Last year after seeing firsthand the harm mowing my pastures caused especially to ground nesting birds; I decided I would not mow this season. The resilience I witnessed was remarkable, with cover the meadowlarks, curlews, killdeer, Hungarian partridge, and sharp-tailed grouse all raised successful broods (some parents raised two broods). Just yesterday morning I was rewarded with the sight of two broods (about 26 birds) of Hungarian partridge scurrying across the gravel through the corrals and out into the tall grass. Reciprocity = Resilience.
That's exactly what I need to hear, Patrick. Thank you. And thanks for the tagline that I'll steal for later use. I'm guessing you're out in MT or the Dakotas? If you don't mind me asking, what's your long-term management plan for the pastures? Here an unmowed field wants to be forest, but what's the forecast for a pasture left untended there?
I live in Montana, just east of the Rocky Mountain Front on what used to be all short grass prairie, so the threat of forest encroachment east of the divide is minimal. Cheatgrass is the scary invasive around here. Russian Olive Trees are now considered an invasive species. The tree was originally used for shelterbelts and windbreaks but now it's a problem in riparian areas, irrigation ditches, and occasionally pastures. My guess is forest creep may be a concern on the west side of the divide but it's only a guess.
As far as long-term pasture management, the less disruption the better. I hope to leave the grasses to do what grasses are supposed to do. My horses will continue to rotational graze only in the late summer, the fall, and the winter; hopefully that will control seed heads and stimulate new plant growth. My priority is good habitat for all the migratory birds.
Sounds like you're on top of it, Patrick, with the right knowledge and perspective. Hope your neighbors are paying attention. Those birds need all the help they can get.
Did you see the piece I linked to about ranchers in Nebraska learning to bring fire back into their land management? They need it to beat back the "green glacier " of redcedars long used for windbreaks. Might interest you.
I noticed in the article, the 30-year woodland encroachment from 1990 through 2020, and the maps show some woody encroachment in Montana on the east side of the Rockies. I need to find out what's causing that.
From the article:
"According to 2022 research published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, tree cover has increased 50% across the rangelands of the western U.S. in the last 30 years. The creeping woodlands threaten open prairie, prairie wildlife species, and the ranching industry. They also increase the chances of uncontrollable wildfire."
I found this link within the article too, (a definite keeper).
When I think about the huge amount of biodiversity sustained by the grasslands and the challenges from monoculture agriculture, development, and now woodland creep; I understand exactly what good stewardship means.
Continuing to enjoy my travels through the archives - you asked in this lovely post whether anyone could recommend any resources regarding meadow management. I have two. One is a PNW-based meadow restoration outfit, but the general principles should apply in other northern corners of the US: Northwest Meadowscapes (https://northwestmeadowscapes.com). Plus their website is enchanting, and they mail out their seeds in little handmade envelopes, and they've even published a little softbound zine on meadow planting.
I also enjoy Benjamin Vogt's work - he is Midwest-focused but again, generally applicable principles. As a heads up, he does advocate using herbicides in certain cases, which I imagine he will eventually back away from, given how rapidly our understanding of the harm caused to pollinators by herbicides is advancing. His most recent book is Prairie Up.
I loved this post. I too experienced the full wonder of native asters this year due to our "spring of many atmospheric rivers." I've got three varieties in my mini-meadow, from a pale lavender to an almost plummy purple, which look glorious in the company of their goldenrod friends. It was a buzzing, glittering, zipping pollinator superhighway throughout the late summer and fall here. Such fun.
Apparently I forgot to respond to this comment, Rebecca. Sorry about that. Thanks for the link to the NW meadow folks. It is a lovely site. Glad you also had a great (wet) summer/fall with asters and goldenrods. It really was a marvelous experience.
Oh, no worries. I am finding keeping up with notifications a bit of a challenge here, actually. Not because I have all that many, but just because I don't always see them at first and then they kind of seem to disappear somewhere. Or maybe in my case, it's just user error. :) Anywho -- hoping for another nice aster year this summer!
Take in mind my comments are from only a little experience and also in a completely different biome to yours (tropical).
