Grassland 2.0: Restoring People & Prairie to Agriculture;WN@TL goes dark on December 22&29;Genomics & Genetic diversity of carrots;New options for Harnessing Energy from Ammonia

I grew up in Lee County Illinois, a land so flat we called it God’s Own Pool Table, and a place that in the 1830’s and 1840’s had featured Inlet Swamp serving as a hideout for the marauding and murderous Banditti of the Prairie.

Despite that legacy, I never set foot on a prairie as a boy, because the prairie was gone, extirpated if not extinct. Ironically, from our house on College Avenue in Dixon it was just a six-mile bike ride to Grand Detour IL where in 1837 John Deere developed his self-scouring steel plow.  The Deere plow could zing through the virgin sod, the steel singing as it sliced through roots of a 10,000 year-old biome, giving life to crops and crop-farmers, and spelling death for the prairie.

While we may think of our slice of Wisconsin as woodlands, many of us live on land that the glaciers and grasses left for us as prairies and savannas, as wetlands and uplands.  I remember being shocked the first time I saw this map by the Wisconsin Geologic & Natural History Survey based on John Curtis’s The Vegetation of Wisconsin (1959) showing the extent of prairie across southern third of the Badger State.   A similar map of Illinois affirms the extent of prairie before the Euro-Americans colonized with their plows, their roads and their fences of log rails and eventually of barbed wire; and with their steam shovels and ditches to drain the wetlands and swamps (including Inlet) and “reclaim” the land.

Progress was measured first in taking land and then in making the land arable, especially as tallied by tillable acres for growing annual crops.  The disk, the harrow, the drill and the rotary cultivator joined the plow as tools of tillage. At first these fields were sown with wheat for people, oats for livestock, and barley & rye for drinkers.  Later came the dominance of corn and soybeans, mostly for livestock. By the time of John Steuart Curry arrived at the College of Agriculture in the mid 1930’s, we are remembering the land as rows of corn for striding, or fields of wheat for hiding.

UW-Madison:  5.9 million owners, one pretty good public land-grant teaching, research and extension university.