An Iowa woman moved to South Dakota to single-handedly save 950 acres of native prairie.
Her name is Tracy Rosenberg. She grew up on an Iowa farm in a state that had once been 85% Northern Tallgrass Prairie. By the time she graduated high school, that number was down to one-tenth of one percent.
She spent 35 years in Des Moines. A divorce forced the sale of the small farm she'd been planning to convert. She started looking for native prairie to buy in Iowa, but there wasn't any left to find.
Then she read a 2012 Star Tribune article about prairie conservation that mentioned Pete Bauman, an ecologist with the Nature Conservancy working in the Dakotas.
She emailed him. Within an hour, he wrote back and told her that the Benedictine monks at Blue Cloud Abbey near Marvin, South Dakota, were closing and selling their land, including some of the last unplowed native sod in the state.
So she packed up and moved to a place she had never been.
In 2013, Tracy bought almost 1,000 acres of virgin tallgrass prairie. She named it Abbey Grasslands of the Prairie Coteau. Then she got to work with prescribed burns, intensive rotational grazing, and integrated pest management.
She's spent the last 13 years restoring degraded sections and protecting the intact ones. The federally threatened Dakota Skipper butterfly, gone from most of its historic range, has been documented on her land.
Tracy received the USDA NRCS Earth Team Individual Award and was named Conservationist of the Year by the National Organization of Professional Women.
She gives talks at national prairie conferences, hosts educational tours for ranchers and tribal college students, and runs the property as a working classroom.
Less than 4% of America's tallgrass prairie remains. The nearly 1,000 acres Tracy is protecting is some of it.
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