Plains Folk: Spring is in the air
By JIM HOY
© Plains Folk
It must be spring. I can smell the sweet odor of burning grass wafting in on the south breeze. And anyone who has lived in the Flint Hills knows that pasture burning is an annual rite of spring here in the tallgrass prairie.
Actually, it's a little early for spring, and for burning. Winter officially has a couple more weeks on the calendar, and although I already have smelled a little smoke and seen a couple of blackened pastures, it's still too early to be burning, in my opinion.
I like to burn in mid-April after the weeds have begun to green up so they will get killed back and leave a clear field for the grass. Range management authorities suggest that late April and early May is even better because not only will it get a better kill on weeds and brush, but the ground also will be warmer and the grass will come on faster.
The range management authorities may well be right, but that has not always been the case. Up until after mid-20th century agricultural scientists advocated strongly against burning, but they were fighting a losing battle. Farmers and ranchers in the Flint Hills had been burning since pioneer times, in opposition to both popular and scientific opinion. And before that, the Indians native to this area had burned off the old grass each spring.
Oral tradition from the Council Grove area, site of the last Kaw Indian reservation in Kansas, records just how the Indians burned in the spring. After gathering a large amount of dead grass and wrapping it into a big ball with rawhide thongs, a young man would mount his horse, tie a rawhide lariat onto the ball, have it set on fire, then drag the burning ball as fast and as far as he could, setting huge amounts of prairie ablaze.
By at least 1863, white settlers had adopted the Indian practice, but not the method, of burning. That was the year in which Elisha Mardin, who lived near Bloody Creek in Chase County, recorded an accidental fire in March, then two intentional ones in April. By the end of the century most ranchers were burning in March, some even as early as February, in preparation for the arrival of Texas cattle. Such early burning might have meant fresh grass for the steers in mid-April, but it also meant more erosion from spring rains and a less efficacious weed kill.
Ag scientists at K-State, who knew it was bad, began experimenting with burning in the teens and continued into the 1950s, but somehow the results weren't as dire as they had expected. They were forced to temper their findings with the recommendation that if you insisted on burning, you should do it later rather than earlier.
About this time Clenton Owensby, who had a different view of fire, joined the faculty. From New Mexico, home of Smokey the Bear (whose anti-forest-fire effort was perhaps the most successful government program ever devised), Owensby thought of fire as a part of nature. His experiments proved that the folk practice of ranchers and farmers had been sound all along. A pasture, burned at the proper time, would produce just as much forage as an unburned one. More important, cattle would gain significantly more on burned grass than on unburned.
Last summer was one of the best for grass we've had in my memory. Rains came along as needed, without even one dry spell. There is lots of tall dead grass in the tallgrass prairie this spring. The fires will be spectacular.
