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“If you look at just some of these individual landowners, they may have never made any profit out of those practices,” Devlin says. Now, stewardship has ballooned in the hands of Kansas landowners and farmers, partly because of KSU’s influence, says Daniel Devlin, director of KSU’s Kansas Center for Agricultural Research and Environment. Through research funded by state and federal agencies, they began teaching farmers and ranchers how to practice conservation. Researchers at Kansas State University realized 25 years ago that if conservation was going to happen in their state, it would be at the hands of rural landowners. They recognize the issue and they’re working for solutions.” “Now I hear about climate change from a number of landowners who are on the conservative side. “It wasn’t so long ago that if I brought up climate change to a rancher, I’d be run off the property,” he says. Politics has often interfered in conservation issues, but Bennett sees that changing. “You can’t have conservation in Kansas without private lands.” The division of conservation and private lands creates “artificial silos,” says Bennett. Private conservation efforts like Harder’s are key, says Drew Bennett, a professor at the University of Wyoming who researches how conservation, private land ownership and agriculture can work together. With the open space and adequate sunlight that prairie demands, the plants grew from there. It was a time-consuming process: They cut trees and other nonnative plants from the never-cultivated ground, and used fire to clear spaces so that sunlight could reach the native plants that remained. Once they bought the entire acreage, they began building up the prairie. “We watched the land those eight years before we bought the farm and we weren’t able to do anything,” Harder says. “But now I know a few faces in the crowd, and it has changed my whole experience and perception of the prairie.”īefore Harder and her husband bought their 100 acres, they rented their home and a couple of acres of the property. In front of the 12-acre prairie addition at the arboretum, a piece of fired ceramic clay hangs with a quote from her: “When I first started seeing the prairie, it was like seeing a crowd of strangers,” the inscription reads. Harder regularly volunteers at the arboretum, after retiring in 2014 from 25 years of teaching environmental science and biology at nearby Hesston College. “Few if any prairie plantings in the state have been fully restored using local ecotype seed,” says Brad Guhr, head of prairie restoration and education at the arboretum. Biology students visit their property to learn about prairie flora, and the local arboretum, the Dyck Arboretum of the Plains, depended on Harder’s donated native seed to diversify its offerings. Harder and her husband, Bob, have made conservation their life mission, spending the last 30 years transforming 40 of their more than 100 acres in south-central Kansas into a native prairie preserve in their backyard. That means that conserving the prairie is up to private landowners like Harder, along with farmers and ranchers. Margaret Sullivan: What happens to society - and our democracy - when community and regional journalism dries up