Tallgrass prairie

And I remember seeing, you know, seeing pur- purple coneflowers everywhere.

And, and then I went out to Tallgrass Prairie this year.

Mm-hmm.

West of...

Yeah.

You know? We just live here.

And, and when you go out to, like, I was just in Illinois in the land of the tallgrass prairie, and there's, you know, the land of the tallgrass prairie, uh, parentheses with no prairie, you know? [laughs]

Yeah.

We're going to do two sales for Nature Conservancy.

The first sale is going to be held for Tallgrass Prairie out of Oklahoma.

The other one which will be right behind of the tall grass sale, Niobrara Valley Preserve.

What we're going to do, we've talked with the preserve managers, we're going to sell the tall grass animals first and then we're going to turn around right away, right after we sell the last batch for tall grass, turn around and sell what we have for Niobrara Valley Preserve.

Okay, we're gonna get into the case studies.

So the first case study I'm gonna talk about is the American Tallgrass Prairie.

This is the f- a burn they're doing at the University of Kansas, and the American Tallgrass Prairie is verifiably fire dependent.

It cannot exist apart from fire.

And the American Tallgrass Prairie is very beloved by ecologists and other people around the world, and it's a very endangered ecosystem.

I wonder why.

Because when you put out the fires, you take away everything that goes along with it.

So the American Tallgrass Prairie is supported by below ground biomass.

These photons and molecules are finite resources that plants cannot share and for which they must compete.

the highly efficient tallgrass fleets should rule the prairies.

Paradoxically, the tallgrass prairies are blessed with an abundance of smaller, less efficient wildflowers and legumes, prospering from sub-boreal Manitoba in Canada to the subtropical coastal plains of Louisiana and Texas.

As with the mystery of decay and renewal that abounds in the soil, microbes dwell at the heart of this paradox.

All of us mammals have microbes in our guts facilitating and regulating digestion.

Kal-El lives in the Kent home even though the Kents are gone, and you know, his, his Fortress of Solitude is basically the, the barn, you know, behind the house.

So, um, and I, I really loved, uh, some of the, the Kansas history stuff I got to write, and talking about the, you know, the Flint Hills and the Tallgrass Prairie and Kansas State Fair and, um, you know, I- I grew up in, grew up in Alabama, where Bug Wars is set, but I've lived in Kansas City now for almost half my life, you know, 26 years.

Um, so yeah, it feels, feels good to, to inject some like, you know, authentic Kansas, uh, culture into the pages of Superman.

And we'll, we'll definitely be seeing more of that.