Reseeding the prairie
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In northwest Murray County the corn harvest is well underway. Farmers pilot the open mouths of their combines through the long rows nearly non-stop.
On a hilltop with a great view of agriculture's favorite show, John Beech is on a different stage. For him, the cool fall days means it's time to plant. With a quick pull, Beech rips the thread off a yard long bag of seed. He reaches inside and grabs a handful of leaves, stems and tiny seeds, all of it from native prairie plants.
"See how light brown this is?", says Beech. "It's just full of asters and the goldenrods and sage and just the higher prairie flowers."
As he empties the seed into the planting machine's hopper Beech says these grasses and flowers once covered nearly all this land. That original prairie is almost gone, except for scattered parcels.
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Beech says after today's planting, and a few years of growth, the soybean field will look much as it did over 100 years ago. That means tall grasses sprinkled with red, blue and yellow flowers.
Like a farmer battling drought, insects and crop disease, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources employee is protective of his work. He remembers a field he planted this fall near Pipestone.
"I came back the next day and the ground was covered with crickets," says Beech. "So I went and I looked, see what was up. And sure enough they were grabbing seed. And so I went back and got the packer. Packed it in so they couldn't find it."
The origins of the prairie seed are very important to Beech. Beech says early on the DNR used seed from a variety of sources. Some was brought in from Iowa, Nebraska or other states to the south of Minnesota. There were problems. Beech says because of it's more southerly heritage, the plants often failed to produce seed before the first frost. Through trial and error, Beech says the DNR found locally harvested seed did better.
"If you can match the seeding with the seed source from a local area, just by terrain and soil types that's the best way to do it. You're pretty insured of success that way," says Beech.
In a way, Beech is self-insured because he not only plants the seed, he also harvests it.
He did his harvesting just a few weeks ago in several locations across southwest Minnesota. One was a patch of native prairie on the Murray-Nobles County line.
On a warm, windy day Beech steered a tractor through a field of ripened plants. He watched his harvester sweep a steady stream of seeds into a holding bin. As he drove, Beech called out the names of the plants.
"See that fuzzy one right there, that tall one?", says Beech. "That's Blazing Star that's ripe. You'll notice a 'poof' as we go through. It's one of the ones that has a parachute on it. The harvester is so fast it knocks the seed off the parachute so even though it looks like there's a lot of fuzz going by this machine most of the seed's in the hopper."
Beech's tractor bumped and rattled its way through a variety of unseen obstacles. The harvester's head was about eight inches off the ground.
"I don't like to go any lower because if you hit a pocket gopher mound these machine's are actually aluminum and they will bend," says Beech.
The harvest and several others yielded dozens of plants and hundreds of pounds of seed. Beech has brought a truckload of the seed to the old soybean field to plant. It's packed neatly in white bags waiting to be opened.
"We're kind of getting really high-tech," says Beech. "We have our own sewing machines, sew bags together and everything these days."
Beech says one of the biggest advantages to quickly re-planting the harvested seed is that it helps germination. He says the seed coating is very tough. If it dries for a long period of time, say several months, it becomes so hard it may take years in the ground to crack open and germinate. Fresh seed is relatively soft, so it should sprout next spring.
As he finished his thoughts on the intricacies of planting native seed, Beech climbs into the tractor cab and starts the engine. On a beautiful fall day, there's planting to be done.
