Inch by inch, row by row: Thoughts on native prairie restoration
Bumble bee in Prairie grassland, SK - Jason Bantle
Growing up on a small grain farm just north of Osler, Saskatchewan, right along busy highway 11 , and with half of Saskatchewan’s lake-bound traffic watching, successful farming meant making sure to drive the tractor straight.
Our fields of wheat and canola were cultivated from field edge to field edge. Seedlings grew in perfectly spaced and parallel rows, and we sprayed to keep the weeds down. When it came time to harvest the crop, the swaths of golden ripe wheat and canola made beautiful sweeping arcs that copied and accentuated any peculiarities in the field’s borders . And we weren’t just trying to impress people driving by on the highway; the uniformity made harvesting more efficient and economical, and that’s what success looked like.
Red circle highlighting author's childhood home. Red arrows highlighting direction of people’s stares as they drive to their cabins at their lake (Matthew Braun/NCC)
As my interest in agriculture and ecology evolved, my idea of success and how to get there changed and shifted toward native grassland conservation. As I started to explore and walk on more and more native prairie, I learned the look, feel and names of the hundreds of grasses, flowers and shrubs (well, I mean, I learned them and then forget them, but I recognize them and that is something!) and I started to appreciate and love the diversity and messiness of native ecosystems. This became my new yard stick for success. Who needs straight rows and evenly spaced plants that are all the same height? Messy is beautiful, and good and healthy systems change over time! I started to recognize the role of land managers in creating plant patterns that offer different habitat and cover by varying their height and densities across the landscape. This helps them manage their business of grazing cattle but also provides spaces for plants and animals with different needs.
It’s this shift in thinking that sits at the heart of the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s (NCC’s) Prairie Grasslands Action Plan. Through collaboration with farmers, ranchers, Indigenous communities and government, the plan recognizes that healthy grasslands are dynamic, living systems — and that conserving what remains while restoring what has been lost is key to keeping the Prairies resilient, now and for generations to come.
I’ve been living with this new mindset for the last 20 years or so and I’m starting to get comfortable in it. It is how I view the landscape now. Morgan Kanak, NCC’s ecological restoration manager here in Saskatchewan, invited me to tour one of her native prairie restoration projects at our Buffalo Pound project (866 hectares along Saskatchewan’s Buffalo Pound Lake). If you’re unfamiliar with the process of native prairie restoration, it might seem like a straightforward task of throwing a couple of native seeds on the ground and letting nature take its course. But it is not. Morgan’s work requires a lot of planning and effort to control invasive plants, preparing the seed bed, selecting the correct plants to seed and seeding them well enough that if it rains, they will germinate. Even then, her work is not done. Generally, it takes several years for all the species that have been seeded to germinate and really establish. Even then, it can take decades to return all the species that once occupied the area.
Seeing this work first-hand made it clear why NCC’s Prairie Grasslands Action Plan prioritizes large-scale, long-term conservation and restoration. It’s also about careful stewardship, helping native seeds take root so that the web of life that depends on these ecosystems — from pollinators to prairie songbirds — can thrive once again.
Rows of newly seeded native grasses growing in a former crop field (Matthew Braun/NCC)
With my perspective and understanding of the challenges of restoration, I started walking across what was once a farmer’s field and is now growing perennial native grasses and on its way to producing biodiversity instead of wheat and barley. As Morgan and I walked in a very familiar-feeling field, with its neat rows of plants, I found myself once again having to change my definition of success. The tight, parallel rows of plants I was seeing were the native perennial grasses Morgan had seeded there. The process of restoring it to something similar to native grassland had been successfully started.
In moments like these, you can feel the future of the Prairies shifting under your feet — one seed, one row, one field at a time. Thanks to efforts like the Prairie Grasslands Action Plan, there’s real hope that more people will come to see the beauty and importance of these landscapes and join in the work of conserving and restoring them. To learn more, visit prairiegrasslands.ca.
About the Author
Matthew Braun joined the Nature Conservancy of Canada's Saskatchewan Region in the fall of 2014.
