TERRE HAUTE — An existing restored tallgrass prairie located within the
Vermillion Rise Mega Park will be converted to row crops, but a state conservation plan will restore a new prairie that is twice as large on the northwest corner of the area.
Steve Aker, executive deputy director of Vermillion Rise Mega Park, said the park’s board of directors earlier this week entered into a land management contract with
Farmers National Co., an agricultural management firm with an office in Lafayette.
The company will manage about 3,500 acres of land, which is expected to generate about $750,000 annually. That money will be used to help improve the park’s interior for industrial and commercial development, Aker said.
Bids to lease agricultural tracts, which includes the tallgrass prairie area, will be sought early next month.
The U.S. Army contracted from 1994 to 2005 to create a restored 336-acre black-soil tallgrass prairie. It spent nearly $128,000 for site preparation, seed and planting. Several conservation groups had sought to keep that site as a prairie.
Tom Swinford,
Indiana Department of Natural Resources ecologist for the central part of the state, said that while more than 300 acres of restored black-soil tallgrass prairie will be converted to row crops, the state plans to double that area with a new tallgrass prairie restoration.
The 600-acre tallgrass prairie will be part of a 1,700-acre preserve in the northwest corner of the former
Newport Chemical Depot.
Swinford said the northwest part of the depot has two stream tributaries that connect into the Little Vermillion River that then drains into the Wabash.
“It was a tough sell, but I think [the park’s board of directors] saw the wisdom of concentrating our conservation efforts in that northwest corridor and connecting two big forested corridors with a prairie restoration,” he said.
“We will do a comprehensive design and use state of science techniques there,” Swinford said. “First thing we will do is remove all the [crop] drainage tiles and return the water back to the soils, which brings the life back. We will then put native plants on there. It is exciting and a pretty neat opportunity,” Swinford said.
Swinford said the move “provides an opportunity to use Indiana source seeds. The prairie nurseries and the wetland nurseries have come a long way and many plants are available now and plants that have been collected locally that were not available” when the existing prairie was installed by the U.S. Army, Swinford said.
The restored prairie was not an original prairie, known as remnant prairie. “That is the rarest of the rare … and there is just a tiny fraction of those left in the state,” Swinford said, adding most of those areas are now protected.
“I think we will be improved,” over the U.S. Army’s site, Swinford said. “That was done very early in the restoration cycle or experience. It was very early in the science of restoring prairies then and we have gained a lot of knowledge and experience since then in how to do them better.”
“We will restore the prairie and will be set in the context of nature that features a 1,700-acre area. It will be prairie set in the middle of a forest with tributary streams. It is not an isolated prairie planting out in the middle of farmland anymore,” Swinford said.
The forest contains 1,100 acres, he added, and contains the endangered Indiana Bat.
“They lend strength to each other. The bats can forage over the prairie and we will have a big wetland area. We will do it right and be on a large scale,” he added.
The DNR will own all the land within 15 years for conservation, Swinford said. Funding for the restoration will be sought from both state sources and conservation organizations, he said.