Déjà Vue for a Blacksoil Prairie

Phillip Cox: Now on the outside looking in.    

     Prairies of any size are rare enough, but those on deep, black soils ideal for agriculture are rarest of all. Such a prairie grows on 336 acres of former corn and soybean fields near Newport in west-central Indiana.

     The problem is, this blacksoil prairie might meet the same fate as its predecessors more than 150 years ago.

     Phillip Cox, who's in the photo above,  is among those trying to prevent that from happening.

     He took me out to see the prairie last month.     We couldn’t get very close, as it was on Army property on the other side of a 7-foot chain-link fence.  We were looking in at a decommissioned U.S. Army ammunition plant near the Vermillion County Seat town of Newport.   Known as the Newport Chemical Depot, the plant sprawls over some 7,000 acres of land, much of which it was used as a buffer zone for its operations (the plant once made chemical weapons).  Nearly 3,000 acres are prime agricultural land still being leased to farmers.

     In the mid-‘90s the Army allowed a small portion of that land to be returned to its original tallgrass prairie ecosystem.   Cox had a hand in the prairie reconstruction when he worked as a conservationist for the company that managed the land for the Army.   By 2005 experts had replaced row crops with tallgrass prairie on a total of 336 acres.

    But here’s what worries Cox and other conservationists.  In September the entire 7,000 acres are scheduled to be over to an ad hoc government agency known as the Newport Chemical Depot Reuse Authority.  Over the next 10 years the Reuse Authority will sell the land to the public for various uses according to a master plan.  Approved uses include agriculture and industrial development.  The plan also calls for 30 percent to be managed as natural areas.  However, these are mostly sloughs and woodlands and other untillable areas.  Nearly all of the 336 acres of blacksoil prairie that Cox and others planted years ago remain on land designated for agriculture, according to the master plan. 

    Cox and groups such as the Isaac Walton League and the Audubon Society want the Army to put a covenant on those 336 acres to ensure they won’t go back to corn and soybeans.  But the Department of Defense is dragging its feet because such a restriction could complicate transfer of the land.  The Reuse Authority has also rejected the idea despite testimony at public hearings in support of protecting the prairie.

    “These 336 acres represent the largest example of the blacksoil prairie in Indiana,” Cox said as he looked out over the yellow coneflower and other forbs and grasses on the other side of the fence.  “Its biodiversity offers habitat to rare grassland birds and other wildlife, not to mention the other environmental benefits it provides.  It’s part of our natural heritage, and it could be a place for the public to visit and appreciate,” he continued.  “And yet we might lose this priceless prairie for another 300 acres of corn and beans.”
    Cox added that about 1,900 acres in the Newport Chemical Depot are potentially restorable to blacksoil prairie.  “A restoration of that scope would have national significance,” he said.
    But for now, Cox and others are just trying to save 336 acres of prairie from being plowed up, reminiscent of the prairies’ fate in the 19^th century.