During Summer 2024, Climate Land Leaders met up in Central Iowa at Whiterock Conservancy. There Liz Garst and her partner, Darwin Pierce, gave the land leaders a gift: Insights into their lifetimes of observing, working and restoring the land around them. We asked Liz to expand on some of her “place-based knowledge.” A banker, activist and environmentalist, Liz and her family donated the 5,500 acres of Whiterock, a land trust. She is knowledgeable, experienced and provocative–a true Iowa treasure.
On Prairie Restoration
Liz Garst
I’m the world’s leading expert on how you should NOT start a prairie. I made a lot of mistakes early on. For my first prairie restoration, I found local ecotype for my forbs but I didn’t have local ecotype grasses in my mix because Neil Smith National Wildlife Refuge was getting established and all of the big bluestem seed available in Iowa went there. So we brought seed from Kansas for the big bluestem, and it was so aggressive and completely dominated the planting.
Local ecotype is important but the balance of grasses and forbs is as well. In the early days of prairie plantings, we had only three grasses and five forbs in the mix. The mix would be 60-80 percent grasses and 20-40 percent forbs. Now I use 80 percent forbs and 20 percent grasses in my prairie restorations—way more than the NRCS CRP practice standard CP42 [Pollinator Habitat] requires. If you have too high a percentage of grass, it will take over eventually, and you don’t want to give it a head start. We use up to 80 different kinds of forbs.
Using a really high percentage of forbs in your mix is expensive. We can spend $600 an acre, even $800 an acre in seed. But at least some of that extra expense is offset by the fact that you fill every ecological niche in that prairie with different forbs. Where we’ve done $600 an acre seeding, we haven’t needed to mow. With the low-end CRPs mixes, you spend years fighting thistles, fighting thistles, fighting thistles – mowing them, or spot spraying and mowing them, and spot spraying. With the high-end mixes, you spend money on seed and save money on maintenance.
What other mistakes have I made? I had a planting on its way to being a beautiful prairie. You’re supposed to keep it mowed down to about eight inches, but my cutting was more like two feet. I essentially buried the seed with too much deadfall laying right on top of it. Another mistake: The first time I ever planted a prairie, I didn’t understand the drill calibration. I spent $3,000 on fancy prairie seed that all ended up in the outside row.
There are a lot of really bad prairie restorations going on right now in Iowa. You need to work from a list of the plants found in your county, and no other plants. Iowa has plantings right now with seeds from all over, which is really inappropriate.
I’m also against spreading prairie seed around in remnant prairies. If you’re introducing seeds, maybe they’re appropriate and maybe they won’t turn out to be. We just don’t know which one. I think of remnant prairies as our recipe. If you’re introducing seeds, then you no longer have a remnant prairie, which means you no longer have a recipe of what things should look like. So don’t go around polluting remnant prairies.
We thinned a timber stand at Whiterock Conservancy and the soils are pretty exposed. There have been proposals to overseed prairie there, and I think that’s a bad idea. After we’ve got all the junk cleaned out and the area burned several times, only then will we know what we have. Then maybe we could introduce prairie if we don’t have anything there that we need to restore. Sometimes it can take years to know what you have.
On Savanna Restoration and Forest Management
With savannas, people need to understand the effects of the lack of fire in Iowa’s landscape. It isn’t just our oak savannas that are overgrown. All of our forests are suffering from lack of fire. All of our forests have way too many stems per acre. The classic definition of oak savanna is 30 to 70 percent shade on the forest floor. But it’s a continuum. Even in Eastern Iowa, we should be worried about how many stems an acre we have, because our forests are too dark. I fret that people go to state parks and use the roots of trees as stair steps on the trails, and don’t understand that when you’re using the roots of trees to stair steps, there’s a big problem. There’s terrible soil erosion going on. The forest floor doesn’t have sunshine, and therefore nothing is growing on it. The herbaceous layer holds soil, and we don’t have herbaceous layers in our forests.
In his book Biophilia, EO. Wilson characterizes savanna as “…the ideal toward which human beings unconsciously strive….” Of all the places, we love savanna best, with a little water in the background. We all came from Africa. We all like to see what we’re hunting. And we all like to see what is hunting us. I just think that’s great.
Savanna is understood a little better now. We now know the importance of it – and how much of it there was on the land. The state ecologist of Iowa, John Pearson, re-examined land surveyors’ data from the 1830s-1850s. Those surveyors had just a couple words for forest: forest or timber, and had a couple different words for prairie: prairie or meadows. But they had about 20 words for savanna: oak openings, oak barons, part grass, part forest, woody grasslands, scattering oaks and others. Pearson went through those surveyor notes, and he relabeled everything that sounded like savanna as savanna.
The surveyors said that about 15 percent of Iowa was savanna – that’s a lot! The savanna was primarily east of the Mississippi River/Missouri River divide. West of the divide, the prairie fires were so hot they killed all the trees. Western Iowa has way too many trees because of fire suppression. East of the “M and M” divide, savanna was found on the slopes of river valleys. On those slopes, the fires didn’t get hot enough to kill the oaks, which are unusually fire-adapted. On the ridgelines, fire killed all of the trees.
