Burning

 

Part of good land stewardship means doing the sorts of things that mother nature used to do until mankind put up barriers to prevent it from happening, in this case, setting fire to the land. In plots of prairie, native prairie grasses send roots down upwards of ten feet deep providing the black nutrient rich soil this part of the world is known for. But in the spring, cool season weeds can come up earlier and crowd out the native grasses with shade and if left that way, will eventually take over any given plot of prairie. Mother nature solved this problem by sending fires to sweep across the prairies but mankind put a stop to this by building homes and towns out there and getting upset when mother nature burnt them up.

So every year on the farm, we try to burn approximately half of our patches of prairie by artificially setting them on fire in a controlled manner that we can control them. In the picture above you can see on the far right the first line of defense, a plowed strip of earth that goes completely around each patch. Then on the downwind side of the patch, we light a "backfire" that burns the fuel up to the plowed dirt and if everything goes right, self exstinguishes that edge. The upwind edge of the fire we started will slowly creep into the wind expanding the area of blackened ground that no longer has fuel to burn and thus extending our "safe zone". 

Once the backfire has burned enough ground into the wind to create a sufficient buffer, we will walk along the sides of the field into the wind setting fire to the edges of the field. This too will burn up the fuel between the main body of the field and the tilled earth creating a buffer. Because the wind is essentially sideways to the strip of dirt and the rest of the land it protects, it doesn't need to be nearly as wide as the backfire. 

Once all three sides of the field is now burning, we walking to the upwind side of the field where the wind is blowing directly over the tilled dirt strip and into the body of the field full of dry dead remnants of prairie grass from last season and the green shoots of undesirable weeds looking to make a home there. Lighting the head fire is just walking across this last end of the field and setting fire. The wind quickly blows the flames towards lots of dead prairie grass fuel and the flames get quite high, burn very hot and move really fast. You never want to be between it and the backfire. Most of the time, all resident wildlife can escape over the backfire which doesn't burn as hot since it can't move fast into the wind but occasionally, some of the wildlife won't make it. If done correctly though, it makes a dandy home for wildlife for the next two years until we burn it again. 

In the above picture, you can see the backfire in the foreground and the headfire in the background coming towards me as I snapped this photograph. 

Here is a picture of when the headfire finally consumes everything between it and the backfire and you can see all the blackened ground between me and it which is what keeps me safe and all the land behind me from catching fire. Mother nature never created backfires back in the day which is why wild grassfires were horribly destructive to mankind and their creations.

If all goes to plan, literally maybe five minutes after setting the headfire, the field looks like what you see above. It has burned all the consumable dead prairie grass and set back all the cool season undesirable weeds to the point where the prairie grass will now come up and shade the cool season weeds out and thus create an even more robust stand of prairie grass to protect wildlife and add nutrients to the soil.

There is a lot more too it such as paying attention to windspeeds and humidity along with using the proper tools to start the fire and stop any fires that start where we don't want them in order to do this safely. When the variables aren't in our favor, we don't attempt this and wait for another day. Some years, we don't get everything burned which is why we hopefully get over all the ground once every other year. We spent two days burning this year and got over all the ground we hadn't gotten last year and a piece or two of ground that we had burned last year. If we had excellent conditions and more stamina, we would burn it all every year but alas, that rarely happens these days.