Restoring native meadows

We hear a lot about the loss of small farms in our region. And for good reason. According to the American Farmland Trust, New England has lost 80 percent of our farmland in the last sixty years, a staggering number. When we think about what this means, we often talk about declines in human planted crops like grains and veggies and apple orchards. But as Robert Graham, land steward for the New England Botanic Garden recently reminded me, this loss of farms is also affecting habitat for non-farm species.
Robert: So meadows were kind of at their peak because we had all this open habitat that was created through pasture and everything but now with a lot of those small farms disappearing across Massachusetts we’re losing a lot of that open habitat.
Meadow is basically another word for grassland—and historically, it’s only really been present in our area where there’s been a disturbance—usually either fire or grazing. Sometimes fire comes from lightening, and grazing of course can be done by wild game species, but the bulk of meadow habitat in New England for thousands of years has been human created—either through prescribed or cultural fire or from clearing pastures for farm animals. The combination of fire suppression and farmland loss over the past century means that suddenly, lots of native meadow habitat has been disappearing.
Robert: We’re seeing especially in central Massachusetts successional white pine forests that are evidence of all these former farms more or less being abandoned and just regenerating.
Regenerating as forest, which is great for some species, but not so great for those that rely on open spaces. These include everything from owls to copperheads to turtles—and a long list of other animals and insects that are either stressed or endangered.
Robert: Kill deer is a great one, uh in order to nest needs open bare soil. That's something, in a lot of the new meadows that I put in at the garden, when we have all that bare soil, we get lots of different kill deer and things flying in like that. Another thing is a lot our native bumblebees that are ground nesting need that open soil or sandy habitat to get into. 
Fire is one tool to bring this habitat back, and mowing is another. But increasingly, conservation land managers are seeing farm animals as one of the most effective ways of helping endangered native meadow species.
Robert: So there’s actually a lot of places around the country right now that are experimenting with sheep.
Nantucket is one—apparently 25 to 30 thousand sheep once grazed the island at the turn of the 18^th century and a 2017 study on property owned by the Nantucket Conservation Foundation tried bringing them back to restore a native grassland. It’s a good tactic, Robert says, and one he’s also thinking of trying on the land he manages for the New England Botanic Garden.
Robert: We're hoping that there might be some other added benefits as far as being able to do a little bit more damage to those invasives that we get, those woody invasive pressure that we get in some of those meadows. But then also there's even some statistics that our farmers that we're hoping to work have talked about with the actual hoof movement being able to help till up some of the native seed we're looking to have come up in those meadows.
This hoof movement—the trampling that roughs up the ground—is exactly what the study on Nantucket found sheep are especially good at it creates disturbed areas where new seeds can germinate. It’s a good reminder that disturbance isn’t always a bad thing— in fact when it comes to creating and maintaining biodiversity, we need it. When every part of the landscape has the same plants and habitats and is at the same stage of regernation, it’s almost like a monoculture.
Robert: We have areas all over the state that are kind of set at the same period of time as far as regeneration, we don’t have this unique range of different ages of species, ages of forests that give us that biodiversity that we’re looking for. And that biodiversity is important not only just to the plants, but also to the different birds, mammals that kind of depend on those open habitats or edge habitats to kind of travel in.
In leaving land untouched and unmanaged, we forget that we humans and our farm animal allies can create habitat—not only for ourselves, but also for so many other species. For CAI’s Local Food Report, I’m Elspeth Hay.