When we first started on our land we happened to be lucky enough to do Kiss The Ground’s soil advocacy course, which was free at the time. Cutting grass (or better yet, grazing it, at an optimal time did wonders for our soil and water infiltration. We now had green grass throughout the year and we went from a property of mostly cogon grass (considered a terrible weed but probably native to the Philippines and at one time was utilized for roofing materials etc) to something with a higher diversity of forage.
However our insect numbers seemed to plummet (purely from observation, no scientific measuring) and bird life wasn’t doing much better.
I then got a scythe, this was great because less noise to disturb animals, I could listen out for distressed birds if I was cutting too close to a nest etc. However I was still too enthusiastic and cutting so regularly that insect numbers still showed no increase.
So I slowed down.
Boom
Yes my place is now mostly a wild mess and as my city-living mother-in-law suggests there’s probably people hiding in the grass spying on us (haha) but bird life and insect life is booming (as much as it can in the midst of the insect apocalypse). I now only scythe before I move the chickens, which is every week or so, slowly rotating them around the property to fertilize and disturb the soil, resulting in more plant diversity. We also have a cow and sheep that free roam over the entire property and feed themselves and medicate themselves when necessary. They’re very heathy and we don’t use any dewormers as it would continue working in the soil when the cow takes a poop.
It’s tempting to get another cow as it would be a good income source (since food farming here in the Philippines is very poorly supported) but if I did it would need careful observation to ensure I haven’t gone beyond the limits of what my land can healthily support. And I think insects and birds are a great indicator of that.
Take in mind I come from this at the angle that I am trying to marry agriculture (growing some human food on a small homestead scale, and not yet very successfully ) with care for the land and it’s inhabitants and with quite a bit of rewilding and native tree planting also
That is a different world from Maine, Leon, and your story speaks to the different paths to a more diverse land in different places. Slowing down seems to be what unites us all, though. As I often write, there are too many of us doing too much for too little reason, and mowing seems a good metaphor for all of that. I had originally intended titled subsections for this essay, and one of them was going to be We Are the Mower.
The other piece that you bring up here is the relationship of grazing to biodiversity, and I don't know enough about that to say anything, other than I've read that bison - or cows, I guess, if managed correctly - make Plains habitat more diverse, but generally cow/sheep grazing has been a down-to-the-nub nightmare nearly everywhere.
Happy to hear you found through hard work a good solution for both you and the insects and birds. Thanks for that. Three cheers for wild messes.
Regarding the large herbivores and grazing I feel it is very important and worth delving into, if you like I can share the text only copy of the course we did. Although it very much depends on context. Some biomes are too fragile to have large animals graze. There’s the group Soil4Climate and they’re all about using cows to heal the soil and drawdown huge amounts of carbon. I think this is great but I also sometimes feel some of them want to put cows absolutely everywhere.
It’s all about limits.
I definitely lean towards these sorts of solutions than the techno optimistic billionaire saving the world sort of thing. Nature knows what to do, we need to get out of its way and help it.
I see you’re already a subscriber to the Rob’s climate according to life Substack. Alpha Lo has a great Substack regarding water which is worth having a look at, he’s a water physicist and one of his recent essays was regarding Daisyworld, a model that showed that biodiversity affects climate.
One thing I’ve woefully forgotten to mention is that in the Kiss The Ground course they did talk about when you over-rest grasses. This leads to the clump of grass eventually dying and isn’t good for the soil. The specifics of this I can’t remember, and whether it also applies to other sorts of ground covers like flowers, not too sure
Jason, thanks for your thoughtful examination of the mowing issue from multiple perspectives. I'm always searching for the right balance here in midcoast Maine. I have 4.5 acres of mixed fields, some of which is very wet, and other parts that sit higher and drier. In the beginning I had them mowed once a year in late July, which I now know is too early. Then I left them unmowed for maybe 3 years to see what would happen, except for paths around the perimeter and through the middle. In those years, multiflora came back with a vengeance, and alders are aggressive too even though they offer valuable food and habitat. I was also rewarded with a birch grove, a volunteer walnut, and a mix of asters and goldenrod. I try now to push the mowing into late November, which partly depends on the availability of the guy with the mower. My focus is on habitat restoration, and while I would like nothing better than to leave things to grow year-round, it's just not compatible with invasive control. Most of the year, I rely on hand-to-hand combat with the multiflora, and let the alders be except where they invade the open meadow. I'll be interested to hear of any resources you come across that offer happy solutions and am also curious about how late in early spring is too late.
