as summer turned to fall. In comparison to the previous wet year, there was perhaps 25-30% as much seed to gather. I supplemented that by gathering at some other prairies which weren’t as droughty, but in the end had to give in and buy more seed than I had originally planned. I did my best, though, repeatedly wandering over the hills on my farm, trying not to take every seed out there. Some species, such as porcupine grass, groundplum and blanketflower, I did well on. Others, like leadplant, prairie onion, silky aster, pasqueflower and whorled milkweed were almost total washouts. And, of course, that leaves many species in the middle, providing a significant amount of seed, but necessitating some purchases I hadn’t planned. Something that helped was that I had the pleasure of gathering three or four species on my 100 acre restoration that had grown from seed I had gathered in my prairies and spread there two or three years ago.

The field was in wheat last summer, but the wheat was so thin in a dry year that the straw was no problem. Here’s what we were seeding into.

A couple views of the stubble that was seeded into

And so we got to have our fun as early November gave us several sunny, beautiful days for work. That was two months ago, and very little precipitation has yet fallen , but the magic of a fall seeding is that we really don’t need much precipitation to begin the stratification process that most seeds need to overcome a natural dormancy. It wouldn’t make much evolutionary sense for seeds to germinate in October in the northern plains, so most seeds need a period of refrigeration, preferably with just a little moisture, to change their inherent reluctance to germinate and face the world. It is happening now.

Again one could say that this is my third try at a prairie restoration, so it is time to discuss what I have learned to make this better than the first two attempts. The first attempt was eight years ago on 36 acres on the section to the west. On the map above it would be just to the left, with only a small strip showing on the map. I seeded nine species, of which seven are still in the field. At the time, I was too cheap and had an inadequate vision of what could be realized. Then I went a little crazy on Iteration Two, the 100 acre restoration that was seeded three years ago. There are 147 species that were seeded there, but many species were seeded at such miniscule rates that I may never see them in the restoration, or the few scattered plants will fail to find pollination partners and die unloved. For that iteration, I gathered as much seed as I could locally, but I also purchased small packets of species that don’t occur in my prairies but have been found in my neighborhood.

As you may have already guessed, this is a Goldilocks situation, and I am searching for the answer that is “just right”. I don’t know if I found that, but I decided that I would try to seed significant quantities of every species that I was able to. And with a few exceptions I would only seed species that were already found in one of the adjacent native prairies. If only a few plants of a particular species are able to establish they will have compatriots nearby. This allows cross pollination to occur and will mean that those few plants may be able to make a contribution to the greater gene pool and to evolutionary development of the species locally.

This is also much easier to do on a 20 acre piece than on a 100 acre piece. When we were hand spreading seeds of individual species in November we could feel that we had covered the appropriate environments on the entire field. I took on too much when I tried to do a 100 acre restoration. There were practical reasons that drove that decision, but if the goal was to create a restoration which would have an intuitive connection to the native prairies nearby, it was too big. In the end what I have now in that field is a 40 acre restoration, along with a 40 acre diverse prairie seeding and a 20 acre grass planting that may be turned back into farmland eventually.

Going back to the idea of a lesson learned, what I learned meant that I didn’t try to do a second 20 acres. I will manage this 20 acres for a year or two, along with putting time into the 100 acre restoration, and then I can decide if the next 20 acres gets restored.

The third lesson was that more care needed to be taken with the seeding itself. The sloppiness of the manner in which the 100 acres was seeded will haunt me for the rest of my days. It necessitated multiple fixes which will never truly fix it. I hope to have the time, opportunity and physical stamina to spot treat the Canada thistles across the 100 acres this summer. It will be a Sisyphean task, perpetually rolling the boulder up the hill, but I will try. There will always be thistles in any perennial seeding in my area, but I hope to help the establishing forbs get the opportunity to get roots down. Much of the area is xeric enough that the thistles should be at a disadvantage once more drought tolerant species get a foothold.

And so I was able to set up a preferred fall seeding, rather than the late spring seeding date I was stuck with on the 100 acre restoration. A Truax drill was used, rather than the John Deere grain drill that caused the problems in seed distribution on the 100 acre restoration, and I was able to be there during the process, watching to see how everything went. It is still possible there will be bare areas because of drill malfunction, but not likely. This will hopefully make it less likely that the thistles get the same foothold on this seeding, as well facilitate erosion control. I have high expectations that I will be seeing some results by mid to late summer.

Finally, I think that I learned what I really want to accomplish with the restoration. More than anything else I want the restoration to be an extension of habitat for the plants and the attendant fauna that are adapted to the gravelly outwash hills of the area. Bigger picture ecosystem services such as water quality improvement and carbon sequestration come along for the ride. I really want to see more groundplum and maybe some prairie turnips. I want to see grasshopper sparrows and upland sandpipers. I want to see, God willing, a Dakota skipper butterfly nectaring on a black samson flower from seed that I gathered and spread. I want the 80 acres of existing prairie to grow and develop into 200 acres of prairie under the protective umbrella of the perpetual easement that I hope to put on the restorations. Much depends upon what I accomplish in the next few years to put things on the right track. And after that, forever is a long time that I humbly bow before.

