Photo: Annick Sjobakken/New York Times.
Farmers are restoring the prairie with government help. The aim is to reduce nutrient runoff from cropland, and help birds and bees.
Sometimes we have to go back to the old ways to fix the mistakes of the new ways.
For example, our country’s beloved “bread basket” has used for generations agricultural techniques that have depleted the soil. Maybe we can learn something from the time of Little House on the Prairie.
Cara Buckley reports at the New York Times, “The little tracts of wilderness grow on Maple Edge Farm in southwest Iowa, where the Bakehouse family cultivates 700 acres of corn, soybeans and alfalfa. Set against uniform rows of cropland, the scraps of land look like tiny Edens, colorful and frowzy. Purple bergamot and yellow coneflowers sway alongside big bluestem and other grasses, alive with birdsong and bees.
“The Bakehouses planted the strips of wild land after floodwaters reduced many fields to moonscapes three years ago, prompting the family to embark on a once-unthinkable path.
“They took nearly 11 acres of their fields out of crop production, fragments of farmland that ran alongside fields and in gullies. Instead of crops, they sowed native flowering plants and grasses, all species that once filled the prairie.
“The restored swaths of land are called prairie strips, and they are part of a growing movement to reduce the environmental harms of farming and help draw down greenhouse gas emissions, while giving fauna a much-needed boost and helping to restore the land.
“As the little wildernesses grew, more and more meadowlarks, dickcissels, pheasants and quail showed up, along with beneficial insects. Underground, root networks formed to quietly perform heroic feats, filtering dangerous nutrient runoff from crops, keeping soil in place and bringing new health to the land.
“ ‘We’re thinking about our farm as a small piece of the overall good puzzle,’ said Jon Bakehouse, on a visit to the family’s fields one sunny morning earlier this summer. ‘On a larger scale, we’re all in this together.’
“The fertile soils of America’s vast prairies made the heartland ideal for growing crops. But today in Iowa, less than 0.1 percent of original prairie remains, scattered in fragments around the state.
“Prairie strips are helping to reverse that loss, and are being adopted at an increasing clip. Researchers counted 586 acres of prairie strips on farmland across seven states in 2019. As of last year, they had spread to 14 states, filling 22,972 acres.
“While the acreage accounts for a tiny fraction of the Midwest’s farm fields — Iowa alone has roughly 30 million acres of cropland — researchers said the strips had disproportionately positive impacts.
“ ‘There are a whole suite of dramatic environmental benefits that come with this small intervention,’ said Lisa Schulte Moore, a professor of natural resource ecology and management at Iowa State University, and a founder of its prairie strips project. ‘If you put a bit of prairie back, it makes a big difference.’
“To be classified as a prairie strip, restored land must adjoin active cropland, reach a width of at least 30 feet and be sown with dozens of native plant species.
“Researchers at Iowa State found that when prairie strips were planted in and around soy and corn fields, they acted as both ‘speed bumps and diapers,’ Professor Schulte Moore said.
“Soil erosion and surface runoff plummeted, as the prairie plants held soil in place and transpired water. Levels of nitrogen and phosphorus carried in surface runoff from adjacent cropland decreased by as much as 70 percent, absorbed instead by the prairie strips, resulting in less water contamination. The prairie strips created better conditions for helpful bacteria, resulting in dramatically lower levels of nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas generated by chemical fertilizer, compared to cropland without prairie strips. The strips also drew twice as many native grassland birds and three times as many beneficial insects, compared to fields that had not been rewilded.
“While the research did not show that prairie strips affected yields in adjacent cropland, tests found that the strips boosted the health and fertility of the soil where they were sown. …
“Iowa has the most industrialized livestock farms in the country, and tens of millions of pounds of untreated manure that they produce end up fertilizing crops, along with synthetic fertilizer made from fossil fuels. The nitrogen-heavy runoff from agricultural fields threatens drinking water, and is a leading cause of an oxygen-starved dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that kills marine plant and animal life.
“In 2007, Professor Schulte Moore was part of a team at Iowa State University that began researching the ways in which restoring parts of the prairie could enrich soil, help insects and wildlife, and stanch emissions and fertilizer runoff. They went on to plant prairie strips on commercial farms and at some of the university’s test sites, and found that benefits were consistently achieved when 10 percent of a farm’s cropland is converted into prairie strips, with lower amounts still providing some boons.
“The findings might have sat on a shelf, Professor Schulte Moore said, were it not for her department chair, who rewrote the professor’s job description so she could promote the idea to farmers.
“In late 2018, the prairie strips initiative got perhaps its biggest boost when it was included in the federal Conservation Reserve Program. That meant that farmland owners who converted some of their acreage to prairie strips could collect money from the federal government. According to the Agriculture Department, the average payout for prairie strips is $209 per acre each year.
“ ‘That was monumental,’ Professor Schulte Moore said. ‘It helped align hearts, heads and pocketbooks.’ ” More at the Times, here.
Photo: 
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