Hi Dudley: It's surprisingly complicated, isn't it? Though I suppose anything to do with the land, with habitat, should be understood as specific to the site. There's no good time in the sense that there's life in the meadow all year-round. But there's management that has to happen. I wonder if you could think of the 4.5 acres in sections and mow a section or two per year? Also, could you get away with a controlled burn at some point? That would mimic the Wabanaki management, at least in part. Otherwise, I'll keep an eye out for a thorough resource. I imagine that spring mowing should be done as soon as the mower can get in there, but the lower section may be too wet for that. Stay tuned... And thanks for all the good work you're putting into the land.
Thanks, Jason. All good ideas, and I will keep juggling options, not only for the mowing parts, but also for the areas that are too wet to ever mow. This a site-specific problem, as you say, and the solutions will vary from year to year, though within a framework.
Wonderful writing. "Ad asters per aspera" (to modify an old Latin motto.) Thanks also for that enlightening conversation with Patrick. We donated one of our plots of land to the Nature Conservancy. The mixed grassland was being invaded by the all-but-ineradicable junipers. Haven't been out that way in years to see what the Conservancy did with it.
I don't know if they really welcomed it. There was a lot of erosion control that needed to be done according to the folks in the county Ag office. Fences were in disrepair, hunters were trespassing all the time and one time we caught a local running a small herd of cattle on the acreage. So maybe not such a generous gift all things considered. The Conservancy was going to have to deal with each and every one of those problems I imagine. On the positive side, there was an all year pond, seasonal creek and some large pecan trees that got there, God knows how... Prime large acreage but lots of work...
Last year after seeing firsthand the harm mowing my pastures caused especially to ground nesting birds; I decided I would not mow this season. The resilience I witnessed was remarkable, with cover the meadowlarks, curlews, killdeer, Hungarian partridge, and sharp-tailed grouse all raised successful broods (some parents raised two broods). Just yesterday morning I was rewarded with the sight of two broods (about 26 birds) of Hungarian partridge scurrying across the gravel through the corrals and out into the tall grass. Reciprocity = Resilience.
That's exactly what I need to hear, Patrick. Thank you. And thanks for the tagline that I'll steal for later use. I'm guessing you're out in MT or the Dakotas? If you don't mind me asking, what's your long-term management plan for the pastures? Here an unmowed field wants to be forest, but what's the forecast for a pasture left untended there?
I live in Montana, just east of the Rocky Mountain Front on what used to be all short grass prairie, so the threat of forest encroachment east of the divide is minimal. Cheatgrass is the scary invasive around here. Russian Olive Trees are now considered an invasive species. The tree was originally used for shelterbelts and windbreaks but now it's a problem in riparian areas, irrigation ditches, and occasionally pastures. My guess is forest creep may be a concern on the west side of the divide but it's only a guess.
As far as long-term pasture management, the less disruption the better. I hope to leave the grasses to do what grasses are supposed to do. My horses will continue to rotational graze only in the late summer, the fall, and the winter; hopefully that will control seed heads and stimulate new plant growth. My priority is good habitat for all the migratory birds.
Sounds like you're on top of it, Patrick, with the right knowledge and perspective. Hope your neighbors are paying attention. Those birds need all the help they can get.
Did you see the piece I linked to about ranchers in Nebraska learning to bring fire back into their land management? They need it to beat back the "green glacier " of redcedars long used for windbreaks. Might interest you.
Well, that was a real eye-opener.
I noticed in the article, the 30-year woodland encroachment from 1990 through 2020, and the maps show some woody encroachment in Montana on the east side of the Rockies. I need to find out what's causing that.
From the article:
"According to 2022 research published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, tree cover has increased 50% across the rangelands of the western U.S. in the last 30 years. The creeping woodlands threaten open prairie, prairie wildlife species, and the ranching industry. They also increase the chances of uncontrollable wildfire."