And I can dream of finding lots of native forbs such as the alumroot from the adjoining prairie to the west

Speculations on Natural History

And then the World Changed

I haven’t written a post for a long time, though it’s not because nothing has happened. Quite the opposite, as the Buddhists say, “Life is on fire.”

So what has changed for me? The big change is that I had a big surgery, a laryngectomy, about seven weeks ago. A laryngectomy removes the voice box, the larynx, which allows total separation of the two pathways that normally are conjoined in the mouth, food and air. Now my lungs are only connected to a hole, a stoma, in my throat. Nothing that goes in my mouth can get to my trachea or lungs. Similarly, my mouth (and my nose) are only connected to my esophagus and stomach. I am unable to blow my nose because there is no source of air to push. Coughing only concerns my lungs, not my mouth or nose, though old reflexes mean there are still complementary spasms in my throat, but they are “all dressed up with no place to go”. The core reason to do this was to eliminate aspiration, the leakage of material from my mouth and throat into my lungs, which was causing me to have repeated lung infections leading sometimes to pneumonia. As my surgeon told me when suggesting the procedure: “If you think you can continue to regularly get pneumonia and live a long life you are mistaken.”

So this is my love song to my family. I would undergo a difficult surgery (which actually ended up as three surgeries over the course of a week because of difficulties), go through a tough recovery with various complications, and lose my voice; and the trade-off will hopefully be that I will be there for them for a long time. No promises, no surety, nothing that provides a warm blanket of comfort around the process. Simply put, “Do I want to take a shot?” Big risks and big rewards. I decided to roll the dice.

That was seven weeks ago. So how has it gone?

To start with, as I said, my radiation damaged tissues didn’t want to cooperate so, as I said, one surgery turned into three, the last surgery yanking my right pectoral muscle up from my chest to put it around my neck to stabilize and cover the other work. With three surgeries, three areas of skin were borrowed from my legs to put the seal over the top, leaving me with what looks like the worst sunburn you have ever seen. A chunk was taken out of my right arm, borrowed to form a new esophagus to replace my old radiation damaged esophagus that was basically causing all my problems. And now Frankenstein lives.

As difficult as this has been, and I have purposely left out many gory details and anecdotes, I would be remiss not to mention a couple side benefits of the surgery. First, it should allow me to breathe better. This is not yet true, as I work through healing and management of my new paraphenalia. If I can work through a couple issues my breathing should not be as limited as it was through the tiny opening of my trachaeostomy tube. We will see. The second benefit is the ability to eat now that I don’t have to worry about aspirating food into my lungs. The reformed esophagus is significantly wider than my throat used to be and I am getting about half of my calories orally now, learning what foods I can manage and what foods my stomach and gut can manage. It’s not easily predictable, but more of a trial and error process. Two nights ago was an error and I was up most of the night with a protesting digestive system. It is pretty interesting to eat again though. My somewhat phlegmatic personality is overwhelmed by my subconscious saying, “Hell, yes, I’ll have some of that!”

So the winter is for healing and therapy, probably into February. What therapy can accomplish will be interesting. I am late to start therapy, primarily because I have been occupied with some serious challenges to healing. Hopefully I can make some progress this winter and be ready for a fun and productive spring. And if the Covid vaccine truly becomes widely available then an expansive life can begin anew. The world has changed and I need to respond appropriately to learn how to live an abundant life in this new world.

oo

Speculations on Natural History

Gathering Seed 2020

Though the bulk of prairie seed gathering occurs in August and September, I have begun gathering a few of the early blooming species as they become ready. What a difference a year makes! Last year was a bit cooler than average and very wet. This spring and early summer’s rainfall is less than half of average and perhaps only 25% of last year. Temperatures have been about 2-3 degrees above average. The effects of a warm dry year are accentuated by the lack of water storage in the gravel hills of my prairies. I was spoiled last year by large seed crops on many wildflower species which this year are failing to bloom. The corn and soybeans in the area, primarily on deeper soils with significant water storage are suffering, though still growing, and withering on light soils. My crop is no different in needing water, but native prairie plants evolutionary history has weathered many droughts more significant than this, and it is interesting to see how the different species respond.

1976 and 1988 are the two serious droughts in my memory, when there was no life visible, and all good prairie plants were cowering at or under the ground, hiding from the relentless heat and drought. This is not 1988, however, and the different species are engaging in a wonderful balancing act: how to divide up the limited carbohydrates they are able to make. Do they risk putting scant resources into showy flowers and expensive seed or do they hunker down and feed roots or new meristematic tissue. That contrast is very noticeable in comparing the blooms this year of the black samson (Echinacea angustifolia) to last year.

Here was what many hills looked like the past two years
And this is 2020

If you look closely at the hills this year the relationship becomes obvious. Judging by the ubiquitious nature of black samson in my prairies they are a winner in the “Who gets to live on the gravel hills?” sweepstakes. Evolution has created a plant which responds to the clues of the year and makes a proper decision. this year a majority of the plants look like this.

