Bill Neiman Interview, Part 2 of 2

DT: Bill, on the-on the previous tape, we were talking about one of the big obstacles to getting a-a native ecosystem reestablished and that is some of the exotics that have become introduced over the years. Can you tell me about some of the other obstacles that-that you have to deal with in trying to replant and-and get a-a stand of natives established?1:35 - 2208

BN: Well there's a lot of things to consider, David, about what it was that was here, what it went through before we came to this moment of wanting to put it back. And if you can ever find the chance to go to a place that has never ever been plowed, and feel the earth, reach down and find your way through the litter of the organic matter and put you hand into the soil. This is the soil that is supporting this climax prairie. Then come to the place of the sight that you would like to do your ecological restoration, and in you mind you must know that in the late 1800s, the steel plow was invented, and it was pulled at first by mules or oxen or horse, and in order for those animals to be fed, some pieces of prairie were held, because even then, those early pioneers knew the value of a native hay 3:00 - 2208meadow, it would produce, even when their crops would not. And they needed that hay meadow for those draft animals to pull the plow, but that earth was turned and turned and farmed and farmed year after year. Then the-by the '20s or '30s, the diesel tractor came along, by the 1930s, and it was no longer necessary to pull the plow with the horse. Now that allowed the plowing of the hay meadows. So you can pretty much be assured that anything that could be plowed, has been plowed, since about the '30s, seventy-something years.

And you must think in your mind that as we harvest our crops, we are hauling away the soil. Nutrients are converted from the soil into the crop, into the grains, the corn or the wheat and taken away. We're not replenishing these nutrients other than our nitrogen-phosphorus p-p-pot ash in a-and a lot of times those aren't even looked at, only the nitrogen now is being replenished and it is being replenished in a very unnatural way. In hydrous-ammonia gas is injected into the soil, which when comes in contact with H2O, even a light dew converts into chlorine gas, which kills all living things. It happens to leave this residue of nitrogen that plants-the-the crop plant might be able to utilize. But we are paying prices in the burning out of all of our organic matters from our soils, and as I discussed earlier, some of our soils, were not very thin to begin with, such as on the Edward's Plateau, very fragile. And the more west you go, lower rainfall, the more 5:23 - 2208fragile the soils.

But basically what people have to ha-overcome is this idea that by simply intro-reintroducing the climax tall grass species onto a minimum eighty-seventy-year old depleted farm field, may-may not be just as easy as you would think. Yes, those natives are very tough, but there are symbiotic relationships between the species and the soil structure that will all culminate into a climax prairie. It might serve us to make more of an understanding of the succession of species that might come into an area that will have been depleted that would begin to make an environment conducive for the more productive species to some a little bit later. Something like what I mean to say is 6:33 - 2208for instance on caliche, or on the-in Edward's Plateau, it might be smarter, instead of going to the climax, the little bluestem / Indian grass prairie association that would have been dominant through here, now because of the degradation of the soils, it would probably be more appropriate to begin with some of the very shorter grasses that are much more drought tolerant and not nutrient dependent, such as purple threon, or white tridents, or curly mesquite, or-or the red grama, or the hairy grama, or the side oats grama and get a set of native grasses that then begin to associate with and encourage the beneficial bacterias and mycorrhizae in the soil to begin this conversion with-at which time in the relatively foreseeable future, a more productive climax grasses such as the little blue-stem and the Indian grass could be introduced. It could be said that an 7:53 - 2208introduction of all of them at once could work. But not to expect that productive prairie to be instant result, but in fact those seeds could be in-all introduced at one time but that you would be very satisfied to have a span of very short early successional species, the pioneer species, that might go in and make an ecological turn on this degraded soil that would begin to prepare for the coming of the little bluestem and the Indian grass. Do you understand what I'm saying?DT: (inaudible)8:35 - 2208

BN: There are other native legumes and forbs that are very important in these roles, such as the native prairie clovers, or for instance gayfeather, roots go up to twenty feet deep and it lives in order to hold soil down, together when there is a-an erosive condition. There are other species tha-like the mountain pinks, that you see growing in just pure caliche. Those may be also ingredients that you would want to look at each site individually. And there are always places little micro-habitats, for instance where the slopes level out and that's where you may have caught some of the soil that eroded from 9:24 - 2208above, that some of the taller species would-would produce and readily become productive there. My-a-as life is pretty short and people's attention span is even shorter it seems like, shorter than their life, my approach is that most of the humans that I've come across, including myself, are not capable of knowing exactly where each species really would fit on any given one acre site, much less a hundred acres, or a thousand acres. There are so many microelements and little microhabitats that it only 10:18 - 2208makes sense to me to get as much diversity as possible into your efforts and let nature sort itself out.

