“Desiccated and Subsidized” Reviving the Enchantment of the Prairie
Easily the most memorable experience of my career was participating in a controlled burn at the Missouri Department of Natural Resources’ Prairie State Park, less than 20 miles from Harry Truman’s birthplace in Lamar. The 4,000-acre park contains the largest remaining tallgrass prairie landscape in the state. The park also contains about 100 bison and a diversity of animal and plant life, including 25 rare and endangered species.
I had been waiting in my office in Jefferson City for word from staff that the conditions—mostly the humidity—were right. A state plane was available to take me to the park at a moment’s notice. Upon arrival I participated in setting the perimeter fires in anticipation of the big burn at the end of what was a cool fall day. Several hundred acres were to be set ablaze.
With the sun setting, park staff set the head fire which, in short order, created an incredible conflagration. I observed the spectacle from the front steps of the visitors center. It was an awesome, beautiful, and frightening sight to behold, given the density and height of the grasses. My imagination ran wild with thoughts of what it must have been like when thousands of acres of such grasses went up in flames before European settlement remade the landscape.
In his moving account of the Mann Gulch Fire tragedy, Young Men and Fire (1992), Norman Maclean recalls a passage in James Fennimore Cooper’s novel The Prairie, in which “eastern readers are held in suspense throughout most of chapter 13 by the approach of a great prairie fire from which the old trapper [Natty Bumppo] rescues his party at the last moment by lighting a fire in advance of the main one and having it ready for human occupancy by the time the sheet of flames arrives. He stepped his party into the burned-off grass and moved them from side to side as the main fire struck.”
This riveting scene of a prairie fire helps us understand the mixed reactions European settlers had to this incredible resource, its dangers, hardships, challenges—and agricultural potential. A romantic rendition of Cooper’s account is depicted in a painting by Alvan Fisher, a landscapist of the Hudson School. The Prairie on Fire is displayed in the Art Institute of Chicago. In this work nature overwhelms the people amid sharp contrasts between light and dark.
Alas, so much of the romance and enchantment of the tallgrass prairie have largely vanished, although there are shoots of renewal, sprouting up throughout the heartland of America. This is the sad, yet hopeful, story expertly told by two Midwestern journalists, Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty, in Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie (2025). Surely, it is advocacy journalism, but it is of the highest order, grounded in research, shoeleather investigative reporting, and a solid understanding of the science of soil, water, plants, and animals impacted by the destruction of “one of the most threatened ecosystems on Earth.” Yet, they make a sincere effort to understand the existential predicament of farmers and ranchers who live in and depend upon grasslands, the culture of those who lived on and worked these lands for generations as well as the Native Americans who preceded them.
Not unlike the nation’s wetlands, 99 percent of the eastern tallgrass prairie of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, eastern Kansas, and western Missouri is gone, plowed under in the 19th century. But the losses do not end there. Western shortgrass prairie in places like South Dakota, Montana, and western Kansas “is disappearing at the rate of one million acres a year as farmers plow up grass to plant corn, wheat, and soybeans [as opposed to running cattle on the land].”
“That’s an area the size of Connecticut disappearing every three and a half years,” write Hage and Marcotty. “With little notice, these grasslands are vanishing faster than the Amazon rainforest.”
Of course, these lands are not being paved over for housing and shopping center developments, for which we give thanks. But the impacts of what has become a gigantic, industrialized “factory for food” are detrimental to what this reviewer would characterize as the overlapping Venn diagrams of the water, nutrient, and carbon cycles along with biodiversity. The authors did a lot of on-the-scene, investigative journalism on farms, ranches, tribal lands, the Des Moines Water Works, the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, and the halls of land grant universities throughout the Midwest. Besides introducing the reader to grasslands ecology, they describe, in depth, agriculture’s impacts on erosion, nonpoint source pollution, water quality, and food production. You will also learn much about farm subsidies, herbicides and pesticides, pollinators—and the significant, often overlooked matter of drain tiles, which underlie farmland throughout vast swaths of the country.
The development of drain tile technology, starting in the nineteenth century, represents a “hydrological revolution” across the land, along with the governance structures to finance and implement drainage of the land. Tiles are designed for agricultural productivity but disrupt the natural hydrology and treatment that comes with water gradually seeping into the soil. Instead, tiles rapidly carry water, fertilizer, chemicals, and sediment off the land into the water, creating havoc on groundwater and surface water quality. Between 1880 and 1900 the cost of Midwest farmland increased by nearly 40 percent, and of drained wetlands often up to 500 percent—all due to drain tiles and drainage districts that finance and regulate the process in state after state.
According to the Department of Agriculture’s 2022 Census of Agriculture, 96 million acres of cropland in the United States are drained by ditches and underground tile lines—85 percent of them in the Corn Belt states. Write Hage and Marcotty, “Today instead of clay tiles, farmers use miles of perforated corrugated plastic tubes that are buried four feet deep with specialized drainage plows. Between 2012 and 2017 tiled cropland in the United States increased by 14 percent, or seven million acres, though the rate has flattened out since.”
This reviewer, a native Midwesterner, has a hard time explaining the extent and consequences of drain tiles in farm country to my Eastern friends. Hage and Marcotty nail it. Their discussion of agricultural drainage and its impacts alone is worth the price of the book. They systematically describe how, since World War II, the widespread use of synthetic nitrogen as fertilizer has increased agricultural productivity—which while good for feeding the world is also a challenge to water and air quality.
Thankfully, Sea of Grass concludes on a hopeful but realistic note, describing examples of leaders in agriculture, tribes, conservation, philanthropy, and academia who recognize the global and local significance of grassland ecosystems and are pursuing creative, collaborative initiatives to revive, at scale, the enchantment of the prairie.
What is notable in these cases is the strenuous efforts made by the restorationists to understand the needs and concerns of working farmers and ranchers, winning them over by persuasion and, where right and proper, financial incentives and reimbursements, say, in the event of lost county revenues due to non-profitmaking land holdings. Or testing and tracking of reintroduced buffalo to avoid cross-contamination with livestock. Some of the programs could be categorized as “free market environmentalism,” not a term the authors would use given their concerns over property rights as an environmental problem rather than a potential solution. But they have the good sense to see what works and praise it.
The organization known as Practical Farmers of Iowa has been working with peers for four decades, “showing, farm by farm, how to change the face of Iowa agriculture”—whether it be the installation of buffer strips, no-till planting, or the reduction of inputs that cost too much and create polluted runoff. PFI now garners agribusiness support from companies who want a sustainable and environmentally friendly supply chain. In ten years, its membership has grown to 6,300 farmers, with PFI annual revenue of $4 million. A good start and part of a broader movement toward regenerative agriculture spreading across the nation.
Among the more impressive restoration efforts described by Hage and Marcotty, one in which all the stars came into alignment—expertise, money, public support—is the American Prairie. The Wall Street Journal includes it in a list of “rewilding” projects that might be “the next generation of national parks.” This project covers 460,000 acres and is supported by a $200 million endowment “built by far-off millionaires” which “offended people who spent sleepless nights wondering how they would pay the next feed bill.” So staff has had to work hard to gain the trust of their neighbors. Hunting is allowed. Costly electric fences have been restored to keep bison away from the ranches. Hopefully, with time, mutual trust and respect will grow with the neighbors.
There will be no return to a prelapsarian Paradise on the prairie, but recovery of some precious remnant of these great grasslands is something for which we can continue to hope and strive.
G. Tracy Mehan III is an adjunct professor at Scalia Law School and former director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. He may be contacted at gtracymehan@gmail.com.
On the Treasure of Natural Grasslands
