Some Thoughts on Native Grasses

“Ten acres of St. Augustine doesn’t make very good wildlife habitat.”

That’s what a local landowner told me recently while we discussed the issue of land fragmentation in Fayette County. I wrote about this topic two weeks ago after it came up at a meeting between the Fayette County Commissioners Court and the local Agrilife agents.

At that meeting, the Commissioners discussed the increasing risk of wildfire as more and more landowners move their property from ag production into wildlife management. As large farms and ranches get split into multiple small tracts, new landowners find it much easier to obtain breaks on their property taxes for wildlife management rather than raising cattle or cutting hay.

They plant native grasses that grow tall without any cattle grazing. This creates a big wildfire risk, especially this time of year when the weather freezes and those grasses become dormant and dry.

I didn’t intend to disparage anyone who does this with their property. Landowners attempting to restore the great prairie that once covered this area are doing a great service to wildlife, especially the monarch butterflies that migrate through Fayette County every year. I’m not trying to tell anyone what to do with their property. But I’d much rather see the prairie return than 10-acre blocks of St. Augustine everywhere.

This landowner I spoke with last week turned me onto the Fayette Prairie Chapter of the Native Prairies Association of Texas. This group dedicates itself to the conservation, restoration, and appreciation of native prairies, savannas, and other grasslands in Texas. The Fayette Prairie Chapter formed in 2020.

Local writer Gary Kocurek wrote about this organization in the January 2022 issue of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department newsletter “Oaks and Prairie Wildlifer.”

“We know from early historical accounts that the area consisted of tall grass prairies with clusters of oaks, with a greater diversity and spatial density of trees along the Brazos, Colorado, Navidad, Lavaca and Guadalupe rivers and their tributaries,” Kocurek wrote. “These were ‘disturbance-dependent’ prairies, maintained by prairie fires and the buffalo herds that followed, seeking the green regrowth. A resilient prairie requires disturbances from fire and grazing to maintain the plant heterogeneity that makes this ecosystem an ideal habitat for a variety of grazing mammals, birds and pollinating insects.”

Kocurek says nearly all of this ecosystem was lost with European settlement and the intensive agriculture that followed.

“Farmland for cotton, corn and other crops yielded over the decades to rangeland, and after WWII cattle grazing and hayfields dominated,” Kocurek wrote. “With the introduction of varieties of Bermudagrass, forage production changed dramatically and permanently away from native perennial grasses.”

It didn’t just affect grasslands. The woods changed, too.

“Woody encroachment by low-quality trees such as red cedar, and brush such as yaupon increased as the frequency of fire decreased,” he wrote.

Kocurek poses the following questions: “Are the Fayette Prairie and Post Oak Savanna destined to become 10-acre tracts, essentially gentrified big yards? Will favorite sports such as hunting and fishing become impractical because the area has become just too fragmented?”

Folks like Kocurek believe it doesn’t have to be that way if landowners team together to restore the prairie.

Native grasses benefit from occasional grazing or fire. Lots of folks shy away from prescribed burns. I can certainly understand why after that scary fire in Bastrop last month. But fire can be a great way to manage native grasses. I admit, I’m scared to do it myself, but I have seen it done safely and effectively. One local group, the South Central Texas Prescribed Burn Association, helps members conduct prescribed burns on their properties. (Find out more about them at https://sctpba.org.)

You can also get many of the benefits of fire without the danger by grazing cattle or cutting hay.

At that Commissioners Court meeting two weeks ago, Agrilife Agent Scott Willey offered a simple suggestion for small tract owners: install a gate in the fence and ask the neighbor to graze his cattle on your property.

Kocurek agrees: “Cattle grazing and haying are definitely part of prairie management, and these traditional practices can be carried out so that they are actually beneficial to the prairie ecology,” he wrote. “Sustainable grazing and wildlife habitats go hand-in-hand in rangeland management.”

I think landowners practicing wildlife management should consider occasional grazing or offering their neighbors a cut of hay. If you’re not leasing the property, you can always kick the cattle off before they begin to overgraze your grass.

Read Kocurek’s story and more about wildlife management in the January 2022 issue of the Oaks and Prairie Wildlifer, available online at https:// bit.ly/3sSPoGS.

If you read the newsletter, it includes an article about treating sedge grass (genus Cyperaceae, sometimes known as nutgrass) with glyphosate, the toxic chemical in the popular herbicide RoundUp.

I think that’s terrible advise.

Glyphosate is toxic to you, your children and especially your pets. Please, don’t use it.

I admit, though, sedge grass is very difficult to control.

Howard Garrett, one of the premier experts on organic gardening in Texas, says molasses is the best way to control sedge grass. Garrett recommends drenching with a mixture of ¼ to ½ cup of liquid molasses per gallon of water. Use one gallon of the mixture to drench every nine to ten square feet. He says two to three applications may be required to knock out sedge. Garrett says sedges prefer poor soil. Molasses boosts the microbial levels in soil and the nutgrass “fades away,” Garrett says.