The fight to save America's 'seas of grass'

Here & Now Anytime

NPR

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4.1 • 953 Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Here & Now's Chris Bentley takes a walk through the Schurch-Thomson Prairie of southwestern Wisconsin with a crew of self-described "plant nerds" who are working to restore the American prairie.

Then, we visit the nearby Paris Family Farm, where cows graze on pasture instead of eating feed. We hear why raising cows on pasture appeals to a growing number of farmers and milk drinkers.

Also, pasture-based farms and restored grasslands can both be part of the solution to environmental problems like habitat loss, freshwater pollution and climate change. But neither is a silver bullet.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for here and now anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design.
0:09.2	MathWorks accelerating the pace of discovery of the prairie.
0:55.2	This is here and now anytime from NPR and WBUR.
0:56.4	I'm Chris Bentley.
1:04.0	Today on the show, a trip through America's grasslands.
1:08.5	We'll meet some of the people trying to bring back an underappreciated ecosystem with the potential to provide a home for threatened birds and fight
1:12.8	climate change. Grasslands well managed can be incredible reserves for carbon. But you don't have to be a
1:19.3	wildlife biologist to love grasslands. In fact, given how much of the former prairie is now farmland,
1:26.6	some of the most important people, bringing
1:28.6	back grasslands, are farmers.
1:30.9	This is what I love is like, when you have it this dense, you can't see the soil.
1:37.1	It's all covered with growing roots underneath it.
1:41.4	More on that in a few minutes.
1:44.0	But first, European settlers likened the American prairie to a boundless sea of grass.
1:52.3	But if you zoom in to the perspective of the thousands of species that depend on it, birds and bugs, the prairie is nothing like the vast, lonely ocean, more like a raucous
2:03.9	festival crowd, buzzing with life. I love a nice open field, something I only really truly
2:10.5	appreciated when I moved to the Midwest, and I wanted to get a better sense of what's so special
2:15.8	about grasslands. So in early August, I drove three hours northwest of Chicago and headed up to the Driftless
2:22.4	region of Wisconsin.
2:24.2	I will note, you should probably be mindful that there are ticks in this landscape.
2:27.8	All right, so I'm wearing long pants for a reason.
2:31.9	The Nature Conservancies in Calhoun and I weighed into a sea of flowers and grass at Shirk Thompson Prairie.
	...

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