Douglas County, Kansas landowner has restored land over decades

by Erin Socha

When Mike Moddrell bought 320 acres of land in southwest Douglas County in 2002, it looked very different from the tallgrass prairie it is today.

“When I bought it, it had been neglected for a long, long time,” Moddrell said. “It was in pretty bad shape. I kept burning and burning and burning, and the native grass responds to the fire. It’s taken 20 years for the native grass to come back.”

Today, the land boasts an abundance of native grasses and wildflowers that would have otherwise died out under the relentless attack of invasive and woody species such as eastern red cedar, Callery pear, and Chinese bush clover. The most important aspect of Moddrell’s management is fire — he burns the prairie every year in late winter. The previous season’s dried brush provides an abundant fuel to keep woody species in check.

“If you have a good, hot fire, it’ll kill them out,” he said. “They’re harder to kill with a chemical than with a match.”

Moddrell’s approach is nothing new. Humans have been burning grasslands for thousands of years.

Kansas’ native grasslands formed about 12,000 years ago, after the last ice age. As the glaciers receded and indigenous people populated North America, the grasslands evolved alongside their stewards. The wide-open prairie was once one of the most diverse habitats on earth, teeming with birds, insects, bison, and wildflowers.

“Prairies developed in large part because of people,” said Chris Helzer, director of science and stewardship at the Nature Conservancy of Nebraska, who restores and maintains prairie. “The use of fire was a big piece of that. Indigenous people were moving plants around the landscape, they were managing populations of animals through hunting and influencing in very strong ways the way all those things work together. And it was intentional, it wasn’t an accidental thing.”

The story of the evolving prairie changed dramatically less than 200 years ago, after European settlers arrived. Vast swaths of fertile land were converted to farmland, at the price of ecological diversity. Pockets of never-tilled prairie, such as Moddrell’s, are often found on rocky soils unsuited to crops. Instead, the land is used for cattle ranching and hay farming.

In addition to fire, Moddrell has no choice but to use herbicides to control noxious, non-native species such as Chinese bush clover and Old World bluestem. While these herbicides reduce diversity of wildflowers, they are an unfortunate necessity.

“Some people are anti-chemical,” Moddrell says, “but without chemicals, you would just lose the whole thing.”

Ecologists and conservationists have come to understand that the work of people such as Moddrell is vital to preserving what remains of the tallgrass prairie, in a region that has lost over 96% of its native habitat.

Two researchers at the Kansas Biological Survey and Center for Ecological Research at the University of Kansas, Jennifer Moody and Jennifer Delisle, recently undertook an ambitious project to catalogue the unplowed tallgrass prairies that remain in Douglas County in the form of working land such as Moddrell’s — pastures and hay meadows.

“There’s a lot of ecological value as well cultural and economic value to these open grasslands and a lot of reason to keep them as open grasslands,” said Moody, a plant ecologist and botanist.

To find these parcels, Delisle and Moody used satellite imagery to identify promising areas, then drove more than 600 miles through Douglas County to assess land from the road. Afterwards, they contacted private landowners and conducted site visits. In total, they visited 16 different parcels and identified 13 as native prairie pastures or hay meadows, most of which were 30–70 acres in size. They found that more than 80% of the plants were native, and more than 80% were perennial. Most of the work was conducted in 2023.

The project was funded by a grant of $38,731 from the Douglas County Heritage Conservation Council, whose goals support natural and cultural heritage projects throughout the county, according to Kaitlyn Ammerlaan, director of the council.

“The goal of this particular project,” Moody said, “was to provide information to the county about where there are these large, native grasslands being grazed that they may want to, as they move forward, think about with the open spaces program, think about preserving them.”

“I think this study was super interesting,” Ammerlaan said, “because we understand and know about the super-diverse remnant prairie, but there was a gap of knowledge in working lands.”

The county will use the information gathered as an educational tool for landowners and for zoning and planning, she said.  

“It’s one more tool,” Ammerlaan said. “A missing piece of info we didn’t have before.”

Moody said that the landowners they spoke to understand the ecological value of the land they steward and the importance of what they do.

“It was really quite joyful to talk these landowners,” Moody said. “Everybody that we talked to has a good understanding and a lot of pride and care for the native grasslands that they are managing, which was really cool to see.”

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