Burrow & Graze

Graze decided to prove her point. She grazed a wide patch beautifully — cropped it even, stirred the seed, moved on to let it recover, exactly right. "There," she said. "Perfect grassland care." But over that same patch, where no prairie dogs had dug in a long while, the soil was packed hard as a road. The rain she'd hoped would soak in just ran off the top; the greened grass she'd tended stayed thin and thirsty despite all her careful grazing. "Hm," Graze said, frowning at the hard, dry ground. "I did everything right up top. But the ground underneath won't drink. My good grazing is sitting on soil that can't breathe."

Burrow scampered over to that hard patch, curious, and got to work — tunneling, turning, opening doors in the packed earth. Air and water sank down where they couldn't before, and the soil grew soft and alive. "See?" Burrow said proudly. "This is what the prairie needs." But she looked around her freshly-dug patch and noticed something: the grass above her tunnels had grown so tall and tangled and rank, with no grazer to crop it, that it was smothering the young plants and shading the ground hard. "Oh," Burrow said quietly, looking up at the choking thatch. "I opened the soil so beautifully. But the grass up top has gone wild and it's strangling everything. My good digging is under a jungle that nobody's tending."

The two of them looked at each other — the digger with her breathing soil under a choking jungle, the grazer with her perfect grass over ground that couldn't drink.

The old meadowlark hopped down between them. "Now imagine you work the same patch," she said.

So they tried it. Graze grazed the tangled grass down to thick, healthy, open green — and Burrow dug the packed soil beneath it soft and breathing — the same patch, from above and below at once. And that patch, with its cropped thriving grass and its open living soil, came alive the way neither of their patches had alone: rain soaked deep, roots ran down, wildflowers rose, and creatures came running. "That's a healthy prairie," the meadowlark sang. "Not the work of the grazers or the diggers — the two of them, over and under, at the same time. The above-ground and the below-ground are one system pretending to be two. Crop the grass but pack the soil, and it fails. Open the soil but let the grass run wild, and it fails. It only thrives when both ends are tended together." And it belongs to everyone, she added — every healthy grassland on Earth runs on this partnership of what grazes above and what burrows below, and those deep, living, well-tended prairie soils lock away enormous amounts of carbon, safe underground. People who have stewarded grasslands for generations have long known you cannot tend a prairie from one side only.