Vegetative black samson

Note that the plants look healthy and vigorous, not drought stricken. In business its called conserving working capital. Do I spend money (stored carbohydrates and new photosynthate) on a dicey business proposal (making seeds during a drought) or do I hold on to my working capital to take me through hard times (drought) and have it available for a better business opportunity ( such as making seed next year). The penalty for a business which uses too much capital on a losing proposition is bankruptcy; not fun, but you live to try again. A plant that is unwisely profligate with its resources dies. It loses in the evolutionary race to pass it’s genes down. Human genotypes which make unwise business decisions still pass on their genes, perhaps to another generation of bad decision makers. Much less pressure.

Of course the calculation is different for every species in every year. A long lived species like black samson can afford to wait a year to make seed. A short lived perennial like blanketflower (Gaillardia aristata) is under more pressure to make seed and unlikely to give up on blooming. I am gathering blanketflower seed right now and while there is far less seed than last year there are plenty of seedheads to pick.

Many other forbs are reacting to the weather the same way. Here are a couple other examples,

Green milkweed (Asclepias viridiflora). Perhaps 10% of the plants bloomed this year.
Prairie turnip (Pediomelum esculentum) to the left of my glove and a brown alumroot (Huechera richardsonii) to the right. About half of the prairie turnip bloomed and about 20% of the alumroot.

Finally, I will mention one of the few successes I have had in collecting seed this year. Porcupine grass (Stipa spartea) has had a great year, a cool season grass which made wonderful growth from stored soil water and our few spring rains. One could say the same thing, however, about smooth brome (Bromus inermis), which is competing for resources in most of the areas that harbor porcupine grass. Perhaps its the warm spring; perhaps it was the drought tolerance of the native grass. In any case it was dangerous to walk through the gauntlet of spears, but with time and patience I was able to gather a significant amount.

Here’s a close-up

It was easy to gather by grabbing 5-10 heads and slide the heads through my gloves coming up with 10-20 seeds at a time. There is the down side of having the little spears sticking out of me and working their way through my shoelaces and into my socks. A small price to pay. I hope to have that kind of experience with some other species this summer. We shall see.

Speculations on Natural History

Progress

It has been a while since I last posted because my messy life gets in the way of all plans and schemes. It has been a very nice spring, especially the last three or four weeks, and I have been trying very hard to accomplish something outside every day, even if it just to walk in the spring breeze on my restoration. There are a limited number of days that the combination of decent weather, decent health and the time and opportunity converge and those possibilities can collapse into an experience (that’s a metaphor from quantum theory, but I am not a physicist so it’s probably a bad one). Right now, thankfully, that may be four or five days per week, but that doesn’t mean next week or next month will provide the same opportunity. And while I am definitely making plans for future years, I have no illusions; it is my responsibility to live now, and not live in the future. Thus I have been out looking around, and these are are some of the things I have been seeing.

First, I need to return to the make-up of the restoration: zone 4 is being managed to control Canada thistle and has almost no wildflowers, so only 75 acres can still be called a prairie restoration. And only 50 acres has the full panoply of gathered seed spread, as Zone 1 received extra seed when the Day County Conservation District drill performed the original seeding and there was no room at the inn for added plants. The situation demanded that I go big on the restoration, but 100 acres is a lot to manage for one person, and mistakes will be made. Thus, most of the writing and the pictures I show are on half the restoration, particularly on Zone 3 on the map below. With that I will show some of the plants that I have been finding the last couple weeks.

Blue eyed grass (Sisyrinchium campestre), picture by Ben Lardy
Silky aster (Symphyotrichum sericeum), picture by Ben Lardy
Field Pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta)
Prairie smoke (Geum triflorum)
White penstemon (Penstemon albidus), a plant that I gathered a great deal of seed from and the results are very satisfying
Prairie violet (Viola pedatifida), picture by Ben Lardy

The common thread on all these is that they are growing in Zone 3, where almost no seed was applied in the original CRP seeding. This means that almost everything I see was spread one of the innumerable times it seemed we were adding more seed, perhaps 5 or 6 times in areas. Some, like the blue eyed grass, the pussytoes and the white penstemon had only gathered seed tor a source. Others, like the silky aster, the prairie violet and the prairie smoke were a mixture of purchased and gathered seed.

The most gratifying discovery of the spring, however, was finding several blooming groundplums (Astragalus crassicarpus). There are three or four forb species which for some reason have an iconic status for me. One of those is groundplum, aka buffalo beans. I began eating buffalo beans over fifty years ago, after learning about them from my Polish grandmother. I have assiduously been gathering pods and in many cases manually tearing apart the dried pods to get seeds out. A little sandpaper for scarification and refrigeration for stratification. And then some Astragalus specific Rhizobia to help the legume with nitrogen fixation when they are spread finishes the process. I have not been that careful or diligent in preparing all the seed that I have gathered, but this was a labor of love. And damned if it didn’t work! I saw four or five this spring and I think it likely there will be many more visible next year. There are many challenges still occurring and more to come, but I will relish a success when I get one.

