Let’s talk restoration

[Transcript]

Hey, I'm here doing some prairie restoration on Karol's prairie late October of 2021. And see kind of a mess of trees behind me this fence line here existing fence posts. fence line goes up and sort of jogs over there. And old white mulberry on it that we're really at the end of life. And so with the help of a couple of tractors, we've tipped them over away from the fence line and put them up in a couple of brush piles here that we're going to end up cutting with chainsaws down. To where they're more manageable sizes, having some firewood for sale maybe. And then leave some of the brush for habitat for the birds and critters that like to live up here in the old shelter belt.

And our hope is that on the on the west side of the shelter belt you see over here we still have the standing part of the shelter belt. Most trees drop saplings each year that get eaten or sprayed or mowed or whatever happens to them. And we're going to try and do some natural selection of those by putting up some fencing around some natural saplings that nature has chosen to support in this soil.

And we might also do some other tree introduction as that shelter build on that side is also old and about 80 years every two years or so you got to do some renovation work.

Firstly, you would do it as you go along. So as trees start to die, you replace them with more biodiversity of species unfortunately, back in the day.

We didn't think in those terms and so we might have a whole shelterbelt that's one species or two species all planted at the same time and lo and behold, they all died same time or they all have the same risk of predators or disease at the same time. So we'll try to reintroduce some biodiversity.

We've got a couple of species over there, but not a lot of diversity. So we cleared out this shared fence with the neighbors who I'm meeting with this morning. And this should help them with some water on their side trees will take water 50 feet into prairie lamb. And so as they're farming their land right across the fence, doing some soy, I believe that appearances are for sure and fenceline you see their crops right up against the fence. We're gonna let this be sort of a 50 foot buffer to make sure that we're being a good neighbor and they're being a good neighbor. So this is part of the collaboration that's happening here as a 10 year project. We're restoring this pasture that goes all down through here you see the tractor sitting over there. I'm sitting at the way north end of it. It's just 45 acres but we hope it provides a lot of natural habitat wildlife habitat for species as they moved through the area. So super excited to meet with the family this morning, our neighbors and look at their progress and talk about how we're gonna fix the fence. Thanks