Fences made continuous grazing lethal to Silphium where buffalo pasturing had been tolerable

Evidence

Why does Silphium disappear from grazed areas? I once saw a farmer turn his cows into a virgin prairie meadow previously used only sporadically for mowing wild hay. The cows cropped the Silphium to the ground before any other plant was visibly eaten at all. One can imagine that the buffalo once had the same preference for Silphium, but he brooked no fences to confine his nibblings all summer long to one meadow. In short, the buffalo’s pasturing was discontinuous, and therefore tolerable to Silphium. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 181

Categorization

• XREF: Fencing as the causal hinge reversing buffalo-era ecology connects to the reader’s colonial land-use and disturbance-history threads. — connects to: Settler farming ended prairie fires and converted grassland to oak woodland — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 116; Apparent farm solvency conceals ongoing topsoil loss to erosion — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 425