Thanks to Bill Zales and his family for protecting prairie in the Loess
Hills.
Forwarded by Jane Clarkl
Zales says it takes a county to preserve a prairie
Monday, November 12, 2007
By Magdalene Biesanz, Le Mars Daily Sentinel
Iowa once was blanketed in prairie.
Rolling grassland covered 90 percent of the state.
Now there's less than one-tenth of a percent left.
Plymouth County resident Bill Zales has a dream: that we hold on to the
little bit of virgin prairie we have left.
Zales owns 300 acres in the Loess Hills of western Plymouth County -- about
75 percent of that he calls "quality prairie" -- and he's signed an easement
that will keep it as native prairie forever.
His vision is to make that option viable for other landowners in the county.
A retired botany and ecology professor from Illinois, Zales had family ties
to the Loess Hills area and when he heard some of the land was up for sale
in the 80s, he jumped on the opportunity. He bought 160 acres of hilly
prairie and sold the easement on his land to the Nature Conservancy, meaning
that he maintains ownership of it, but he's sold the right to develop it, so
it will forever remain prairie.
"Most counties in Iowa have zero prairie," he said. "Most of the remaining
prairie in the state is in the Loess Hills. The rest of Iowa is looking to
us."
Plymouth County, he said, contains about 11 percent of the Loess Hills
landform. The hills make up about 13 percent of the county, he added, and
they're not prime cropland or the best pastureland.
Zales is quick to say he's not anti-agriculture.
"Iowa is an agricultural state, and I benefit from that," he said. "It's
just that agriculture has 99.9 percent of the state. Can't we save the last
piece? It just happens that here in Plymouth County we have the last
remaining prairie in the state."
Now Zales owns 300 acres of hilly prairie. And while prairies by their
nature maintain themselves, Zales says owning a native prairie can involve
some work. Every year he does controlled burns on pieces of it, with the
help of groups like the Nature Conservancy and Plymouth County Conservation.
For people starting fresh in prairie preservation, there's help out there to
help do these burns and learn how they work.
This fall, Zales even combined his prairie for the native grass seeds. He
donates them right now -- some of his seeds are going to revitalize prairie
at Ponca State Park in Nebraska -- but he says there's a market out there
for them, too.
His combine is an old International 403 combine with a 15-foot head like
you'd see for combining soybeans.
"In the 1970s when it was new, it was the Cadillac of combines," he laughed.
It's gone through a few modifications to make it native-seed ready: there's
less fan to blow away chaff, since that would just blow away the seeds, and
the sifting screen is finer mesh.
An avid bowman, Zales also uses his property for hunting.
While his land situation is currently rather unique in the county, Zales
doesn't want it to stay that way. But to get from here to there requires a
bit of a shift in the way people look at land.
"Landowners in Plymouth County have all kind of options and all kinds of
money available for management of their land," Zales said, pointing to cost
shares or funds for terracing land, adding grass waterways, or putting land
in the Conservation Reserve Program. "What if someone has land and would
like to protect it? What option do they have?"
Right now, what eventually happens for landowners, he said, is that someone
comes by with enough money and buys a couple acres on top of the hill.
"Everybody wants the little bit of land with the best view," he said.
Most landowners he's talked to, though, would rather not parcel off their
land for small acreages, but when it comes down to it, that's just the best
financial option.
There's money out there for prairie preservation, Zales said. It's just
spread out among different groups: the NRCS, the state (in REAP funds),
Pheasants Forever, the Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited, and others.
"Partnering is the big word here," he said. "We've got to get everybody in
the same room at the same time. We're not inventing anything new. Other
states, other counties are doing this."
There just needs to be a central coordinator, he said. His suggestion:
county conservation.
"We need to get a committee or an employee, a full-time contact person," he
said.
In his vision, that person would be available for someone looking to sell
their land, or sell the easement on their land, and would guide them through
the process, helping them find the tax breaks and bringing funding sources
together to make it a feasible -- and desirable -- option for the landowner.
"I'm saying, 'Plymouth County, you've got to make the move,'" Zales said.
He listed several options to preserve native prairie.
*Number one: Landowners can give away their land. It might sound crazy, but
Zales said for some, the tax benefits from donating their land might put
them in a better situation than selling it and paying taxes on the sale. The
sellers can potentially live the rest of their life on the land, then --
rather than passing land on to their kids -- they can pass on the funds from
their tax benefits.
*Number two: Landowners can sell the easement on their land. The easement is
basically the price difference between their land appraised for acreages and
their land appraised for pastureland. Selling that to a private or public
group is basically selling the development rights for the land permanently.
*Number three: Landowners can donate the easement. Once again, the tax
breaks from donating are the payoff. Landowners who donate or sell their
easement can still use their land to pasture cattle, bale hay and take trees
for lumber. They cannot, however, plow it up or raise crops on it. That,
Zales said, can be a hard sell when corn is $4 a bushel.
*Number four: Landowners can sell their land. Here's where partnering among
organizations to give landowners a good price for their land comes in, Zales
said.
*Number five: A governing body can use eminent domain to set aside land as a
preserve. This, Zales said, is one way to get everyone angry fast. "If you
want to start a firestorm," he said, "you say, 'Here's your money, now get
off."
*Number six: Landowners can give groups like Plymouth County Conservation
the first right to refusal on their property if they ever sell it.
As a botanist and ecologist, Zales sees preserving the prairie as an end in
itself. Even while he was still a professor at Joliet Junior College in
Illinois, he would get the college to send classes to the Loess Hills with
him to study its complexities.
Seeing some of those complexities slowly disappear also motivates Zales and
others to work for preservation.
"There used to be spotted skunk here, jackrabbits. They're not here
anymore," Zales said.
Another part of the picture is purely aesthetics.
"We have people driving through the hills, stopping, saying, 'Isn't this
beautiful?' Isn't there value in that?" he asked. "We have museums full of
art, the human animal appreciates beautiful things. Out here, the seasons
change, the colors. This is the most beautiful part of Iowa."
He compared asking "Why preserve prairie?" to "Why pay money to store
treasures at a museum?"
"The prairie is older than any antique we have," he pointed out.
And prairies, in their abundance of species, could hold scientific secrets
that will unlock doors in the future, said Zales, who has his doctorate in
botany.
"We're designing microbes to kill insects. We're looking for genes to put in
plants to make them grow better," he said. "Now, we may be creating a
monster, but if we're looking for genes, should we look in a cornfield where
there's one species or in a prairie where there are thousands?"
And agricultural scientists are paying attention to the way a prairie
thrives.
"Monoculture -- like a cornfield -- is hard to maintain, but polyculture
takes care of itself," he said. "We need to start modeling that. And where
do you go to study polyculture? The prairie."
Zales admits that preserving the land as virgin prairie is not a vision
everyone shares. That's the way it is, he said. This is America, and private
ownership rights are king.
But he'd like to debunk a few myths, too.
"There's a lot of misinformation out there," he notes.
Some people say by selling the easement on land or donating or selling the
land to stay as prairie is "locking up" the land, he said.
"But as private land, wasn't it already 'locked up'?" he asked.
Others argue that prairies are a breeding ground for grasshoppers and other
pests. But he argues that there are more grasshoppers in a beanfield than
prairie land.
"In my prairie there are spiders, snakes and birds -- predators," he said.
"The prairie really is a brutal place."
Preserving the prairie means a shift in how people think of land, Zales
said. And it means working together as a county.
There are people in the area who share his vision, he suggested, people
willing to sell or donate the land or the easement if that was a good option
financially.
"We've got to start," he said. "I think we can accomplish something with
what little we have left in Plymouth County."
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