There's a question that comes up eventually for anyone who gets serious about prairie restoration: how does a planting I seeded compare to one that's been there for a thousand years?

The honest answer is that they're not the same thing. Not even close. But understanding the gap between them, and what drives it, will make you a better steward of whatever piece of ground you're working with.

What's Actually Left

The numbers on remnant prairie in Iowa are uncomfortable to sit with. About 0.01 percent of the original tallgrass prairie that once covered the state remains in anything resembling intact condition. That figure comes up often on the Prairie Farm Podcast, and it tends to land differently each time you hear it. Iowa was once almost entirely prairie. What's left could fit inside a single county.

Dr. Tom Rosberg has suggested at the Iowa Prairie Network's winter conference that the true number might be slightly higher than 0.01 percent, particularly in old, unimproved cow pastures in south-central and southeastern Iowa that may harbor more native diversity than they get credit for. Even so, the picture doesn't change much. Tiny. Scattered. And irreplaceable.

A 2025 study published in Restoration Ecology found that even when restored prairies are seeded with diverse, carefully chosen seed mixes, they consistently fall short of matching the plant diversity found in remnants. The species that tend to be missing in reconstructed prairies are short-statured plants, early-season bloomers, and species that simply aren't commercially available. In other words, the hardest species to bring back are exactly the ones remnant sites still hold.

What Remnant Prairie Has That Reconstruction Doesn't

The differences between a remnant and a reconstruction aren't just about species counts. They're about time.

A remnant prairie holds thousands of years of genetic selection. The big bluestem growing in a cemetery ditch that never saw a plow adapted to that specific microclimate, that specific soil moisture profile, that specific frost window over centuries of reproduction. The seeds from those plants carry adaptations that commercially produced seed, even high-quality locally-adapted seed, can't fully replicate.

Below the ground, remnant prairies contain mycorrhizal networks, soil biology, and a seed bank that has been building for millennia. Some prairie-dependent species, like the eared false foxglove, require the specific underground ecosystem of a remnant site to complete their life cycle at all. You can't seed them in. They need to arrive the slow way.

Laura Walter of the Tallgrass Prairie Center, who has spoken on the Prairie Farm Podcast about seed sourcing strategy, has pointed out that seed collected from multiple remnant sources leads to better establishment and greater species richness than seed from single sources or cultivated varieties. This is part of why Hoksey Native Seeds has spent decades building relationships with remnant seed sources across the region. It's not just about what species are in the bag. It's about where those seeds came from and what they carry with them.

At Hoksey, a remnant prairie is rented specifically to preserve it from row crop conversion and to maintain seed stock from verified remnant-origin plants. That's not virtue signaling, it's seed sourcing strategy that directly affects what customers are getting when they buy locally-adapted Iowa ecotype seed.

Why Reconstructed Prairies Simplify Over Time

Here's something that takes a few years to observe but is almost universal: reconstructed prairies get simpler over time if they're not managed. The grasses win. Big bluestem and indiangrass, the most durable and aggressive warm-season grasses, crowd out the forbs. The wildflowers thin. The insect diversity follows the plant diversity down.

There are a few reasons this happens. The absence of large grazers is one. Bison and elk grazed dominant grasses preferentially, which opened space for less competitive forb species to flourish. Without that disturbance, grasses fill in.

But a new study from Iowa State University adds another layer. ISU ecology professor Brian Wilsey and doctoral graduate Nathan Soley demonstrated through a four-year experiment in restored prairie plots that removing pollinators from the equation caused viable seed production among animal-pollinated plants to drop by 50 percent and species diversity among those plants to fall by 27 percent. Detailed coverage of the study is available through the Iowa State University news service. The implication is that pollinator decline isn't just a downstream consequence of prairie simplification. It's an active driver of it. Fewer pollinators mean less successful reproduction among the very forb species that diversify the prairie, which leaves more space for wind-pollinated grasses to take over, which means even fewer pollinators. Wilsey calls it a plant-pollinator extinction vortex.

This is one reason why the gap between remnants and reconstructions tends to widen over time without active management. Remnants generally sit in more ecologically connected landscapes with existing pollinator populations from adjacent habitat. Reconstructions are often isolated, surrounded by monoculture agriculture or mowed turf, with no pollinator reservoir nearby.

The Good News: Management Can Close the Gap

None of this is a reason to stop planting. It's a reason to plant smarter and manage harder.

Fire is the most powerful management tool available to most landowners. A well-timed prescribed burn resets grass dominance, returns nutrients to the soil, and stimulates germination from seeds that have been waiting years for the right conditions. Episode 254 of the Prairie Farm Podcast, featuring Ryan Kurtz of Hawkeye Community College, goes deep on how to think about burning for prairie quality, not just biomass management.

Hoksey's guide to burning a prairie field and the companion safety tips post cover the practical side of getting a burn done right.

Beyond fire, the ISU research points toward the importance of building pollinator habitat into and around any reconstruction from the beginning. That means choosing seed mixes with strong bloom diversity across the full growing season, not just peak summer. It means considering connectivity to adjacent habitat when you're deciding where to plant. And it means recognizing that the long-term health of your prairie is not separate from the health of its pollinator community.

Starting with the Right Seed

One major implication of everything above is that seed quality and seed sourcing matter more than most buyers realize. A reconstructed prairie is only as diverse as the seed that went into it, and seed from unknown origins or commercial cultivars carries less of the genetic heritage that makes native plants resilient to local conditions.

Hoksey's CRP mixes are built primarily from Iowa ecotype seed, meaning seed traced back to plants that evolved in this region. That's the starting point for a reconstruction that has any chance of approaching remnant quality over time. It won't be a remnant. But it can be something worth defending.

If you're working through the planning process for a larger restoration and want to think through site-specific species selection, Hoksey offers consultations built on nearly 40 years of seed production and prairie establishment experience in the Midwest.

The gap between remnant and reconstruction is real. But it's also the reason this work matters. Every reconstructed prairie is a bet on the future, that with the right seed, the right management, and enough time, something closer to what Iowa once was can come back.

For more on what makes remnant prairies irreplaceable, read Why Iowa's Remnant Prairies Matter More Than You Think.