![]() Her research shows that chemicals it releases into the surrounding dirt hurt the survival of nearby native plants. She says Old World bluestem even employs a form of biochemical warfare to increase its spread. KAREN HICKMAN: It's highly competitive so it can outcompete and outgrow and inhibit the growth of other native plants.ĬONDOS: Karen Hickman heads the Environmental Science Program at Oklahoma State University. So why is Old World bluestem so good at being so bad for prairies? ![]() While it may not look menacing, this plant is threatening a lot of what makes Kansas, well, Kansas. And here all we see is Old World bluestem.ĬONDOS: Most of this hillside is now covered with a thick blanket of the pale-yellow grass that grows about 3 feet tall. KEITH HARMONEY: In a native pasture, we could see 10, 11, 12 different species all within one single square foot of space. The horse is out of the barn.ĬONDOS: And researchers now say Old World bluestem is transforming the area's grassland ecosystems into what they fear are biodiversity wastelands.ĬONDOS: Kansas State University scientist, Keith Harmoney, is crouching down at a research plot in northwest Kansas, near where this school planted the grass decades ago. ORVILLE MOORE: Nature will take over and it'll eat your lunch, so too late now. ![]() Farmer Orville Moore helped Kansas State University plant the grass for research in the 1980s. But the traits that made Old World bluestem so attractive - it's prolific growth, its hardy tolerance to drought - are the same things that make it such a problem today. Department of Agriculture has even encouraged landowners to grow it for conservation. Soil that once grew wheat now blots the highways.ĬONDOS: Back then, highway departments planted it on roadsides to control erosion. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: The good earth has turned to dust. David Condos of the Kansas News Service reports.ĭAVID CONDOS, BYLINE: This is a story about good intentions gone awry.ĬONDOS: It goes back to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s when the federal government planted a foreign grass called Old World bluestem in the Great Plains to revive land that had been farmed and grazed into oblivion. Some landowners are trying to eradicate the invasive grass, but it may already be too late to keep it from changing the state's prairie landscape forever. Across the Great Plains of Kansas, a type of grass planted intentionally decades ago is now threatening to wipe out the grassland ecosystem.
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