Returning to Its Roots

Ok, I have to admit that I am a little bit of a plant nerd.  Not as bad as my neighbor, Mike, but bad enough to get glassy eyed looks when I get going about some of my favorites.  Which leads me to why Beth and I just spent an afternoon in Cedar Falls at the Tallgrass Prairie Center digging up grass rhizomes.

If you had been watching from the nearby highway, you might have guessed we were digging for gold, the way we dug and pried at the ground with our spades. But that wasn't what was going on.  We were there collecting tripsacum dactyloides, more commonly known as eastern gamagrass.   

Digging and separating gamagrass rhizomes. The crowns can be seen in the background.

We'd been invited by Laura Jackson of the Tallgrass Prairie Center to collect the rhizomes to plant around our farm.  It's about a 2 and a half hour drive, but I figured that it was well worth it to both learn more about the grass, and to be able to collect some to bring home.

Eastern gamagrass is a native warm season species that has largely disappeared from Iowa's grazing lands, but we are working to bring it back to our land. It loves low lying, wet ground and with thick, remarkably deep roots, provides excellent resistance to erosion. But most importantly for us as ranchers, the cattle love it. They prefer it so much that it is referred to as an ice cream species--the cattle will seek it out and eat it first.

Checking out an example of eastern gamagrass roots (center) at the Tallgrass Prairie Center.

Yet that the cattle love it is a large part of the reason it went missing from our environment. Like all of our prairie species, gamagrass spent hundreds of thousands of years adapting to being occasionally grazed and then being given time to recover. 

It was when farmers arrived with barbed wire fences to keep cattle in one spot that things started to go sideways for the prairie species. As the cattle grazed the grasses again and again, the plants in that spot began to weaken as they tried to reestablish. Even though healthy gamagrass can regrow up to two inches the day after it has been grazed, the continual punishment eventually kills it off. 

It reminds me of the apricot pies my mom used to make me.  I would graze them over and over until they were no more.  Mmmmmmm....what was I saying?  Oh, right. So, since we rotationally graze our cattle and goats, we give each piece of pie, I mean pasture, plenty of time to recover. Dear gamagrass will be able to survive and even flourish through the intermittent nibbles.

But the best part about eastern gamagrass is that it seems to be one of the few native grasses that can outcompete phalaris arundinicea, reed canary grass.  There aren't many things on our farm that I really dislike, but reed canary is one. It is used as a quick growing ground cover, but the problem is that it forms a thick sod, crowding everything else out.

A mass of reed canary grass I dug out of Beth's new flower garden. You can see the thicker rhizomes among the regular short roots.

Worst of all, reed canary grass matures at lightening speed, and as soon as it does, the cows won't touch it. Plus it makes terrible hay. To top it all off, while it forms a sod quickly, the roots are fairly short and it really doesn't hold soil very well if there is a lot of rain. Three strikes and you're out.

One thing Reed Canary is, however, is hard to get rid of. It spreads readily through both seed and rhizomes. The seed floats in water and germinates easily, so if someone has some upstream from you, it just takes one heavy rain and voila, you have it on your land.  If you try to plow it or disc it, it just comes back through the rhizomes and the seed sticks to your equipment so that the next spot you use that equipment, taadaa, you have reed canary grass there, too.

If only our native grasses were so fecund.

One of the native gamagrass crowns on our farm.

But gamagrass is a tough customer, too. Going head to head in one of our sloughs, I have seen gamagrass, over the years, encroach on canary grass and push it aside.

Ah-ha! When I saw Eastern gamagrass could compete with this rapacious invader, I began working to give it a leg up (in this case, by importing more from up north).  A few local plants still exist in out of the way places on our farm (e.g. the slough), and so it is a win, wink win, returning this grass to our pastures. It nourishes our cattle, fights an invasive species and secures and deepens our soils.

So next time you join us here at Whippoorwill Creek Farm, ask to visit with our gamagrass, newly returned to its roots.