Prairie fires went on east all the way into Indiana toasting most trees but oak. So there’s a lot of oak savanna not only in Eastern Iowa but in North Central Illinois and Indiana.
Oaks are a magnificent part of our environment. They are highly adapted to fire, in fact, fire-dependent. Oaks are the best carbon sink. Insects love them–more insects live in oaks than any other kind of tree. I fret desperately about Iowa’s oaks. This oak wilt is dreadful. I’ve heard it hypothesized that oak wilt is going to kill most oaks in Iowa before it’s done. The good news is that oak trees can evolve to resist oak wilt, unlike ash trees, which cannot evolve to handle the emerald ash borer. They’re going to go extinct. Oaks can evolve to resist oak wilt, but they have to have sunshine to make it from babyhood to adulthood, and we don’t have sunshine in our forests because they’re so overgrown. We’re not letting oaks evolve to resist oak wilt, and that is a big concern in my book.
What else can I tell you? You can count on a woody, invasive invasion right after you do any timber stand improvement. Just count on it. We use Basal bark treatment now [herbicide applied directly to the base of the stems of woody invasives]. Fire alone won’t solve the problem of woody invasives. Fire eventually works to restore savanna; it’s just super slow motion. It takes forever burning to get things under control.
Darwin Pierce, Valerie Arganbright, Omar Tesdell and Lee Tesdell at Whiterock Conservancy
I’ve tried all of the theories for “slash management,” the trees and bushes that are removed in timber stand improvement. One theory is, you just ring the trees–you kill them and leave them standing. I did that once, and it took away all enjoyment from the land because these big standing dead trees are dangerous. They drop branches down and then whole trees come down on a windy day. You don’t want to be anywhere near those dead trees. Even worse than that, they leave a mess. Anything that’s sticking up above the ground is just an invitation for birds to come and perch on the branch above the ground, and shit honeysuckle or buckthorn or whatever from those branches. Also the branches and the tree trunks themselves stop the run of fire. Over the course of time I’ve concluded that it is absolutely worth the money, at the very least, to cut the trees all the way to the ground and piling the slash is even better.
It’s worth it, because getting rid of the terrible invasive species problem is also big money. So if you’ve got trees down all over, you can’t do anything about those invasive woodies coming in. I’m a big fan of doing it right.
On Markets, Bankers and Soil Health
Markets have so little focus on longevity of the land. For example, I have land that was appraised lower because it has soil-saving terraces on it! Another example: I have a field that was appraised as crop ground even though it’s pretty steep pasture.
We are going to have to grapple with the problem of soil health, soil quality and erosion sometime. [Former Director of the USDA Lab for Ag and the Environment] Jerry Hatfield says we are going to run out of topsoil in 35 years in Western Iowa. Mortgages are for 30 years. Well. what’s the value of our asset in 30 years, if there’s no topsoil? Bankers haven’t really addressed that issue.
Bankers don’t really have a good way to distinguish how well a farm is being taken care of, and that’s a real problem. Soil erosion is hard to measure, but we’re getting better at that because of Lidar technology. For all our talk about soil health, we don’t have a good metric system on the subject. Soil organic matter is the best single indicator of soil, but it’s really slow to respond to management.
There’s the Haney test. I joke around that the Haney test results depend on if it’s Tuesday or Wednesday. What I really mean is, it depends on: What’s the temperature today? Versus the last time you took this test? How much moisture is in the soil? What time of year is it? Conditions vary so much that the Haney test is not a reliable metric.
Another test that’s pretty popular is soil bulk density. It’s a measure of how compacted the soils are, and it’s got a benchmark by soil type. The disadvantage, though, is even one tractor tire pass in the last year or two can dramatically affect the results of that test. So it’s subject to a fair amount of testing error. You also can test for water infiltration rates but it has testing flaws. Water can leak out of the ring, and it’s a very slow cumbersome test.
So I’ve come around to the idea that the best single metric is soil aggregate stability, sometimes demonstrated as the slake test. You put a clod of soil on turkey netting in water and observe how fast the soil dissolves. At Jerry Hatfield’s recommendation, we went to Regen Lab, which has a water-based soil aggregate stability test. But the protocol from Regen Lab in Nebraska is not the protocol used by places like Cornell University in New York. And neither benchmark their protocols by soil type.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time investigating the metrics, and what would be best. I’m voting for water-based soil aggregate stability. I just think we need somebody to bite the bullet and get a standardized benchmarking system going for it, whether Cornell’s protocol or Regen’s, or somebody else’s. But let’s get on the same program.
On Pasture Leases
After my dad died, I rented out what is now Whiterock Conservancy pastures to a local cattle guy and he badly over-grazed the land. He did a lot of damage in the two years he rented. I told him he was hurting our land, and he said, “I paid you $80. I can do whatever I want.” So I told him, “Here’s your notice. You’re out of here.”
