Historic ranch preserves native grasses…but fescue needs some help – Brooks Bulletin

Historic ranch preserves native grasses…but fescue needs some help – Brooks Bulletin

The Glenbow Ranch Park, west of Calgary, is one of those rare areas in Alberta where the original native fescue grass remains mostly undisturbed by human activity. Those short grass fescue plants and other native forbs could be hundreds of years old and would have been grazed by bison. By the 1880s, the bison were gone, replaced by large ranches with thousands of head of cattle. Most of the big ranches were later broken up into smaller operation…