Y Gwyndwn, the Unplowed Land

Doug Caulkins looks over recreated prairie on the farm he named Y Gwyndwn.

Grinnell, Iowa — Two deer broke the November stillness, materializing out of the tall, dry grass 20 yards in front of us and leaping across the prairie toward the treeline. Doug Caulkins stared after them. He had been telling me that the tall prairie grasses and flowers among which we stood have such deep roots—six, eight, 10 feet—that they have no trouble surviving the fires on which the prairie depends for regeneration.

Prairie fires were originally set by lightning—and later by Native Americans hoping to attract buffalo for hunting by creating areas of tender new grass growth. Now the fires are set by Mr. Caulkins, an emeritus professor of anthropology at Grinnell College, as part of his effort to return more than half of this 240-acre farm to prairie.

It’s a difficult, long-term undertaking, he said. He began by buying seed from a farmer who burns sections of prairie he owns every spring and runs a combine through it every fall. The farmer sells bags that contain seeds from more than 100 varieties of prairie plants.

Early one winter, Mr. Caulkins spread the seed across the fields he wanted to restore to prairie, then he let the fields grow up. He kept after them from year to year, setting fires that killed whatever wasn’t a prairie plant. “After eight years, some areas are looking more like they should,” he told me as he drove me around the place in his green Ford Ranger pickup. There are other fields he hasn’t gotten to yet.

Burning isn’t his only prairie-tending job, either. During the decades when the whole property was farmed, the absence of fires permitted competing trees to grow up around the fire-resistant oaks that originally lived among the prairie grasses. The new trees shaded the oaks’ lower branches, killing many of them, so Mr. Caulkins has been cutting down the interlopers. In other areas, he’s been planting oaks where none have grown lately. And in one space, he’s recreating a wetland.

Why go to so much trouble? For one thing, he said, “Iowa has just become a giant storm sewer.” Because rain falls at times and in amounts that are inconvenient for farmers trying to get tractors into their fields, the farmers create tile drainage systems that carry water to streams and rivers as soon as it falls, contributing to flooding. Prairie plants, on the other hand, retain water beautifully. “Iowa is the most human-modified state in the nation,” he added.

For another thing, modern agriculture has made Iowa a near-monoculture, at least in plant terms, where there was once—before the prairie was plowed up—a “perennial polyculture.” Mr. Caulkins said it would be ridiculous to expect to return the whole state to prairie (although cattle can be grazed on prairie and then sold). But it isn’t ridiculous to turn land that doesn’t work well for large-scale farming back into the kind of landscape that was here before the the 19th century? “We need islands, and preferably corridors, of prairie,” he said.

Mr. Caulkins practices what he preaches. He and his wife have owned this farm a few miles south of Grinnell for about 10 years, naming it Y Gwyndwn (pronounced ah-gwin-doon). The name is Welsh for “the unplowed land,” and is meant to honor the Caulkins’ intent and their Welsh heritage as well as the Welsh immigrants who moved to this part of Iowa. There’s no house on the farm any more, although there are several sheds and what Mr. Caulkins calls a “cabin-ette” on skids (the skids make the structures “temporary,” and therefore not taxable).

About 130 acres—the land that’s being returned to prairie—are enrolled in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program. The rest, which is not eligible for the reserve program because it’s good farmland, is leased to nearby farmers. The Caulkins are also among 10 Grinnell families who together own a 629-acre spread elsewhere—much of that farm, too, is also being returned to prairie.

“This is one of those all-too-rare things in which you get rewarded for doing good,” Mr. Caulkins said. Besides the rent he receives from leasing part of the land, the reserve program pays him about $10,000 a year for the acreage enrolled in it. That money goes toward paying off the mortgage, and there are tax advantages to boot.

He’s been laboring here long enough to see some results. “Everything works better the more it’s like it was in 1840,” he said. A sedge meadow helps filter runoff from a neighboring farmer’s field before it reaches a stream on the farm, for instance, and a beekeeper keeps hives along the the old farm lane because bees like the many prairie flowers.

“What we get from the prairie is a sense of marvel at diversity,” he told me as we drove slowly back down the old farm lane toward the gravel road. “We have to develop an aesthetic that says diversity is beautiful.”