Groundplum milkvetch (Astragalus crassicarpus)

A preliminary count now shows 49 species identified in the restoration, and many more forb crowns still unidentified. I will wait until this fall, and then post a list of species found. Also, with the help of a young Brazilian entomologist/agronomist I now have the samples taken for the baseline measurements for a long term study on the ability of the restoration to sequester carbon. More on that in the future. Also in the future is the discussion on how to respond to the various problems I have in the restoration. Life is not all sunbeams and buffalo beans. For now, though I leave you with one final success, not due to any efforts of mine, but the vagaries of wind, weather or animals.

Fringed puccoon (Lithospermum incisum)

There are plenty of fringed puccoon in the pasture nearby, but I don’t remember being able to gather any seed, and I know that I didn’t buy any seed, so the seed for this plant seems to have wandered over on its own. This is a phenomena I hope to document for other species in the future.

Speculations on Natural History

Spring Prairie

Over the weekend I took a long walk on Linda’s grazing unit, 340 acres about 15 miles east of where we live. Here’s a few things I ran into.

First pasqueflower of the spring

As I type this three days later it is snowing lightly and has not been above freezing for two days; thus any brave pasqueflowers which had emerged are well frozen. Still, its always a treat to see the first flowers of spring.

This little guy was the least shy of a bundle of four garter snakes

I was a little surprised to see snakes out this early, with the temps in the mid 50’s, but they were vigorous enough to scoot when I tried to get a close-up photo.

I don’t know the species, but ant mounds like this are ubiquitous in all the prairies around here
A teeming mass of ants milling about in the spring sunshine

It wasn’t a surprise to see the ants out. A sunny, 35 degree day in March will bring them to the surface. I don’t know how old the colony in the first picture is, but it is about 18 inches high. When I was growing up there was a colony just behind our house which was there for at least 30 years. Perhaps a large mound like that is even older.

Pando is inspecting one of 10-15 divots created by the local badger population. Groups of holes like this compete with the rocks as impediments to travel across the pastures.

While it is cold today, and I am under the weather, I hope that warmer weather later this week coincides with resurgent health to allow another walk very soon.

Speculations on Natural History

Building a Prairie Unit

For over a year I’ve been posting short essays centered around a 100 acre prairie restoration on the farm where I grew up in Day County, South Dakota. The blog has slowly expanded to the restoration’s place within the entire “home farm”, 590 acres including other native prairie pastures and haylands as well as cropped ground. That is not all the land that my wife and I own, however. We have also accumulated 420 acres of native grass pastures in several transactions which are managed within our cattle LLC, a business set up to own the pastures and cow herd that grazes them, and which allowed us to take on a partner, Mark, a young farmer who lives ten miles east of us.

The story begins 36 or 37 years ago when I visited with a middle aged farmer from 15 miles northeast of where we now live who had hired me to take soil samples on his crop fields. After a few minutes lining up that work we began visiting about the pasture which took up almost all of his home quarter. I complimented him on its excellent range condition and asked if I could take a walk in it. He was flattered, and said I could walk in it anytime. Though it was grazed, it was full of four foot tall indiangrass and big bluestem seedheads waving in the October sun.

I kept an eye on the pasture over the next couple years, and soon noticed the quarter to the north was almost as good. The owner had recently gone bankrupt in the carnage of the farm crisis of the 1980’s, and the pasture was ungrazed. I couldn’t resist trespassing to have a look around, and found a good quality tall grass prairie.

Why hadn’t these prairies been turned into corn and soybeans like the rest of the neighborhood? The glacial history had left a legacy of boulders that you can literally step across in some areas without touching the ground, as well as an intricate network of wetlands. In between the rocks and the water is a deep, rich clay loam soil as productive as any in the area. You might call it the “Flint Hills effect” after the area in Kansas and Oklahoma which houses the largest area of remnant of tall grass prairie, still there because the underlying geology makes farming too painful.

This huge erratic (about 9 feet long and many tons) even has a beautiful bowl on one end, perhaps for ritual cleansing before we enter the pasture
Much of the pasture looks like this, almost impossible to farm

From there we move forward to the year 2000 and a conversation with Russ, a client from that neighborhood. He was attempting to buy a quarter of farm ground about two miles south of the pastures I’ve discussed, and mentioned there was an adjacent 80 of pasture he wasn’t interested in. He encouraged me to look into it. The pasture wasn’t impressive when looking at it from the road, but made a better impression as I walked across it. The fences were crap and there was no stock dam for water, just a shallow scrape which would dry up in a drought, but there was 40 or 50 acres of decent quality prairie. I saw potential there.

The realtor I went to visit was a nice gentleman named Chuck. ” Bobbie thinks she has a buyer for the 80,” he informed me, “but I don’t think it is a done deal, I’m not her agent on the pasture, but I’d like to see her treated fairly. If you think you have financing I will inform her of your interest.”

