Late last summer I hosted a field day at my restoration for a group of conservation professionals from a variety of NGO’s and several employees of the state of South Dakota. We had a great day of wandering around and I asked questions regarding several facets of management that the group discussed. Taken as an isolated event it was a valuable and fun experience, one that I hoped to repeat on another occasion. Recently several things have come together to expand my hopes for the group.

First, this goes back to my visit with Dave Ode, about whom I wrote an earlier blog post, and his efforts at raising seed from collections of a variety of native milkweeds. He considered them foundation seed, samples worth increasing and planting in pollinator gardens and restorations. This inspired me to consider engaging in a similar effort, raising some seed from selections in my prairies, particularly several species that are difficult or impossible to purchase. That effort will hopefully begin this growing season. No individual selection is “special”, except as a particular genetic response chance and to its environment, which means that perhaps multiple selections are needed from different environments.

Then, a couple months ago I began communicating with Nina Hill, an employee of The Nature Conservancy (TNC). I travelled to Fargo to have a visit with Nina about becoming a part of an effort to document populations of prairie species in a database that TNC had begun. Marissa Ahlering, Science Director for TNC for the region, joined the meeting for a while, and we discussed the potential use of the database to guide efforts in native seed collection. Marissa has written and talked about the need to broaden the seed sources for new restorations to bring more genetic resilience to them. In effect to “seed” the genetics that might be helpful to respond to climate change or other challenges that we might not be able to foresee. The assumption, again, is that selections of the same species from prairie remnants separated geographically would have differences in their genomes.

The next push occurred after a visit to Dr. Lora Perkins, a professor in Natural Resources at South Dakota State University (SDSU). Dr. Perkins has a native plant material project, researching and increasing seed from a large variety of native species. This has already been done by private companies, so it may seem like reinventing the wheel, but private companies are understandably concerned that they make money, and so are inevitably going to have different goals and outcomes than a public effort. If they find a particular seed source that is easy to grow and has an attractive bloom other characteristics might not be considered, and that one genotype can become the only one offered for sale. Towards the end of our visit Dr. Arvid Boe, an old friend of mine, came to her office and we discussed his extensive efforts at growing native selections over the past forty years. Once more the concept of a native selection as foundation seed came up. At the end of the visit Lora mentioned her desire to start a native prairie seed bank.

All these disparate efforts around the topic of native seeds have a very strong unifying thread. It is that the seed is valuable and that sources of that seed need to be both broader genetically and in larger quantities than is presently available. Why? And what are the implications?

Over the past forty years at my business I have come across many prairie remnants, both hayland and pasture. This has given me what I have come to realize was a skewed view of their abundance. I know of many remnants primarily because I have covered a lot of ground over the last forty years. There are not many roads or dirt trails that I have not gone down in my territory, an area of perhaps 1500 square miles. When I go over this history in my mind, however, I realize both that these remnants are not that common, and that they are slowly but surely decreasing both in number and quality. Several have been converted to crop ground, many of the pastures have been sprayed with herbicides, and even the practice of fertilizing hayland to increase hay production harms native species by giving an advantage to the introduced cool season grasses which are ubiquitous in our native grass. I am coming to feel that a high quality prairie remnant is not just “neat” or “cool”, but important and precious.

On my own farm there is a pasture adjacent to the farmstead that the dairy cows used. When I was growing up I dug prairie turnips and gathered pasqueflowers there. I’m sure it was overgrazed, but there were a lot of native forbs still there fifty years ago. I have looked at it recently and found only a few remnants hanging on in the worst soils, the rest having fallen victim to the combination of herbicide applications, nitrogen fertilization and overgrazing. It has basically become a tame grass pasture and the herbicides and fertilizer are perhaps justified now, though I haven’t allowed their use since I bought the land. Multiply that experience a thousand fold and you have the prairies of eastern South Dakota.

