Preserve Prairies: They're Not Making It Anymore

By Twyla Hansen

Butterfly milkweed at Wildcat Prairie near Virginia, Neb. (Ernie Rousek) Mark Twain once advised, “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” For the same reason, we need to preserve the remaining tallgrass prairie across our cultivated countryside. And not only large tracts—like the Flint Hills in Kansas, where a plow would be ruined by rocks, or Nine-Mile Prairie near Lincoln, where its 230 acres once buffered a military bomb storage facility—but also native hay meadows and undisturbed hidden parcels of land on the eastern Plains. With the exception of a few notable prairie restoration efforts, most of our historic prairie has been lost to agriculture. Wachiska Audubon Society is determined to preserve remaining remnants in southeast Nebraska.

As a nonprofit organization, Wachiska has played a major role in preserving prairie remnants by working with landowners through conservation easements, legal agreements between a landowner and a nonprofit group to preserve the land for the future. The easement does not interfere with farming operations but protects prairie grasslands or other natural areas from conversion to cropland or development. Wachiska presently owns and pays taxes on six prairie sites ranging in size from five to 35 acres in Otoe, Gage, Johnson, Saunders, Nemaha and Pawnee counties. Another 21 prairie sites ranging in size from four to 44 acres in southeast Nebraska, including cemetery properties near Linwood and Rulo, are owned and protected by private landowners. On these, Wachiska holds the conservation easements while the property owners pay the taxes; the community’s governing bodies still earn revenue for public services.

Ernie Rousek of Pleasant Dale was instrumental in preserving Nine-Mile Prairie in the late 1980s and is now active in Wachiska’s prairie preservation program. One of his favorites is Dieken Prairie south of Unadilla—13 acres on a hillside—with its wide plant diversity blooming at various times during the summer. Rousek and his colleagues maintain the prairie by cutting the hay in late July to sell for its high protein content. This year, the west half of Dieken Prairie was hayed in late July, while the east half was left to display its warm-season finery. Wachiska-owned prairies are marked with signs and are open to the public: Dieken Prairie, Wildcat Creek Prairie southwest of Virginia, Lamb Prairie southwest of Sterling, Otoe Creek Prairie northeast of Yutan, Berg Prairie south of Talmage and Klapka Prairie southeast of Table Rock. Wachiska is always looking for prairie remnants that contain a diversity of forbs and native grasses and that are free of nonnative invasive species such as brome grass or red clover.

In addition to grasses, typical tallgrass prairies have blooming wildflowers throughout the season, such as gayfeather, milkweed, compass plant, leadplant, New Jersey tea, purple coneflower, sunflower, yarrow, purple poppy mallow, wild rose and brown-headed lespedeza. Besides their high-value hay for livestock, Rousek says that prairies are important for their aesthetic, historic, research and possible medicinal values. “Many prairie plants were used for medicinal purposes by the Plains Indians,” Rousek said. “More research needs to be done on these plants for those purposes.”

Marian Langan, director of Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center near Denton, says the importance of saving prairie is related to what this effort tells us about ourselves as people. “Culture is derived from place, and our place is the tallgrass prairie. If we lose it, not only will we have wiped out our beautiful native plants and wildlife, we will have wiped out what makes us special. We’ll just become like any other place. There will be no native places for our artists and writers and scientists to find this particular kind of inspiration,” Langan said.

Less than 2 percent of the tallgrass prairie remains in the region roughly from eastern Nebraska to western Ohio, Manitoba to Texas. Historically, it was dominated by taller grass species such as big bluestem, switchgrass and Indiangrass. But an ecosystem is so much more complex than grass. The prairie ecosystem is a self-renewing plant-insect-animal community with the majority of its biota below the ground. In its place, we now grow just a few annual commodity crops that require multiple external inputs such as fertilizer, pesticides and water. In spite of soil conservation efforts, half of the historic topsoil in the farm belt has been lost to modern agricultural. Biodiversity—the wide variety of life found on our planet—is sorely lacking in farm fields.

Bumblebee on pitcher sage, Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center (Gordon Warrick) Native prairies, grasslands and natural areas such as wetlands and timber tracts are valuable components of the land’s ability to provide ecosystem services—those natural processes that are nearly impossible to duplicate through technology, such as filtering pollutants from water and air, fostering biodiversity, promoting nutrient cycling and waste assimilation, providing flood and erosion control, promoting soil formation, encouraging pollination and pollinators, enabling biological control of pests and preserving genetic resources.

As part of a USDA organic grant, Dr. John Quinn, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Natural Resources post-doc fellow, and his advisors developed a Healthy Farm Index (HFI) to measure biodiversity for a more complete picture of farm ecosystems. Past research to improve farm design have measured only yield and profit. While these are important, Quinn says it is equally important that farm assessment include additional measures of farm health or success. Keying in on biodiversity and the benefits it provides, the HFI was developed with natural ecosystems like prairie in mind. The indicators in the HFI are based on data collected through research, feedback from farmer advisory groups and a consideration that farms need to remain productive. Quinn’s research indicates that the HFI can provide a mechanism for integrating and communicating interdisciplinary data toward farm practices and policy that optimize food production, biodiversity and ecosystem services. “We believe that biodiversity and prairie conservation can go hand in hand with sustainable farming practices, including organic management,” said Quinn.

Dotted gayfeather, Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center (Gordon Warrick) Saving what prairie remains is easier than trying to remake a prairie. The hundreds of varied prairie species evolved together over thousands of years, and many vital components reside underground. But with so little unplowed land left, prairie restoration efforts must be made. In the 1940s, ecologist Aldo Leopold and his family restored prairie on their farm along the Wisconsin River. In his influential conservation book, “A Sand County Almanac,” which was inspired by these restoration efforts, Leopold outlined his land ethic philosophy on responsible relationship between people and the land. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Wachiska is slowly restoring the entire Klapka farm near Table Rock to native prairie, a seeding project of approximately 214 acres. Organizations like Prairie Plains Resource Institute, a nonprofit educational land trust since 1980, actively restore critical native grass wildlife habitat along the Platte River in central Nebraska and other locations. Alison Krohn of Shoestring Acre Seeds, a prairie restoration/seed production operation specializing in seed mixes adapted to the urban environment, has contributed to Wachiska’s prairie project at Densmore Park in Lincoln and to a small prairie in midtown Omaha. Shoestring Seeds sells prairie seed packets for rain gardens and residential plantings through the online Nebraska Food Cooperative and their own website.

Native plants are better adapted to harsh growing conditions on the Plains and provide low-maintenance landscapes in today’s warmer weather patterns. Dr. Kay Kottas of Prairie Legacy, Inc., advocates for prairie restoration and encourages landowners to grow prairie plants in their home and commercial landscapes as something we can readily do to preserve species and provide greater biodiversity in the urban and rural environment. She says that humans have increased the normal changes in nature to the point that nature cannot keep pace and that a quarter of all species will face extinction in the next 50 years. “Preserving prairie is one way to slow it down and allow nature to catch up,” said Kottas.

So, unless we preserve or plant prairie, they’re not making it anymore.