I found this link within the article too, (a definite keeper).
https://www.theprairieproject.org/project-information/solutions/great-plains-grassland-extension-partnership
When I think about the huge amount of biodiversity sustained by the grasslands and the challenges from monoculture agriculture, development, and now woodland creep; I understand exactly what good stewardship means.
Glad it was helpful, Patrick. Thanks for all the good/hard work you're doing.
Love that.
Continuing to enjoy my travels through the archives - you asked in this lovely post whether anyone could recommend any resources regarding meadow management. I have two. One is a PNW-based meadow restoration outfit, but the general principles should apply in other northern corners of the US: Northwest Meadowscapes (https://northwestmeadowscapes.com). Plus their website is enchanting, and they mail out their seeds in little handmade envelopes, and they've even published a little softbound zine on meadow planting.
I also enjoy Benjamin Vogt's work - he is Midwest-focused but again, generally applicable principles. As a heads up, he does advocate using herbicides in certain cases, which I imagine he will eventually back away from, given how rapidly our understanding of the harm caused to pollinators by herbicides is advancing. His most recent book is Prairie Up.
I loved this post. I too experienced the full wonder of native asters this year due to our "spring of many atmospheric rivers." I've got three varieties in my mini-meadow, from a pale lavender to an almost plummy purple, which look glorious in the company of their goldenrod friends. It was a buzzing, glittering, zipping pollinator superhighway throughout the late summer and fall here. Such fun.
Apparently I forgot to respond to this comment, Rebecca. Sorry about that. Thanks for the link to the NW meadow folks. It is a lovely site. Glad you also had a great (wet) summer/fall with asters and goldenrods. It really was a marvelous experience.
Oh, no worries. I am finding keeping up with notifications a bit of a challenge here, actually. Not because I have all that many, but just because I don't always see them at first and then they kind of seem to disappear somewhere. Or maybe in my case, it's just user error. :) Anywho -- hoping for another nice aster year this summer!
Take in mind my comments are from only a little experience and also in a completely different biome to yours (tropical).
When we first started on our land we happened to be lucky enough to do Kiss The Ground’s soil advocacy course, which was free at the time. Cutting grass (or better yet, grazing it, at an optimal time did wonders for our soil and water infiltration. We now had green grass throughout the year and we went from a property of mostly cogon grass (considered a terrible weed but probably native to the Philippines and at one time was utilized for roofing materials etc) to something with a higher diversity of forage.
However our insect numbers seemed to plummet (purely from observation, no scientific measuring) and bird life wasn’t doing much better.
I then got a scythe, this was great because less noise to disturb animals, I could listen out for distressed birds if I was cutting too close to a nest etc. However I was still too enthusiastic and cutting so regularly that insect numbers still showed no increase.
So I slowed down.
Boom
Yes my place is now mostly a wild mess and as my city-living mother-in-law suggests there’s probably people hiding in the grass spying on us (haha) but bird life and insect life is booming (as much as it can in the midst of the insect apocalypse). I now only scythe before I move the chickens, which is every week or so, slowly rotating them around the property to fertilize and disturb the soil, resulting in more plant diversity. We also have a cow and sheep that free roam over the entire property and feed themselves and medicate themselves when necessary. They’re very heathy and we don’t use any dewormers as it would continue working in the soil when the cow takes a poop.
It’s tempting to get another cow as it would be a good income source (since food farming here in the Philippines is very poorly supported) but if I did it would need careful observation to ensure I haven’t gone beyond the limits of what my land can healthily support. And I think insects and birds are a great indicator of that.
Take in mind I come from this at the angle that I am trying to marry agriculture (growing some human food on a small homestead scale, and not yet very successfully ) with care for the land and it’s inhabitants and with quite a bit of rewilding and native tree planting also
That is a different world from Maine, Leon, and your story speaks to the different paths to a more diverse land in different places. Slowing down seems to be what unites us all, though. As I often write, there are too many of us doing too much for too little reason, and mowing seems a good metaphor for all of that. I had originally intended titled subsections for this essay, and one of them was going to be We Are the Mower.
The other piece that you bring up here is the relationship of grazing to biodiversity, and I don't know enough about that to say anything, other than I've read that bison - or cows, I guess, if managed correctly - make Plains habitat more diverse, but generally cow/sheep grazing has been a down-to-the-nub nightmare nearly everywhere.