That's, I think, instead of spending a little bit too much attention on worrying about this specie or that specie and so much percentage and you get involved with some of the, particularly the Government agencies that will authorize cost sharing of this projects and that they have a little formula and that you must follow this guideline and it must contain these species. You know, it's going to become more subject to a failure than one that may have included fifty species of forbs and grasses, wildflowers, 11:14 - 2208legumes, short native grasses. Maybe cattle don't graze them, but they have a purpose here, in the bigger picture. The-one of the drawbacks I see with some of these cost share programs when the Government agencies, they are designed to-not to particularly restore a prairie, but instead to reclaim a pasture for cattle grazing, and everything is thought of in terms of can it be palatable to cattle? And that's probably a limitation that I think we would not want to really hold ourselves to that.DT: Could you explain some of the-the partners that you've had in trying to restore some of these prairie sites, whether they're the people who work with you or the clients that you've had, or the Government programs that have helped encourage this?12:18 - 2208

BN: Yeah, sure, some of them are pretty interesting. Some of them are pretty interesting. The first in my opinion, kind of a landmark thing that we did was began back in 1988, and it was an interesting collection of-of forces that came together. The County is in the Blacklands, the upper Blacklands, Collin County Government. They passed a bond election to set aside an open space program. They saw how Plano had just blown off of the map. The city of Plano which was once a farming community was paved over in a very short period of time and was moving towards Collin County. So there was an interest by the citizens to preserve some open space. The Nature Conservancy had acquired a few small prairies remnants in the neighborhood, and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department had an interest in forming this partnership between the County, the 13:39 - 2208State and then the Nature Conservancy was interested in increasing more habitat and allowing their existing resources to become the seed source.

All that was missing amongst all the Government and non-Government entities was someone to do the work, which is where-where I came in, I don't mind working, I enjoy it, I enjoy this work. So we kind of viewed the entire process and got a strategy of how this might occur, no one had really done it before, that we knew of. There was some pretty fun people involved, one old guy, Arnold Davis, who's no longer with us, he was by the way, instrumental in helping and encouraging me in my early-on days. I spent some time in his garage with a little seed cleaner. With his encouragement I proceeded into the area that I have now found myself. But, we made do, as I said earlier, and made some adaptations, made a lot 15:08 - 208of our best guesses based on, on the ground observations. There was nothing in a textbook that told us how we were going to really harvest seeds from within ten miles of-of a particular site, and then replant them. But we drew upon the expertise of anyone that was involved and, he was pretty funny. When the seeds-Arnold kind of had some experience on knowing when the seeds would be ripe. He had this thing of carrying a-he smoked a pipe, so he had figured out a Prince Albert Tobacco can with another smaller, like a tomato juice can that fit inside of it, and he put a rubber pad in the bottom that had a grid on it, and then a rubber pad was glued on to the other tomato juice can that 16:17 - 208flipped ins-we put the seeds, a handful of seeds in the can, and then he'd twist them, like that, and it would get the chaff off, then he'd pour it out and look and see, were there any grains in there. Another way he would see if the seeds were ripe would be to chomp on them, crunch them, and if it crunched, there would be like a hard grain, you would-you would feel it in you teeth. So there's a little bit of technology for you. He said the seeds were ready. We moved our combines in and we ended up working twenty-one days straight. As soon as we could get up in the mornings and the dew would let up, we'd get that combine up and going and we'd run 'til maybe ten at night. And then go to the seed barn, dump the seed out of the day's harvest and spread it out so it could dry. Then we'd get us a bite to eat, and by the time we got to bed, it'd be about midnight. We stayed up in 17:18 - 2208this old farmhouse up on the Clymer Meadow, the old Clymer House. And after about three solid weeks, we had completed the harvest.

Then the next phase was to clean those seeds and so we rigged up some equipment to-first-my first early efforts was to make all of my equipment mobile, so I could move it anywhere. So we moved our seed cleaning equipment to the barn up in Leonard, Texas that we had rented for this project. And cleaned the seeds and Arnold had us send them off for tests and the tests kept coming back and saying, these seeds weren't any good. And so he would tell me, you've got to clean them again, and I didn't want to clean them anymore because there's a sacrifice, every time you make a cut on these seeds, you're going to throw away 18:26 - 2208something. And I kept-I tried to clean them without losing diversity, but that's hard to do. Even the chaff in the straw has got a value of funguses, insect eggs, bacterias that are associated with this prairie. Why would we want to throw that away?