A few days later I got a call from Chuck. “The deal on the 80 fell through. The buyer said he would be by with a check on Tuesday and didn’t show. You know how worried old people get. She cancelled the sale at the end of the day and wouldn’t even talk to him the next day. Now, she is going to give you each a chance to rebid. Get me your bid in the next couple days and I will present it to her.

I went home to talk to my wife, Linda, who was very nervous about the whole deal. She was, however very interested in grazing cattle. She has a degree in range management and a great affinity for creatures great and small. She had also recently had a bad experience where a business relationship with a neighbor to manage his cow herd had been yanked from under her, which left her bitterly disappointed. Linda was born to run cattle. Because of that I had recently bid on a quarter of pasture at an auction but had been outbid. We also had just finished paying off the mortgage on the little farm where we live, freeing up some cash flow. I resolutely put in a bid of $28,000, $350 per acre, figuring we would have well over $400 per acre into it after fencing and cleaning out the waterhole, which was the high end of the pasture market at that time.

The next day I was back in the realtor’s office. He stood there shaking his head, “Poor Bobbie doesn’t know what to do. You both bid the same amount. She is thinking about re-advertising the land. She really wants to be done with this, though. What would you like me to do?”

The realtor was tramping down the path in front of me, sweeping the leaves away and inviting me through the gate. That’s how it seemed to me, anyway. The other bidder must have really pissed him off. He wouldn’t have done this if the land had been listed with his realty, but he wasn’t going to make a dime off the sale; he was doing this as a friend.

“Would you be willing to take her a bid for $28,500?” I asked.

“I would be happy to do that,” he said. And a couple days later we got to sign the papers purchasing what we now call Bobbie’s 80.

Because of the native prairie and the many wetlands on the pasture we were able to obtain US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) easements on it, which took some financial pressure off us, becoming a late down payment. At that time we had no cattle, so it was used for horse pasture, hayed and rented out for several years. It was also the site of many enjoyable walks.

The next opportunity came five years later. Russ had the chance to buy another piece of land which included 210 acres of grass, the land I had walked over about 20 years before. The grass was intertwined with the farmland, so was being sold as a 480 acre unit. I walked the land again and hesitated a bit, as the intervening years had not been kind to the pasture. Leafy spurge had greatly increased, necessitating herbicide treatments which had almost eliminated native forbs without really controlling the spurge. Nothing but rudimentary patching had been done to the fence for twenty years, and it was a mess. The dugout was badly silted in, necessitating an intricate piping system by the last renter to bring water from the farm site half a mile away. And it had been badly overgrazed, meaning the mosaic of tall prairie grasses I had seen were no longer evident.

Once again, the components were still there, however. The native grass bunches were still visible within the bromegrass and spurge. There were still some native forbs. Fences can be rebuilt and dugouts cleaned out. We told Russ what we would be willing to pay him, so he had that in his hip pocket when he went to the auction, and we were soon the owners of 210 more acres of native grass pasture.

Once more we placed FWS easements on the new pasture, and rented it out while we planned its future. The future of the pasture became secondary to my own future that fall, when life slapped me upside the head. I was diagnosed with stage 3/4 squamous cell cancer of the head and neck about the time of my 51st birthday in the fall of 2006. While my original diagnosis had implied that treatments were rarely successful, I had the good fortune to be referred to Mayo Clinic. At Mayo I came under the care of a prestigious team pioneering a new treatment regimen. All three doctors in the team, the surgeon, the medical oncologist and the radiologist, separately told Linda and me the same story. They would beat the holy hell out of me; I might never work again; I might never eat again; I would lose my saliva and probably lose my teeth; and I might need reconstructive surgery. At the end of my ordeal I would be cured of my cancer. Was I in or out? I signed on without a moment’s hesitation.

The treatments took three months, mostly on site at Mayo. At their conclusion I recuperated in a hospital bed in our living room at home, and within a few weeks I began to get out a little. By summer I was able to get back to work, though I had two separate scares on recurrences of the cancer. A recurrence was even scarier than it sounds because there were no tools left in the toolbox to fight the cancer. Mayo had already shot their wad. Luckily, one of the recurrences wasn’t cancer, and the other one was cut out before it got a chance to spread, so we walked on the proverbial eggshells and tried to get back to something approaching normal life.

About the time I started to feel like I might have a future we heard that Ray, the owner of the pasture that began this essay, had passed away and that the land would be for sale. Russ had been renting the farmland for some time, and was given the opportunity to purchase the farm, and he once more came to us as a partner. Land prices were much higher than when we purchased Bobbie’s 80, we had more debt and my health was still dicey. Linda, who didn’t grow up on a farm, with its attendant comfort with debt, told me she had to go into the bedroom and put a pillow over her head to block out the stress and worry. We still weren’t sure I had beaten the cancer as there seemed to be a new worrisome development every time I visited Mayo.