After that, we went to leases based on the animal unit per day and a base amount of rent. But that’s pretty complicated, and the point of all that wasn’t to make it complicated but to make sure the land wasn’t overgrazed. So we finally switched out of that animal unit month per day concept and went to just your regular base rent with a couple of twists. The first twist: We accept $5 to $10 less than Iowa State University says the pasture rent should be but reserve the right to ask the tenant to leave if we’re out of grass. The second difference is our leases run to the middle or end of October. If we have extra grass at that point, then we charge per animal unit per day to the extent we have grass. A simple but fundamental concept: Our job is to grow grass, not raise cattle.
On Living and Working on Your Land
When the Climate Land Leaders visited, I said something like: “If you don’t live there and work the land, you should let it go.” Maybe I should have said: “If you don’t pay a whole lot of attention to what’s going on on your land, no matter where you live, you should let it go.” That might be a more diplomatic way to say it.
A lot of landowners don’t know what’s going on on their land, and that’s a problem. An amazing number of people think their nephew, or whoever their farmer is, is a fabulous farmer. They like their nephew, and therefore they think their land is being well taken care of.
That is a real trap. Loving your nephew isn’t the same as he’s taking good care of your land. If you can’t understand that, then you shouldn’t own the land. I’ve gotten more and more rude on this subject. I ask people, is your nephew farming no-till? Usually the answer is, no. Does your nephew have cover crops? Usually the answer is no, and I say your nephew is not taking good care of your land.
If you’re not no-tilling and cover cropping, you’re not taking care of the land. That’s the beginning, the middle, and the end of it.
On Carbon Markets and Truly Climate-Friendly Policy
I’m sorry, but the current carbon markets are complete baloney. The research is showing that most cover crop and no-till systems are not meaningfully sinking carbon, yet the carbon payments are going largely to pay for those practices. I used to believe that you could sink carbon until I started looking at my own efforts. I have been no-tilling for 40 years and cover cropping for 12-14 years, and I’m not increasing carbon in my soil. If you have highly complex livestock integration, highly intensive multi-species cover cropping, or you have really bad soil, maybe you can increase organic matter some.
Darwin Pierce shows off Whiterock Conservancy’s soil
Organic matter built up during the best possible climatic conditions and animals–super wet, super warm, super flat, lots of bugs, swamps. It took us 10,000 years to get up to 6% organic matter, and it’ll take us 10,000 years again to get it back–not meaningful at our timescale.
Also, you really need to increase organic matter at depth. The corn growers talk about all the cellulose they are putting in the system and how they are increasing organic matter. But the life expectancy of increases in carbon within a few inches of the surface is nothing. Carbon isn’t captured and kept there. It’s going up into the atmosphere with time, especially if you disk.
Companies like Indigo come along and say they’ll measure the actual soil carbon increases. I’m waiting for them to pay somebody based on the increase in their organic matter or in their carbon. I’m waiting to see it, because I don’t see any science that says that works.
I recently looked into the USDA carbon-friendly tree planting programs and that’s baloney, too. Their program is a 30-year contract, and trees like oaks don’t amount to anything in 30 years. There’s a lot of research that says that the bigger the tree, the more carbon gets sunk. And when we harvest those big trees as lumber, and really keep that carbon, you know, indefinitely out of the system.
But a 30-year weed tree is not ever going to be lumber. That tree’s carbon is just going to go up in the air when the payment stops and people dig them up or burn them and start over. A 30-year program is ridiculously inadequate.
Tree planting also has some practical problems too. Darwin [Liz’s partner] says, “Liz, how many tree plannings have you done that worked?” I can name one out of maybe a dozen attempts over my lifetime I’ve tried. It’s almost inconceivable you could get a tree going without a lot of watering. It costs big money to water a whole field of trees, a huge expense in those early years when you have a 30-year payback.
Here in Western Iowa, we are not able to grow trees anymore without a lot of human intervention. Our droughts are too long. Our rainfall is not reliable enough.
A better program run by the government for trees would be a permanent easement program. If you had a permanent easement and maybe some cost share, the investment of the first couple of years of getting the trees started might be more economically feasible. Maybe you can allow mature trees to be harvested for lumber, meaning the carbon is kept out of the system indefinitely. The program would need to be more like a 100-year lease, maybe up to a 300-year lease because oak trees live 300 years. The program would, in essence, be buying the land.
In contrast, with the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program, which has 10- and 15-year contracts based on rental rates, the federal government has bought a whole lot of the land I know two or three times as people re-enroll in the program. CRP wastes the taxpayer’s money. USDA would be way ahead to just buy the land or permanent easement like the Wetland Reserve Program.
Maybe the word “permanent” needs to be rethought. Maybe we start a “National Emergency Farmland Reserve” for when there’s almost no topsoil left. We’ll need that soil to eat. There would have to be some flexibility in the program. Permanent is a long, long time but 10-year programs are ridiculous, and 30-year programs are too.
We’re talking about existential threats for the future of our planet. I’m surprised: Ten years ago, I thought I wouldn’t live to see this rapid climate change. Now this climate devastation is happening in my lifetime, not our kids; and grandkids’ lifetimes. And I’m appalled that people are just not worrying about it.