Grassland Restoration

Why we harvest yaupon to bring the grassland back

There is a piece of Texas east of the Hill Country where the brush is so thick a deer cannot walk through it. That wall is yaupon. When Abianne started CatSpring fourteen years ago, she thought about yaupon the way most Texans do. As a problem. What took me a decade to understand is that the thicket is not the problem. It is a symptom. And the harvest is how we fix it.

The land used to be different

A hundred and fifty years ago, this was grassland. Then we eliminated the bison, suppressed fire for a century, and grazed the prairie harder than it could recover. The woody species that fire and grazing once held back began to advance, and on a lot of Texas land, yaupon won. The state now estimates twenty million acres under yaupon thicketization. Roughly the size of South Carolina. Almost all of it on private working land. Almost nobody is talking about it.

What thicketization costs

Once yaupon crosses from understory shrub to dominant overstory, the consequences cascade. Native grasses disappear, because the closed canopy blocks the light they need to germinate. Water leaves too. Mature thicket intercepts up to 31% of rainfall before it reaches the ground, and the rest runs off with no grassland to absorb it. Habitat collapses with the grass. Bobwhite, meadowlark, and the endangered Houston toad all lose their home to a wall of leaves that nothing eats.

The accepted response does not work

For forty years, landowners have been told to bulldoze her, spray her, burn the stumps. It costs two to three thousand dollars an acre. She grows back in three to five years. Restoration becomes a cost center no working ranch can carry. So we do the opposite.

How can harvesting a plant be good for the land?

We do not plant her. We do not irrigate her. She is already there, growing wild across land where she has lived for thousands of years. The question is not whether to manage yaupon. The question is how. The accepted "how" is to kill her. Ours is something else entirely. We are implementing a conservation practice. The leaf is the byproduct.

Restoration harvest

We walk the property with the landowner and map the stands. We shear the desirable yaupon in the field, and the leaves travel to Brenham to become certified organic tea. Then comes the half most people miss. We mulch the remaining canopy back into the soil, seed native grasses at nine pounds an acre, monitor twice a year, and maintain with prescribed fire. We are validating it all through a $1.6 million USDA Conservation Innovation Grant, with Texas Parks and Wildlife, the Wildlife Habitat Federation, Audubon partners, and the American Bird Conservancy at the table.

What the land gets back

Restored grassland grows roots thirty to fifty feet deep, reaching the water table and stopping runoff before it floods the counties downstream. This is the land, returning to what she was asking to be.

Quantified by Planet Forward:

7% more soil carbon

70% more species biodiversity

31% of water recharge restore

The land is asking

Every conversation with a new landowner starts with one question. What is this land asking to be? We do not bring an answer. We bring a process. Most supply chains scale by taking. We built one that does the opposite.

The more we scale, the more we restore.

The land is asking. We are listening. This is the land, returning to what she was asking to be.