This was too good of an opportunity to pass up, however. Adding the 130 acres of Ray’s pasture would give us a contiguous 340 acre unit which allowed great flexibility in management, and could be complimented by Bobbie’s 80 which was only two miles away. Russ put a three way deal together on Ray’s two quarters: we would buy the 130 acre pasture, Russ would buy the 150 acres of farmground and a third party would buy 40 acres which included the house, farm buildings and livestock lots. Once again we placed FWS easements on the land which meant that in seven years and three transactions we had permanently conserved 420 acres of prairie.

We had already formed an LLC two years before, which gave us a vehicle to bring in the young neighbor, Mark, who was looking for ways to enlarge his livestock operation. We sold Mark a 50% interest in the LLC at a very reasonable price, but the decision was as selfish as it was altruistic. We had unloaded half the financial risk, bringing the debt down to a very reasonable level, a big concern with my health situation. More important, we now had a young, strong, capable partner who could shoulder at least half the load in both labor and management. Mark winters the cows and feeds out the calves. Linda manages the six months on pasture. Together they make decisions on goals and actions. Though Linda was born in suburban Chicago, she was meant to be born on a ranch where she could care for livestock. Over the course of seven years we got Linda her ranch, composed of 420 acres of prairie. We found a partner for her whose skills complement hers. Thus, while I write blog posts about all my activities on my home farm and its restorations, Linda is doing creative and innovative grassland management with the mouths and hooves of 100 head of stock cows and the attendant calves and bulls. It’s a full and busy life.

Speculations on Natural History

Retirement Manifesto

There are several great existential questions we all face. What is my purpose? What is love? How do I understand and approach God? To me, they all come down to a single question: How do I spend my time? All the metaphysics in the universe disappears at the moment I choose what to do next. Nothing counts until I take an action. That is how I fulfill my purpose, show my love and approach the infinite. The motto of the Benedictines is instructive: “Ora et labora”, prayer and work.

For the past forty years I have tried to answer those existential questions within the framework of my crop consulting business, where I spent half of my waking hours. That path is closing off to me as I turn the business over to my successor, Arne. While Arne is remarkably tolerant of my continued attempts at guidance it is steadily becoming his business. I am working about half time this year, and will retire completely within another year or two. How will I spend my time now?

There is the siren song of retirement: I can travel, visit the kids and have a kick-ass garden. For me there is the added factor of dealing with my health issues. Between tube feeding and trachaeostomy care it is pretty easy to blow an extra two to four hours per day. I have also made contact with the Minnesota Land Trust and the Nature Conservancy, and will begin volunteering later this summer. Already it sounds like a full retirement.

Except that it isn’t. The core frustration is that at 64, through my work history as an adult, I have accumulated over forty years of knowledge, forty years of connections, forty years of history and forty years of watching how things fit together so that good results can happen. How can I waste that?

And so, as always seems to be the case lately, we come back to my restoration and the rest of the 590 acres of the farm where I grew up. I did a little math and it seems that there are four acres for every person living on the planet. That’s four acres of tundra, taiga, temperate forest, prairie, savanna, tropical rain forest, desert and farmland available to grow food, fiber and provide the ecosystem services we need for life to be full and abundant. I am tremendously fortunate to own and control those 590 acres, but with great fortune comes great responsibility. This is a weight I must bear, a grand task I need to give myself to.

The task is to come up with a vision that can turn into actions that elevate the ability of those 590 acres to sequester carbon and harbor Dakota skippers, but also to produce wheat, corn and cattle, clean water and wildlife habitat, and perhaps solace to those who want to wander there. The components of such a plan are staring me in the face, inherent in the resources of the land. Sometimes the action that needs to be taken, though, is just to ponder, to allow for wise choices. Covid 19 is good for something, it seems.

Spring now envelops us with its roller coaster of weather, and the last snow will soon melt. What actions do I see being taken this year?

Much time needs to be spent documenting and evaluating progress on the restoration. As I wrote in a recent post, “Counting Carbon”, I plan to establish baseline data for what I hope will be a long term study on changes in carbon in the soil as the restoration matures. I have the opportunity of receiving help form a wonderful young Brazilian woman who was recently hired by Arne, and I need to make the most of it. If we establish reference points and get soil carbon data this year so that an interested party can continue the study in the future even if I am not able to do so.

There will be twenty new acres to seed down this fall which I need to continue to plan for. That will include gathering seed from my prairies again, a prospect that excites me greatly. I’ve actually been out twice this past week and gathered a couple handfuls of overwintered seed while I took my first spring jaunts in my prairie hills. The twenty acres to be seeded is part of a cooperation with Ducks Unlimited (DU) which will include fencing and water source development to graze more acres than I do now.

Those actions of gathering and spreading seed, taking soil samples, weed control and fencing need to be subservient to the vision. however. My job is to provide a robust and flexible, yet fairly detailed plan the someone else (like my daughter) could follow should I be unable. This doesn’t mean that I believe that anyone has an obligation to follow in my footsteps, rather that I have an obligation to create a vision that has the clarity of purpose and implementation to draw others down the same path.

