The Great Plains, Restored
Reader Comments
| May 29, 2008 |  View for printing |
It is hard to love a land you don’t understand, and for most of my life I had no idea why anyone would ever live in the Great Plains – let alone love the place.
There are people with us still who remember the Great Plains in its birthday suit, grass as far as the eye could see, what Walt Whitman called, “that delicate miracle, the ever-recurring grass.”
That land is gone to us, now. Once, the grassland in our midsection spanned at least 14 states, from Minnesota to Texas, the second biggest ecosystem in North America. It’s gone because the grass was overturned and the bison were chased off the land and the riot of biodiversity that evolved over 10,000 years was replaced by a few commodity crops to feed us.
Timothy Egan
Full Story: http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0 ... /index.html
Reader Comments:
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Luckily, there's another great effort underway to preserve some of the last remaining unplowed prairie in the U.S. right here in Montana American Prairie Foundation http://americanprairie.org/ deserves your support. --Russ
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At Native Seedsters, Inc. we have dedicated the past six years to developing a technology to effectively harvest the seed of some of the most difficult to harvest native grass species. Hopefully this will help correct the systematic bias and imbalance toward seeding spike inflorescence species that in nature only make up about 15% of all species. The panicle inflorescence species have been for too long neglected in large part because many aren't easily harvested by a combine. We now have four models of Seedsters of different sizes, and expect to continue to find success in the sale of Seedsters to harvest switchgrass seed. Switchgrass is an important C4 species that will play a major role in cellulosic conversion ethanol. --Lee Arbuckle
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