Nebraskaland

52 Nebraskaland • May 2024 quickly exceed the rental value, and it gets higher every year. If you aren't willing or able to do it, Sundstrom said, "As high as property is right now? Man, sell it and go do something else." Some landowners still want to cut trees and not burn. "The thing that people don't realize is there are so many other benefi ts to the prescribed burns," Sundstrom said. "It's instant fertilization. The grass is better and the cows like it better." When cedars are removed and sunlight reaches plants struggling to grow in the shade and the seeds of native grasses and forbs that have laid dormant, in some cases for decades, the response is instant. Annual forbs like annual sunfl owers and ragweed are the fi rst to explode, followed by the prairie grasses. "It amazes me how resilient that native grass is, and how it comes back," Stout said. Non-native, invasive, cool-season grasses like downy and Japanese brome grasses are also set back by spring prescribed burns. And with native grasses, such as side-oats grama and little bluestem, now growing where cedars once stood, ranchers can increase their stocking rates and their bottom line. Rather than needing 14 to 17 acres for each cow and calf he puts to pasture, Stout needs 8 or 10 acres. For those trying to make a living off the land, "it really does sell itself," Stout said. Sundstrom put a pencil to it a diff erent way, and fi gured he increased the number of grazing days on his ranch by 40 percent, and his profi t, after expenses, by more than 200 percent. "That's the important number there," Sundstrom said. "I always felt like whatever I did for tree control, with increased grazing, paid for itself in 3 to 5 years." A Model for Others Around the world, woody plants are invading grasslands. Few places have been as successful at controlling the invasion as they have in the Loess Canyons. Since 2014, 180,000 acres of the region have been a working laboratory for researchers at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln. With full support of landowners, students have studied the response of grassland plants, birds, the American burying beetle and other topics in response to fi re. The work in the canyons served as the framework for the Working Lands for Wildlife program recently released by the NRCS to guide grassland wildlife conservation in the Great Plains. Now people from around the world are looking to these landowners, researchers and partners to learn how they did it. "Very few groups, and none in Nebraska, have gotten to the level where they're using fi re to manage all of the stages [of cedar growth] at once," Fogarty said. "I don't want to take away from what good work is being done in other places, but the Loess Canyons is just the example to look up to right now." Stout said landowners shrug off the attention. "It's kind of funny, it's just another day for them," he said. "They don't realize what they're doing. … They're just trying to keep their operations afl oat." In the process, by banding together, they are winning the battle, melting the green glacier and restoring a unique — and necessary — landscape. N Purple locoweed, a sensitive species typically found only in healthy prairies, is one of many native wildfl owers that benefi t from cedar removal and prescribed fi re in the Loess Canyons. It blooms in the spring, a time when there are few other plants fl owering, making it critical for early pollinating insects. Where the dense canopy of eastern red cedar blocks sunlight, little, if any, vegetation grows.

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