Living Roots
by Joshua T. Anderson
In a landscape dominated by invasive grasses and monocrops, big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) holds tough in the ditches of Walsh County, North Dakota. With its distinctive purplish tint and turkey track seedheads (or rames), big bluestem is a perennial symbol of endurance that blooms along dusty gravel roads. Its roots, which can spread through rhizomes, are believed to outlive oak trees.
These long-lived, deeply rooted prairie plants can inspire us to take a deeper view of our conservation efforts. To ask: how can the living roots of history inspire us to change farm policies and practices before we are left with irreparably degraded soil and hypoxic, dead water in our lakes and rivers?
On September 18, 1800, Alexander Henry climbed an oak tree near my home on the banks of the Park River. As he observed, “I took my usual morning view from the top of my oak and saw more buffaloes than ever. They formed one body … as far as the eye could reach. They were moving southward slowly and the meadow seemed as if in motion.”
A contemporary of Lewis and Clark, Henry described in vivid detail a landscape thrumming with life: bison, bear, wolves, and otters. Thriving communities of Dakota (Sioux) and Anishinaabe peoples. Native grasslands tall as a man on horseback. The wonton slaughter of wildlife, with carcasses left to rot and “the stench about camp being so great from the quantities of flesh and fat thrown away.”
My office at the Walsh County Three Rivers Soil Conservation District squats on the banks of the Park River near Henry’s historic camp. The Three Rivers in our name refers to the three branches of the Park River, which Henry explained, “derives its name from the fact that the Assiniboines once made a park or [canal] pound on this river for buffalo.”
Down the road from my office stands The Alexander House, the roadside motel and liquor store that pays tribute to the 19th century explorer. Referred to as the “Ax House” by locals, the motel features a sign portraying Alexander Henry in a coonskin cap, a rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. The words “Alexander House” written in a font that resembles cut logs.
The once endless grassland Henry described has been plowed, poisoned, and plundered. Gone are the enormous herds of roaming bison. The bear overhunted for their fur and fat. The stands of tallgrass reduced to the ditches and dwindling cattle pastures.
Nearly 225 years after Henry set up camp here, I joined David, our watershed coordinator, to collect water samples from Homme Lake (pronounced Hah-mee), which is fed by the Park River.
We backed the boat into the water. Toxic algae bloomed along the shoreline. A thick skin of bluish-green foam gurgled on the surface. At the end of the dock, streaks of neon green swirled in the water like spilled paint.
A kettle of turkey vultures huddled in the gloom by the swim beach. A pair of pelicans disappeared into the fog. The spillway, a quarter mile from the dock, washed out in the haze, its shape held like a distant memory.
Homme is the largest lake in Walsh County. Authorized by the Park River Flood Control Project of 1944 and named Homme Lake after real estate investor H.G. Homme in 1948, the dam was designed to hold water during floods and to mitigate pollution from farm runoff.
The 2010 Clean Water Act officially designated Homme as an impaired water body based on its Trophic State Index (TSI) score. The lake has remained on the list ever since.
Without radical changes, Homme will continue to bloom with toxic algae containing microcystin. The microtoxin is deadly to livestock and can cause serious liver and neurological damage in humans, crossing the blood-brain barrier and threatening the structure and function of neurons and the quantity of neurotransmitters. During our last visit, the microcystin sample we collected at the swim beach was 2,010 micrograms per liter (ug/L), or 250 times the reporting limit.
The EPA defines the runoff of chemical fertilizers as “nonpoint source pollution” because we cannot track the pollutants to specific fields. But we can watch chemical fertilizers rumble into our county by the trainload. Train cars filled with white phosphorus, red phosphorus, hydrophosphorus acid, and anhydrous ammonia (nitrogen) are shipped in to replace nutrients depleted by farm practices that leave behind bare, dysfunctional soils. The same chemicals are tracked by the Department of Justice because they are common ingredients in the production of methamphetamine, which, like algae blooms, has ravaged the rural Great Plains.
Living roots offer us an alternative for tracking these problems to their source and for imagining real, tangible, prairie-based solutions.
To this end, our office developed the Working Lands Cover Crop Initiative. The program provides cost-share to farmers and ranchers to replace monocrops with full-season, multispecies grasses and livestock. Our $5.75 million grant proposal has been selected by the National Association of Conservation Districts, and we are awaiting final approval from the USDA.
Our working lands approach to conservation is inspired by the disturbance dependent prairie grasslands and rooted in soil health principles: minimal disturbance (such as tillage and chemical inputs), diversity of species, soil armor, livestock integration, and living roots. The cost-share plan will convert nearly 10,000 acres of monocrops to multispecies grasses in over 10 counties in North Dakota and Minnesota with funding to grow local and regional markets in grassfed beef.
While we await the grant funding, we have begun collecting native prairie seeds from the ditches in partnership with a local high school botany class. The ditches where stands of big bluestem, sideoats grama, stiff goldenrod, prairie liatris, and Indian grass have become unlikely sites of hope.
After leaving my job as a professor, ditches and degraded waterbodies have become my new classroom. Unlikely learning environments where I teach students about native plant communities through the journals of Alexander Henry and the stories I’ve learned from the region’s Indigenous peoples.
“But 1800 was a long time ago,” a student collecting seeds recently remarked.
“Not to the oak tree Alexander Henry climbed,” I replied. “Or to the big bluestem right there in your hands.”
Joshua T. Anderson is a writer from rural North Dakota and the district conservation manager at Walsh County Three Rivers Soil Conservation District. His recent and forthcoming work appears in North American Review, Open Space, Essay Daily, Iowa Capital Dispatch, and North Dakota Monitor. He is the host of Common Ground: A Prairie Podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, and YouTube. He can be found on Instagram @josh_raisedbyariver.
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Thank you for this important, informative post. I live in the mid-Hudson Valley in New York State beside the Shawangunk Ridge. There a hay field next to my yard. Last year it wasn't mowed. This year it was. Several plants I've never seen before began to grow. I still can't identify a wildflower that I first took for a small variety of Joe Pie Weed, but unlike that plant it formed seed pods, similar to butterfly weed and milkweed. Also appearing in the field were many clumps of what looks exactly big blue stem. I had looked it up some weeks ago and it seemed as though I was seeing a midwestern prairie grass. I don't know how it has traveled here, but I have fallen in love with it and visit it every day. Thanks again for this post.
Great read! In just a year, I have seen a lot of changes in my tiny prairie plot. The indian grass is the one that surprised me the most. The warblers ate the seed avidly before migrating south, the turkeys hid behind the clumps while looking for bugs. Next year will bring new surprises. Hope to see the swamp milkweed and the cup plant take off.