This is simply the “island effect”. Small populations can disappear, whether from a catastrophic event such as the plow or a broadcast herbicide application, a significant weather event, or the competition of invasive species. While well planned grazing can be a benefit to prairies, much grazing is done in a way that weakens native species. In small populations the diversity of the genome is degraded as traits are lost even though the species is still present. The world is a dangerous, competitive place, and in the arena of holding on to natural diversity size matters. Protective easements will not totally protect small prairies, and an occasional burn will only slow the process of the spread of invasive species. Every year populations of native species are disappearing from small prairies, and unique alleles, unique genes or combinations of genes from the larger meta-population, disappear. Without the support of a more diverse plant population available to re-seed, and the ability to bring back genetic traits through cross pollination, that species and that genetics is unlikely to return.

Bemoaning this trend is not the purpose of this post, however. Mourning is for the dead and the patient is not dead. Over the past five years 230 acres of prairie restorations have been my response, increasing the area around my remnants with new populations, those new plants coming from a combination of seed gathered from my own prairies, from other prairies and from seed that I purchase. In a sense I am enlarging the island, both in total population of a particular species, but also in the variety of genetic possibilities existing within that population. Some islands cannot be expanded geographically because land is not available, but can still be made more resilient by adding reinforcements by topdressing new seed. I hope to begin doing that on some of my existing prairie after I have finished seeding new areas.

And I am not alone. There is already a community of like minded people who are doing restorations of varying complexity. This is why seed is important. Relying only on seedhouses to provide the material for a restoration means that one is limited in species and is definitely limited in genetic diversity within the species that are available. It means a simplified palette for the greater biotic community to work with. Fewer pollinators have the right partners to pollinate; fewer insect larvae have the right food to eat; fewer bacteria, fungi, actinomycetes and all the varieties of life in the soil are able to flourish. However, over the past thirty years we have gone from CRP plantings of smooth brome, a non-native species, to plantings of 8-10 native species (which was the standard “diverse” planting when I put in my first patch of CRP twelve years ago) to many plantings of 30-40 species today. Maybe that can become 100 species with diverse genomes, ready to grow up and be somebody. The conservation community has grown, and has become aware of the benefits of true diversity. It needs the material to do a proper job.

This brings us back to the original topic, the idea of the prairie working group. For me, the big question is simply whether there are significant advantages with the efforts of a group over the sum of the individual efforts. Put another way, is it worth it to join forces? Or to ask a related question: What important activities can a group accomplish?

Obviously a group can be valuable simply as an excuse to meet and share information and discuss ideas. I deeply believe in the creativity inherent in the ferment of discussion and disagreement, and believe that we have much to learn from other’s experiences.

Let’s also return to the visits I mentioned earlier. Can a group provide the opportunity to expand and enhance the depth and power of TNC’s database? Can it become an addition to Lora Perkins’ project, whether through providing selections to increase, or working on the other end and taking some of Lora’s Foundation Seed and increasing in plots to provide larger amounts of seed to restorations and for the seed bank? Can we step outside of our parochial concerns to share and trade seed that we gather, creating richer, more resilient restorations? Can we share information of opportunities for restorations? For years I have dreamt about purchasing a property with the stated goal of restoring and perhaps then re-selling it after an easement is in place, but such a venture is too large for me at my age. It may not be too large for the group.

My flights of fancy are fine and might even be useful, but I think that the idea of identifying as many remnants as possible and cataloguing the species they contain is a worthy goal even if nothing else is accomplished. I could succumb to my own “island effect” one day soon. As a population of one the information in my brain is at great risk. If there is a group of like minded people and a database that has information on my prairies, then the resources on my land have a chance to be valuable to others and to the restorations that they will work on. Multiply this by the contributions of others from the group, and we may have something significant to give. I hope to set up a meeting soon, and then we can start to decide what is possible, and whether others think there are advantages to combining efforts.

This is exciting stuff for an old guy such as myself. I often think about what the “elders” of the world have to offer. While we are no longer as energetic or active as we once were, neither do we have the pressures of busy jobs or raising a family. And, hopefully, our experiences can provide some insight into how to manage some of the issues that occur with any project. We will see what we come up with.