Happy to hear you found through hard work a good solution for both you and the insects and birds. Thanks for that. Three cheers for wild messes.
Three cheers for wild messes. 🍻 I love that
Regarding the large herbivores and grazing I feel it is very important and worth delving into, if you like I can share the text only copy of the course we did. Although it very much depends on context. Some biomes are too fragile to have large animals graze. There’s the group Soil4Climate and they’re all about using cows to heal the soil and drawdown huge amounts of carbon. I think this is great but I also sometimes feel some of them want to put cows absolutely everywhere.
It’s all about limits.
I definitely lean towards these sorts of solutions than the techno optimistic billionaire saving the world sort of thing. Nature knows what to do, we need to get out of its way and help it.
I see you’re already a subscriber to the Rob’s climate according to life Substack. Alpha Lo has a great Substack regarding water which is worth having a look at, he’s a water physicist and one of his recent essays was regarding Daisyworld, a model that showed that biodiversity affects climate.
One thing I’ve woefully forgotten to mention is that in the Kiss The Ground course they did talk about when you over-rest grasses. This leads to the clump of grass eventually dying and isn’t good for the soil. The specifics of this I can’t remember, and whether it also applies to other sorts of ground covers like flowers, not too sure
The essay is so good.
And so are the comments.
Great writer.
Great readers.🌱
Jason, thanks for your thoughtful examination of the mowing issue from multiple perspectives. I'm always searching for the right balance here in midcoast Maine. I have 4.5 acres of mixed fields, some of which is very wet, and other parts that sit higher and drier. In the beginning I had them mowed once a year in late July, which I now know is too early. Then I left them unmowed for maybe 3 years to see what would happen, except for paths around the perimeter and through the middle. In those years, multiflora came back with a vengeance, and alders are aggressive too even though they offer valuable food and habitat. I was also rewarded with a birch grove, a volunteer walnut, and a mix of asters and goldenrod. I try now to push the mowing into late November, which partly depends on the availability of the guy with the mower. My focus is on habitat restoration, and while I would like nothing better than to leave things to grow year-round, it's just not compatible with invasive control. Most of the year, I rely on hand-to-hand combat with the multiflora, and let the alders be except where they invade the open meadow. I'll be interested to hear of any resources you come across that offer happy solutions and am also curious about how late in early spring is too late.
Hi Dudley: It's surprisingly complicated, isn't it? Though I suppose anything to do with the land, with habitat, should be understood as specific to the site. There's no good time in the sense that there's life in the meadow all year-round. But there's management that has to happen. I wonder if you could think of the 4.5 acres in sections and mow a section or two per year? Also, could you get away with a controlled burn at some point? That would mimic the Wabanaki management, at least in part. Otherwise, I'll keep an eye out for a thorough resource. I imagine that spring mowing should be done as soon as the mower can get in there, but the lower section may be too wet for that. Stay tuned... And thanks for all the good work you're putting into the land.
Thanks, Jason. All good ideas, and I will keep juggling options, not only for the mowing parts, but also for the areas that are too wet to ever mow. This a site-specific problem, as you say, and the solutions will vary from year to year, though within a framework.
Wonderful writing. "Ad asters per aspera" (to modify an old Latin motto.) Thanks also for that enlightening conversation with Patrick. We donated one of our plots of land to the Nature Conservancy. The mixed grassland was being invaded by the all-but-ineradicable junipers. Haven't been out that way in years to see what the Conservancy did with it.
Thank you, Michael. And thanks for donating land to TNC. They do good work.
I don't know if they really welcomed it. There was a lot of erosion control that needed to be done according to the folks in the county Ag office. Fences were in disrepair, hunters were trespassing all the time and one time we caught a local running a small herd of cattle on the acreage. So maybe not such a generous gift all things considered. The Conservancy was going to have to deal with each and every one of those problems I imagine. On the positive side, there was an all year pond, seasonal creek and some large pecan trees that got there, God knows how... Prime large acreage but lots of work...
Pretty sure TNC only accepts what they're happy to get. I'm sure they saw the gift as a gift.