1. Home on the Prairie
English 250
Assignment 3
Prairie Restoration Project
By: Sarah Phillips, Kristin Polchow,
Altay Ozen, Trevor Chalstrom, PavelNikolov

2. With the many disappearances of the natural tall grasses from the Midwest,
people have been coming together to rebuild some aspects of the prairies. Prairies once
covered over 40% of Iowa's land, now it’s only down to 1%. Of course the “virgin” prairie
no longer exists, there are still some projects working to rebuild some similar natural
prairies, for example there is one right here in Ames, which is the one that our group
worked with to learn all about how to restore a prairie and what we can do to ensure
some parts of prairies futures.
First, some background information on prairies. The word Prairie comes from the
French word prairie, meaning meadow. They are known to date as far back as the
1600s, and take many years to form the thick topsoil. Prairies were home to many
different types of native plants, animals, and many other species. The deep topsoil of
the prairie served as a home and safe burrowing ground for many animals. Grasses on
the prairie were known to stand 6-12 feet high, with roots about 12 feet deep. Prairies
only survived the settlers because there were no means of digging through the tough
topsoil for many years to come, until animal labor, and more modernized devices were
used to plow it all down.
There is more information about the animals and a few types of grasses known
to live on the prairie exist. Many animal species including the prairie dog, buffalo, eagle,
etc. There are many types of plants that are now very rare that once flourished on the
prairies such as, big bluestem grass, Indian grass, milkweed and so on. The big
bluestem grasses once protected the soil from the harsh winds on the prairie, when this
grass was plowed the soil started to diminish due to wind. Also, many grasses were a
food source for the wildlife on the prairie and when they disappeared so did many of the
natural animals.
Our group wanted to help in some way to restore prairies locally. We had got in
contact with Lauren Sullivan to see what we could do. Altay and Trevor went out to a
six acre patch of land, donated to Iowa State, to help Lauren seed. This land was
donated because the land was too small for the farmer to farm on, the work wouldn’t be
worth it. To our surprise there were a lot of people there from other English classes to
help out. There were roughly 20-30 people there. First we had to mix the seeds with
sand to making the spreading process easier. By doing this it makes the bag have more
volume and when you spread the seeds there are not huge clumps of seeds all in one
spot. We divided up into groups so each was responsible for a certain section of land to
make this go faster. One person spread the seeds while the rest of the group stepped
on the seeds so they would have good contact with the soil. Having good contact makes
the prairie process a little faster. After one section was seeded we had to clean our
shoes from mud. Lauren did not want the seeds to transfer from one section to the next
because of her study. Our group was the fastest out of all of them so after we finished
our part we help out the others. So many people stopped by to see what we were up to
because you do not usually see a large group of kids helping out for a good cause by

3. stomping on farm land very often. It was great to see how many people wanted to get
involved.
Although, the main purpose of this project is to help nature to restore the
prairies, it is not the only one and actually there are couple more purposes of this
project as well. At the beginning, this project did not intended to have any other
purposes but the graduate students who are making this project needed to do some
research in order to graduate. Moreover, since the project is a very expensive to do,
they need some university departments’ help and in order to get that, they needed to do
something related to education or research. Therefore, it became a multipurpose
project. The other purposes of this project are small animal effects on the prairie growth,
root structure of the prairies, effects of the modern agronomy products to the soil and
this project to become a going on project.
There are some effects of the small animals on the growth of prairies. The
thing is that some people believe that prairies are what small animals made them to be.
In other words, the theory is that if small animals are not allowed to interact with the
prairies then prairies will not be able to grow to their natural states. On the other hand,
other people claim that the prairies interactions with the other animals are slowing their
growth. Therefore, their theory is that these interactions actually have an opposite effect
on the prairies. In order to see these effects, they put fence around some prairie fields
so small animals won’t be able to pass and at the end they are just going to check the
difference between the fenced fields and the fields without fence. That is how the effects
of the small animals on the prairies became to be one of the purposes of the project.
Another purpose is to see how the root structures of the different prairies act.
The most of the prairies have much bigger roots than their entire body on the ground
and very few prairies, like Kentucky bluegrass, have almost no roots at all. In the
project, every prairie field has two parts. In middle all of them have high density part and
all the rest is low density part. Both of these fields contain different kinds of prairies.
They also put some kind of plastic at the each part of the low density areas. This
stopped us to seed on those parts so those parts won’t have any roots there. Moreover,
at the end they can easily take those plastics off and those plastics take out the surface
of the soil as well, leaving all the roots on the surface. This way it can easily be
observed which prairie kinds have roots on that empty area. Apparently, this knowledge
can be used to cut off almost half the expenses on the future seeding.
Modern agronomy product’s effects on the soil and this becoming a going on
project are two other purposes of this project. The effects of modern agronomy is very
straightforward, they are checking that how soil affected by these modern agronomy
products. On the other hand, they are also planning to this project becoming a going on
project. According to the graduate students, who are doing this project, in this field of
study almost all of the projects are projects like do the research and be done with it.
There are very few projects that are going on from researchers to other researchers.

4. For example, there is one that is going on in England. Anyway they want this project to
be one of those projects that go on even after the end of their research. In other words,
they are planning to leave the field to the other graduate students who are also studying
on this field.
Overall, this project was very educational and useful. By helping to this project
we not only helped nature to restore itself but we also helped to at least three
researches that can possibly help humans in the future. Moreover, this project also
developed our researching skills as well since we researched about prairies to learn
about them. After continuing research the main piece of advice given to continue to help
out to bring back our prairies is to keep getting involved. There are many different non-
profit organizations through the entire nation that is helping with multiple different
restoration projects. If more and more people continue to get involved within a few years
the number of prairies covering the nation can be reclaimed and closer to what it once
was.

5. Resource:
Sullivan, Lauren. "Prairie Restoration Project."English 250.Iowa State University, English
Department. Oakridge Research and Education Prairie, Ames. 12 April 2012. Speech.
. "Prairie - Natural History Of The Prairie, The Post-settlement Prairie." http://science.jrank.org.
N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Apr 2012. <http://science.jrank.org/pages/5435/Prairie.html>.