Native Planting for Grazing

This project is to establish a stand of diverse native plants to be utilized in a grazing operation and simultaneously provide quality wildlife habitat, quality pollinator habitat, and a high level of ecosystem services. This would be an opportunity for beef producers to create income with the tool of grazing that, when used properly, is beneficial to the wildlife, pollinators, and ecosystem just as bison, elk, and other herbivores were an integral part of the tallgrass prairie which provided all of these services. This planting would be designed to include a diverse suite of plants including warm season grasses, cool season grasses, sedges and/or other grass-like plants, leguminous forbs, and non-leguminous forbs. The diversity of this planting will act as a year long rather than a seasonal solar collector, and it is key to many things. First, diverse plantings have been shown to produce more than twice as much biomass than monocultures of even the best native biomass producers (Kintisch, 2008). This plant growth not only translates into more forage produced per acre but also into an increased production of below ground biomass which is what was instrumental in building the extremely productive grassland soils that we farm today and could be used to rebuild the soils that have lost significant amounts of their productivity due to erosion of the top horizons that contained large amounts of soil organic matter.