--- title: "Grass Is Winning: Why Prairies Need a Summer Shakeup" description: Prairie grasses crowding out your forbs? Without bison or summer disturbance, they will. How a small, well-timed mow gives wildflowers room to come back. image: https://www.landwright.io/hubfs/bd49d53a-8a0e-4420-aefe-96ad9dd794ec.jpeg --- [LW Landwright LAND MANAGER](https://www.landwright.io/) - [Land Manager Software](https://www.landwright.io/platform) - Contractors - [Robotics](https://www.landwright.io/robotics) - [About](https://www.landwright.io/about) - [Contact](https://www.landwright.io/contact) - [Ledger](https://www.landwright.io/blog) [Book a Demo](https://www.landwright.io/contact) [← Back to the Journal](https://www.landwright.io/blog) # Grass Is Winning: Why Prairies Need a Summer Shakeup [Mark Vande Haar](https://www.landwright.io/blog/author/mark-vande-haar) · Oct 9, 2026, 11:39:38 PM ![](https://www.landwright.io/hubfs/bd49d53a-8a0e-4420-aefe-96ad9dd794ec.jpeg) I've been watching my CP25 prairie that's ten years old and I find: a wall of big bluestem, Indiangrass and switchgrass, and fewer coneflowers, milkweeds and blazing stars than the seed mix promised. The grasses aren't doing anything wrong. They're just doing what grasses do when nothing tells them to stop. That "nothing" is the problem. Prairies evolved with regular summer disturbance, and most of ours don't get any. I've been burning every 3 years and doing a pretty good job of care but something is missing. ## What we lost: bison and summer disturbance Bison are grass specialists. The large majority of their diet is grasses and sedges, and they mostly skip the flowering plants. A herd moving through grazed the grass down and left the forbs standing, which handed those forbs sunlight they'd otherwise never see. Add wallows, trampling, and lightning fires that ran whenever conditions allowed, and you get a prairie that was constantly being reshuffled in patches. Today most managed prairie gets one tool: a prescribed burn in March or April. Dormant-season fire is great at removing thatch and keeping woody stuff out. It also happens to hand warm-season grasses a clean slate right before their growing season. Repeat that for a decade with no grazing and no summer disturbance, and you've built a very efficient native grass farm. The result is predictable: - Grass canopy closes over by midsummer and shades out shorter forbs - Forb seedlings can't establish under the thatch and shade - Diversity drops, and so do the pollinators and insects that depend on it We can't put bison back on most properties. We can borrow what they did. ## The fix: a small, well-timed mow A mower is a poor bison, but it's the one most of us own. The goal isn't to scalp the prairie. It's to knock the grass canopy back during the growing season so forbs get light and room. What that looks like in practice: - **Go small.** Mow patches or strips, not the whole unit. A few acres at a time mimics patchy grazing and leaves cover for wildlife. - **Mow high.** Set the deck around 6 to 8 inches. That clips the grass back without wiping out low-growing forbs. - **Time it to the grass.** Late spring into early summer, as warm-season grasses start to take off, gives the forbs a head start. - **Watch the nesting season.** Ground-nesting birds peak in late spring and early summer. Small patches and rotating locations year to year keep the impact down. - **Rotate.** Don't mow the same patch every year. Disturbance works because it moves around. If forbs are thin on the ground already, follow the mow with a broadcast of forb seed. Opening the canopy only helps if there's something there to fill the gap. This isn't a one-time fix. It's a habit. One summer mow won't undo ten years of grass dominance, but a few years of rotating disturbance can tip the balance back. ## See it in the field Why forbs are important late season [https://youtube.com/shorts/zt9wk8gBUD4?si=DsWbC7rfH5idHyDY](https://youtube.com/shorts/zt9wk8gBUD4?si=DsWbC7rfH5idHyDY) The Problem explained in a short [https://youtube.com/shorts/uXbLYNQrNJM?si=CGC831enkTsh6J6D](https://youtube.com/shorts/uXbLYNQrNJM?si=CGC831enkTsh6J6D) The results of the mow https://youtube.com/shorts/opY9ZKhOpN0?si=MyCURQ8r2vKNmJ0H ## Track it, or it didn't happen None of this works if you can't remember what you did. Which patch got mowed, when, at what height, and what came back the next year. Land Manager lets you log management actions and field observations from your phone, map them, and see what's actually changing over time. Less guessing, more prairie. 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