Finally after about three rounds of seed testing, it takes about forty-five days to get a seed test done, the way they try and sprout them, and under certain conditions and they have to be in a germinator under the so many hours of sunlight and such and such a humidity for such and such temperature for such and such length of time, and then they go in count them. So for the grasses, it's often anywhere from thirty to forty-five days. So we lost a lot of time, in fact, it delayed the planting of the seeds, a year. In the interim we planted milo. It was not milo. It was some fast grass sorghum something or other, hybrid something that 19:44 - 2208you cut for hay. And in the fall of that year that we lost the planting window, we cut the hay and left the stubble and all of the roots in the ground. The field was relatively clean, except for this hay stubble.

The next spring, we decided we got to plant these seeds, whether they're good or not. Let's plant them. The tests only said they were like, I've forgot the numbers now, but something like twelve percent pure live seed. So we put a pretty high seeding rate to overcome that problem. It also said there was maybe six or eight species in there and that was it. The spring came around. We got a no-till drill that was borrowed from the Thompson Foundation up in Montage County, which is over in the Cross Timbers, another interesting project that I came to work with as time went on, and 20:43 - 2208Arnold also was involved with them. And that place still exists. Interesting place that's been set aside for the education of wildflowers up in north central Texas. But we used their no-till drill. It was a tie drill, and of course it created and caused a lots of headaches and problems and having to poke at it and it was difficult to calibrate and the seeds wouldn't flow through right and it didn't have a good system of tillage in front of it, and-but it was the best we had at those-at that time. So the planting finally was done. And now the anticipation of what were we-the results to be? And because so much time had gone by, it seems like the Parks and Wildlife Department and the County and even 21:40 - 2208the Nature Conservancy, almost all everybody had lost interest in the thing and went on to some-somewheres else. But I stuck with it, watching it. I still watch it. This was in 1989, I think.

There's a man that ended up doing his thesis, named Jim Eidson, and as time went on, he ended up becoming the land steward for the Blackland prairies of the Nature Conservancy. In fact, he has an office now at the Clymer Meadow House. But he was student at A&M under Fred Smeins in the Rangeland Ecology, doing his thesis on this project and what would the results be? How many species would show up in this pretty bad seed test thing that we had out there? And I've always been grateful that this 22:47 - 2208circumstance occurred that at end of three years, he had sixty-three species established from this seed that was no good. The seed labs don't know how to deal with this. They can't identify the natives and they do not have a protocol on how to sprout them. They're just like the John Deere system: they know all about corn, soybeans, wheat, but they don't know the natives. So I learned a good lesson there: harvest and maintain your diversity; get it back into your planting site; have faith in those seeds. Have more faith in the seeds than you have in the seed testing laboratory. They cannot identify the-the native species.

One interesting handicap that I've had to really deal with all these years, is that the American Association of Seed Analysts has a protocol that says, any mixture that 24:01 - 2208is submitted for testing that contains any components that make up less than five percent of that mixture don't have to even be counted. There goes your diversity. That's everything we want is not even counted. Your seed test becomes-it's your certificate of proof of what you have, and you can't even rely on it, in the native seed trade. We have a big educational, political, mechanical, structural problem that needs to be ironed out, somehow, to straighten this issue out, if we're going to really do ecological restoration, we can't be handicapped by things like that. The value is the diversity of those small micro-components that make up less than five percent.25:02 - 2208DT: Speaking of educating these seed analysts, I understand that some of your seed planting efforts have also gone towards educating kids and-and working with schools. Can you talk about some of those experiences?25:20 - 2208

BN: Sure, heck yeah. That's probably my favorite thing. Most rewarding is to work with young people. Talking to adults is kind of like talking to bricks. They listen, and in fact they enjoy it and even almost to the point of being entertained. But when the entertainment's over, they go right back about the business of their old habits of doing just like they were doing. So when you talk to young people, though, they're well aware of the destruction of the rainforest, and the ozone pollution, and the dirty drinking water, and the chemicals in the food, and someone in their family's already got cancer and that a 26:11lot of their playmates have got asthma. There-this is not anything that they take lightly,. It's their life and they know it. They have a inherent knowledge that their life depends upon their ability to survive these issues. When they find that a clean world has to do with a clean environment, they are very interested in how to build a clean environment. I think it is easy for a young person to make this connection about how our rainforest here is really a prairie, and talk about enthusiasm and a synergy. They don't like to just sit around and let's bat-bat some concepts around and give me some hypotheses and let's-they don't want to-they-they don't want to talk about it, they want to do it. 27:30 - 2208Once they have enough information to take action, they're ready to take it, and they do. If the adults would get out of the way, or even provide some encouragement, this can be turned around pretty easily, if we really want to do it. I think our best hope, and we have hardly begun, in a big way, we're not even talking about it, that we must instill within the hearts of the next generation a code of land ethics. And until we do that, it's unlikely that we will be a society capable of receiving restored landscapes, because we do not have a 28:30 - 2208people ready yet. We're kind of on the front edge of it, and we're thinking about it, as those last four slivers are being speculated upon by the highest bidder. Everything's for sale, including our children's future. If we can get and raise a generation of people that have a code of land ethics instilled within their hearts, by the time they're eighteen, they become voters and they begin to work as adults in their lives to make these changes real. That's when you will see a-a change. That's where the real work should be right now. We know how to restore the landscape. We need to restore our people now.DT: Tell me about the Composite Technology site, where I-I think you-you made an effort to instill some of these ethics and...29:41 - 2208

