If you’re one of those folks who just can’t get enough information on native prairie restoration, a recent podcast from ATTRA’s “Voices from the Field” series provides plenty of food for thought, in a conversation between NCAT interviewer Darron Gaus and University of Arkansas researcher Dr. Dirk Philipp.

During the conversation, Philipp reflects on what’s actually meant by terms like “restoration” and “reconstruction,” and what outcomes are realistic to expect from the process.

“How do we consider non-native vegetation? If you try to restore a certain ecosystem, like the prairies, you never get that back one hundred percent how it was.”

Philipp describes a number of different motivations he’s encountered amongst farmers adding native plants back into their pasture mixes – as a strategy for providing more summer grazing, as a technique for cutting soil erosion, as a way (when planting native legumes) to reduce fertilizer nitrogen input costs, or even simply for the sake of seeing more native grasses.

Philipp emphasizes that in setting restoration goals, it’s important to recognize that even the small and incremental improvements that can result from these varied approaches are still valuable.

“An original prairie may have contained hundreds of species. Now that is obviously not realistic. So, what we’ve seen in our plantings, we just use maybe 20 forbs and five to six grasses.  We don’t even get half of the forbs we planted.”

“So when farmers decide, ‘Hey, I want to bring the prairie back,’ that is most likely a few grasses and a few forbs – but that is obviously good enough to start.”

He points out that while it’s not realistic to expect to bring back the 99% of the tallgrass prairie that was lost, it’s reasonable to aim for a figure like five or ten percent, in the form of things like prairie buffer strips, which have real economic value in reducing nitrate losses along field edges.

Before concluding the session, Gaus and Philipp go on to discuss some of the more nuts-and-bolts aspects of restoration projects, including mitigating the immense degree of weed pressure, and the need for a post-planting management plan.

Asked what one thing he’d change tomorrow if given the power, Philipp responds, “I wish everyone could see or feel that prairie once. Just go through, put your hands out, touch the grasses. Touch the forbs. I mean, hear the birds, and feel that place.”