Life, full and abundant, is my mantra. And this is my manifesto: The land is important. The land can feed, clothe, shelter and heal. It provides meaningful work and purpose to literally billions of people in the world. As the line from “Death of a Salesman” says, “Attention must be paid!” Attention will be paid to my farm; life will flow from it; food will come from it; lives will be improved by it. I will both experience and contribute to life, full and abundant, for as long as I am able.

Sheltering in, as they say

Speculations on Natural History

Competition and Cooperation

Over the last year I gathered several pictures that got me thinking, and thought I would gather some in a post, riffing on the theme.

First, here is something I ran into last spring, as everything was finally greening up the middle of May.

A giant fairy ring eating its way uphill
Close-up of the fairy ring with a needlegrass bunch at the boundary

The striking thing that is evident is the homogeneous nature of the vegetation behind the advancing invasion front. The extra nitrogen provided by the fungal activity releasing nutrients as it eats dead tissue (obvious in the verdant green of the grass behind the front) seems to be helping the cool season grasses. This picture mostly shows Kentucky bluegrass, but observation later in the summer showed lush bromegrass growth. Uphill from the boundary there are bunches of needle and thread grass, but it appears that the extra nitrogen has allowed the brome and bluegrass to outcompete and eliminate competition where the fairy ring has passed. I plan to return to this spot this spring and follow it through the summer to see if my assumptions are correct. If I can identify the same needlegrass clump I can see how it competes under the highly fertile conditions.

A constant worry in prairies is the loss of native species to the incursions of introduced species as in the example above. Much to my surprise I also found several areas on the gravelly hillsides that looked like this.

Mid October look at an exclusion zone
Close up showing seedheads of two types of grama

My assumption when I saw this was that a densely rhizomatous clone of blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis) was the culprit. The site is pretty droughty and there is plenty of blue grama on the hilltops. On closer inspection I think the blue grama seedhead is a red herring. The blue grama really shows up on the very worst soils on the hilltops, where little else will grow, and doesn’t usually grow in such a tight patch. To my surprise I think that this is sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula). This is one more phenomena that I plan to follow through the course of the growing season, both to confirm the grass species and to watch the progress of the patches. There is a tremendous amount of variety on these hills and it is a little bizarro to find one of the native grasses doing a brome imitation. Here is a picture from a similar site nearby about Labor Day

A lot of silky aster, but a number of other species as well

To top everything off, I will return to mycology. A friend and I were out gathering seed and independently came upon several large mushrooms of a type I had never seen.

A solid, blocky 3″ mushroom tucked into the mulch

Perhaps it is just a puffball, but I have never seen one so substantial. I have a hard time forming an intuitive understanding of soil fungi. Even though I know that most of their life cycle is invisible to us it is hard to visualize the network of hyphae growing along and often symbiotically with plant roots. How large a network does it take to produce a mushroom like this? How big is the area contributing to the fruiting body? Is this a species with a symbiotic relationship with its plant neighbors, a mycorrhiza, or a free agent? Or perhaps it is competitive in some way; does it infect its neighbors? The grass around the mushrooms looked quite healthy and strong, so it seems likely the relationship is mycorrhizal. I am excited to try to learn more about the topic. As we used to say as kids, “At ease, disease, there’s fungus among us.”

Speculations on Natural History

Carbon Counting

Forty years ago carbon was not a topic in casual conversation. Farmers, however, always knew something about carbon in its guise as organic matter. Soil samples taken for fertility recommendations included a test for organic matter in the top six inches of soil as an indication of overall soil fertility and soil quality. It was generally accepted that soil organic matter had decreased by half after 100 years of farming, from about six per cent in native prairie down to three per cent in farmed acres.

The first time I remember popular discussion of global warming was in 1988, an extremely hot, dry year. It was a year of crop failure in South Dakota and the Midwest, and the year that Yellowstone burned. There had likely been some discussions of global temperatures rising in the rarified air of scientific journals for years, but public awareness was literally ignited by the fires in Yellowstone. The oppressive heat layered with the conflagration in Yellowstone created the images and an intuitive mash-up which inserted global warming into the vernacular.

The immediate rejoinder of skeptics was that one event does not make a trend. While 1988 was very hot and dry, so had been many other years. Was 1988 an indication of human induced warming or simply part of the normal range of climate? Looking at tree ring data shows many periods over the past several thousand years of heat and drought, and yet we were generally thought still to be in an ice age. Were we just trying to find something new to worry about?

The skeptics were right, of course. One year, or several years, does not define a trend. Skeptics ignored two things, however. First, weather data had been showing a warming climate for some time already. And second, we had a predicted and verified mechanism to create the warming – carbon dioxide. That has not eliminated a bitter fight, still going on, over the reality of warming and its cause.