BN: We're on our-this is our eleventh year. There's a hundred fifth graders that go through that project every year. So eleven hundred families have been affected by this. The student learns these issues and takes it home to their family, and their family gets turned on, and the family comes out to the Prairie Project to find out, what is this? Why is my kid so turned on? And I can't help but have to come and see, what is this? And then pretty soon they bring the grandma and the uncle and you won't believe what they're doing right now. They have put together a PowerPoint program and they have showed it to the School Board; they've showed it to the City Council, to the Lion's Club, the Optimist Club, the Chamber of Commerce of the City of Saginaw. The title of it is, "Saginaw Needs a Prairie." Saginaw is in the Blacklands, almost treeless. It's probably best known for it's grain elevators and being a cross road of railroad lines. But these kids have learned that those elevators represent why the prairie no longer exists. All the grains that are produced that are put into those grain elevators came off of good, rich prairie land. And yet, in Saginaw, there's no prairie. They want to put it back, along the railroad tracks that go right along Main Street in Saginaw. This is the same Main Street that runs right to the Fort Worth stockyards. I'm pretty sure they'll be successful at this. The beginning of the next generation is already here. (inaudible) invite you to come take a look. DT: Let me ask one more question.32:23 - 2208BN: Sure, Dave.DT: You've been busy landscaping and restoring landscapes and teaching kids about how to do this and why it's important. When you have the time to-to get away from all this activity, how do spend your time? Is there a-a special spot in the outdoors that gives you some serenity or restoration, yourself?32:51 - 208

BN: Well, I'm glad you asked me that. I spend a lot of time just above the Earth's surface, about five hundred feet or so, about the same level as red-tail hawks. And-but that thing's so noisy, it's-and I-I brought to one of the places here on-at the farm that's pretty nice. Sometimes in a quiet moment, you'll find me, or my family right here. I've brought my whole family, several times, my kids and my wife on that same exact trail to the same exact camp spot that my dad brought me on the Gila River. That's probably, if I had to n-only narrow it down to one place, that would be the place I'd-I would go. But I tell you, in my travels and in my work, I know of many sacred places on 34:03 - 2208the land, these places that have never, ever been plowed. And when, if you are willing to feel or listen to the land, you know those places, and they are all connected. They all are speaking that this-all of this land is sacred. And the only people who don't know it is the ones that have not become native to this place.DT: Why do you think it was that-that the Native Americans who lived here for ten thousand odd years, were, I think to a degree, more native to this place and understood the rhythms and the...35:04 - 2208

BN: I'm pretty sure that they could have easily have built brick houses, if they wanted to. And it wouldn't surprise me if we find someday that in fact they probably did. And they saw all the foolishness. In fact, they believed that a person who stayed in one place was doomed to poverty, because he would exhaust his resources around him, particularly the Plains, the Great Plains. The Native people that were here before us, that was their underlying principle, to keep moving. But I also think after extensive period of time, we may learn some of those same things. We may also learn that there are two classes of people, the leavers and the takers, and that the takers are the ones that will deplete. 36:10 - 2208There's something that's occurred in my lifetime and yours, Dave, you were a little younger than I was, but I saw it happen, and I'm aware, I-I-it struck me as it happened. When I was younger, we were called producers, and then towards the end of the Nixon thing, or there, somewhere in that era, I'd say the early '70s, a new word came out for our people. We were called consumers. Have you ever looked in Webster's Dictionary, the word "consume?" The first definition is, "to waste." We are the wasters. We don't have to do it like this; we really don't. And when we understand how to stop wasting, we will I think achieve that same balance that the people before us had. DT: Thank you. (inaudible)[End of reel 2208][End of interview with Bill Neiman]