Modern fertility rests on nitrogen-fixing prairie plants farmers can no longer name

Evidence

In the narrow thread of sod between the shaved banks and the toppling fences grow the relics of what once was Illinois: the prairie. … No one in the bus sees these relics. A worried farmer, his fertilizer bill projecting from his shirt pocket, looks blankly at the lupines, lespedezas, or Baptisias that originally pumped nitrogen out of the prairie air and into his black loamy acres. He does not distinguish them from the parvenu quack-grass in which they grow. Were I to ask him why his corn makes a hundred bushels, while that of non-prairie states does well to make thirty, he would probably answer that Illinois soil is better. Were I to ask him the name of that white spike of pea-like flowers hugging the fence, he would shake his head. A weed, likely. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 419

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: the quiet nitrogen legacies of destroyed ecosystems — how the richest farmland sits atop buried prairie debt, and farmer ignorance of the legumes that made their soil.
• XREF: Echoes ch.15’s claim that prairie fires deplete nitrogen which legumes then replenish from the air — here the legume work is shown vanished and uncredited in the same soil. — connects to: Prairie fires deplete nitrogen that legumes then replenish from the air. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 371; Burning prairies on headlands produced fertilized meadows for elk and rare medicines — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 884

Broader Connections

• Burning prairies on headlands produced fertilized meadows for elk and rare medicines #expands (0.85) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 884