An image was put forth in conservative circles of a cabal of conspiring scientists cooperating to reinforce a political view. The smoking gun was some emails that implied one researcher might fudge some data to make his model appear more accurate. That argument ignores both the heterogeneity of the scientific community and the number of researchers both cooperating and competing to create the best climate models. The study of any large question is an iterative process which starts from a single research paper from an individual or group. That paper is reviewed by several peers for quality and gets published in a journal. This will prompt responses, criticisms and new studies reviewed by new reviewers. Skeptics of the premise or the results get the opportunity to create studies or models which modify or even trash the original paper. Another researcher might buttress the original study with additions to the model, augmenting its ability to predict. As time goes by models are tweaked and adjusted as more years of data are available to plug in. While a sloppy study on a more esoteric topic might slip through the cracks without sufficient criticism, this really isn’t possible on a large and important topic like global warming. If your methodology or your reasoning is poor you will suffer the consequences professionally. Poor research will be punished. Good research will be rewarded with citations, invitations to speak at conferences and grants for further work. Eventually something approaching the truth will emerge.

Climate is influenced by a chaotic conglomeration of factors, making it almost certain that no model will ever be “right”; no model will be perfectly predictive. I think it is pretty clear that we have come to the point, however, where we are fine-tuning climate models. We are narrowing down the effects of feedback loops and trying to anticipate new factors which will arise as temperatures rise. The premise of human induced global warming, primarily caused by carbon dioxide created by the burning of fossil fuels, is here to stay.

Most of the history of life has actually occurred when temperatures were much warmer than they are today. There is nothing normal about today’s climate, though it seems normal to us. Many of the most densely populated areas on earth were under water 10-20 million years ago, and will be under water again in the future. During the much warmer climate of 50-100 million years ago there was no ice at the poles and about half of what we know as dry land was under the ocean. We would just prefer that Miami, New York City, Tokyo and most of Bangladesh don’t go under water in the foreseeable future, but that seems to be the path we are on, caused primarily by our pulling carbon out of the ground as coal, oil and natural gas and sending it up into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

So why am I belaboring arguments that more knowledgeable people have written books about? It is an introduction to what I hope is a significant contribution I can make through my restorations.

I wrote earlier that it was generally accepted that soils in this area, mostly broken out of prairie at the end of the 19th century, had lost half of their carbon after 100 years of farming. That trend, however, has clearly reversed. The combination of high residue farming, particularly no-till farming, and higher yields, has begun to store carbon again. Soils that measured 3% organic matter in 1980, when I began my career, now usually test at 4%, a gain of almost 6 tons per acre in the top 6″ of soil. We don’t know, however, what is happening below six inches and we don’t know where a new equilibrium might occur. It is possible that most of the gains that can be made by farming have already been made. It is almost certain that annual crops will be unable to duplicate the carbon storage of a deep rooted, diverse perennial prairie.

My restoration, along with my other attempts to bring prairie plants to the landscape will transition about 200 acres from annual agriculture to perennial (190 so far, 20 more this year). Though it may be hundreds of years before the ecological processes that stabilize a prairie mature, we should begin sequestering carbon immediately. Gathering more carbon to the soil will start with the first perennial. This will happen because of a cooler environment (no direct sunlight reaching the soil), the depth and quantity of perennial roots decomposing in situ and the lack of disturbance to the microbial environment that will allow the equilibrium to shift towards stable organic matter. We will create a less oxidizing environment.

How much additional carbon can we hope to sequester and stabilize? It is not as if the land is being abused now. My renter uses a three crop rotation with very little tillage. As I said earlier, we are probably already sequestering carbon. So, this spring I am planning to start what I hope is a long term documentation of changes in soil carbon in my prairie seeding compared to the adjoining cropped fields. If I am fortunate enough to live for another ten or fifteen years we might even get some preliminary answers. If I can sequester an extra percent of organic matter in the top foot of soil and an extra half percent in the next foot, a reasonable goal, that will add up to about 17 tons of carbon per acre or 3400 tons over 200 acres. Not too shabby.

What is that stored carbon worth? One can find an incredible range of monetary values for carbon, but I have repeatedly seen $50/ton as a conservative value for the societal worth of carbon. Thus, using those suppositions, my restorations could provide $170,000 of value to the world in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in my soil. If the United States ever reaches a political consensus to enact a mandatory cap and trade marketplace, projects such as this might have a cash value. There is already a precedent in the Pacific Northwest where sustainably grazed ranches have sold carbon credits.

It is very speculative, but if the restorations eventually reach the carbon status of pre-settlement prairie then my carbon sequestration estimates are low. As I have stated in some earlier posts, I am playing the long game. The prairie restorations will continue to develop and the biotic relationships deepen for a very long time. By placing easements on the restorations I plan to allow them to “grow up and make something of themselves”. It might take a hundred years or more, but theoretical carbon sequestration of those 200 acres could reach 10,000 tons. Wouldn’t it be something if I can stick around long enough to document a measurable change? A cool goal like that makes a person look forward to jumping out of bed in the morning. We all need things to look forward to, and I am really looking forward to getting started on establishing the baseline measurements this spring. Stay tuned, the excitement is only beginning.