Agathos Dorea

“The wealth of the tall grass prairie was its undoing.”

~John Madson, Historian

“Prairie” is the French word for meadow. European settlers used this term to name the vast, treeless plains they found when settling central North America. At one time, the tallgrass prairie covered 250 million acres of the Midwest and was home to more than 30 species of grasses and over 250 other plants. By the 1900’s, the tallgrass prairies were on the verge of destruction after only a half century of farming.

At present, there is less than one percent of the tallgrass prairie that remains–making it the most endangered ecosystem in North America. The largest remaining tracts of tallgrass prairies are found in the Flint Hills of Kansas.