Another weed is possible

How a perfectly fine grass went very bad — and how we can make it good once again

Buffelgrass (Pennisetum ciliare) is native to regions of Africa and Asia. If you saw it waving in African wind, athrive in the veldt where it grows in good company, you might want to know how it works, how the animals use it, what spot it might occupy in its world.

A lone elephant (Loxodonta africana, rear view) surveys a grassland. Because the elephantine digestion is less than 50% efficient (versus near-100% in hyenas), L. africana must consume up to 250 kilograms daily in grasses, bushes, twigs, bark, and even roots, to access which it sometimes upends whole trees. This nutrient-rich dung—expelled 12-15 times daily, in payloads of 5-10 kg—serves as a general-purpose fertilizer for the veldt's flora. Elephant calves also eat it.

Or you might, instead, think of the money you’ll make when you bring it back home, as some big Arizona ranchers and their partners in government did back in the 1930s. Those ranchers had a terrible problem: their cattle had nearly depleted the native grasses of the Sonoran Desert. If Arizona was to become the national meatbasket, as they intended, they would need a profuse new source of food. And there it was: buffelgrass!¹

Buffelgrass is native to a vast swathe of the globe, where it has evolved in tandem with plants that benefit from its habits. Elsewhere it is a wildly destructive intruder (aka “weed”).

Luckily for us, the ranchers abandoned their meatbasket plans, and the cattle for the most part departed. But the imported buffelgrass stayed in our desert, outdrinking indigenous plants and, worse, burning often and fast — not a problem back home but lethal in a world not adapted to fire, and to those desert plants that were slow to recover from it: in other words, all of them.² Buffelgrass turned out bad for everyone, profit-driven or not, human or not.

Today many tens of millions of dollars are spent merely trying to slow the plant’s spread by all sorts of means. Yet the best way to stop it remains the cheapest: by hand. And not just the cheapest: culling buffelgrass can be what is called, in the parlance of large-scale ranching, profitable.

Except that we at Barrio Buffelworks are by no means eager for profit — unless profit’s defined as the thriving of our communities. When it’s part of a process of building for the sake of vulnerable members, buffelgrass can indeed hugely profit our world.

Not all non-native plants are bad: some become key to a region’s survival. One plant that has long been purposely spread is Zea mays, or corn, which is newly protected by the Mexican constitution in recognition of its millennia of support for the diet, mythologies, and Weltanschuung of Mexican peoples — and because it is threatened by an invasive weed called industrial agriculture. (Image by Paul Mirocha)

Next week we’ll get down to brass tacks: what we’re doing to turn this weed to good use, and thus eventually diminish its population. Meanwhile, please subscribe to support us, sign up on our volunteer list to keep up-to-date on our brickyard’s opening times, and come visit us in person to participate in our projects.

Oh and if for some reason you’re looking for boilerplate, it’s over here. Oh wait, no… here. For a piece that sums up what we’re doing, check out this one.

1. This is a preposterously superficial summary, of course. There’s more, much more to the history of overgrazing in Arizona, — and much more to know about buffelgrass too.

2. The National Park Service calls buffelgrass “the archenemy of the Sonoran Desert — the invasive grass most likely to cause significant damage to the native ecosystem.”