Restoring Minnesota's prairies
Cattle grazing allows plants like this prairie smoke, photographed on Thursday, May 24, 2012, to thrive when they would otherwise be choked out by tall grass.
MPR Photo/Nathaniel Minor
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources -- along with federal agencies and conservation groups like the Nature Conservancy -- announced a 25-year plan to restore more than two million acres of Minnesota's lost prairie. But a new report from Environmental Working Group and Defenders of Wildlife shows that we've recently lost more than one million acres of grassland, shrubland and prairieland to commodity crops. What does this mean for their efforts -- and for Minnesota's landscape?
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