Native Grasses are an increasing rarity.
Grazed out by over a century of poor land management based on short-term value over long-term need, Native Grasses are rapidly becoming a mythologized character of Old America.
Unharmed for tens of thousands of years by our Native Peoples, Native Grasses have been almost erased from the American landscape in less than 200 years.
Where bison by the millions roamed the vast lands of pre-European America, and Indians lived within the natural structure in a perpetual compliment of their environment, the post-European/Asian Americas show the effects of Man’s misbegotten belief that Nature should bend to our will rather than we should bend into the natural fiber.
Now, voracious invasive species like KR and Kleburg Bluestem, Johnson Grass, Coastal Bermuda variants, have beat down Natives—represented here by Little Bluestem, Switchgrass, Sideoats Gramma, the graceful giant called Yellow Indian Grass, Spangletop, and others—in the way non-natives seem to do best: quick growth and seeding out, and a general lack of palatability, where Natives have neither the water or time to reach maturity.
KR Bluestem—which I term The Grass Eating America—will grow three feet tall with minimal water and seed out, or it can grow to six inches and still seed out without rain. And, since few animals will eat it under almost any condition, it remains untouched where Natives—highly palatable, often like ‘candy’ to grazing animals—are sought after, kept short and do not seed out.
As invasives like KR take over America’s grasslands, the real cost of poor land management will become apparent: since Natives retain nutrition even when dormant in the winter, and most invasive species have near-zero nutrition even when green and growing; the bare ground that’s been the previous result of overgrazing is being replaced with a hyper-competitive invasive grass that won’t give the soil back to Natives without a great, and costly, fight.
The almost certain result will be meat prices that double and triple as land loses the ability to sustain our meat sources, and a greater portion of their diet will have to be brought in and fed. A fact that would have caused the American bison to laugh at our short-sighted foolishness, had we not slaughtered them unto extinction for their tongues and hides more than a hundred years ago, making way for our farms and cattle.
Please…celebrate Natives for the original species, placed here as a part of the cycle by Wakan Tanka, and lost through the negligence, greed and arrogance of an America unable to see the future is through its past.