The Last Harvest, and the First Burndown
The final cutting of Tifton 85 came off the field in late June. Now we turn roughly 45% of the property back toward native prairie.
Fig · The last round bales of Tifton 85 come off the meadow · July 2026Last week, in the last hot days of June, the final full harvest of Tifton 85 bermudagrass came off the meadow. It was a strange thing to stand next to — good hay, cut clean and the last of its kind we intend to make here. With the bales off, the conversion can begin.
Over the coming window we will treat roughly 45% of the property to knock down the introduced grasses that dominate it — Tifton 85 bermudagrass, King Ranch bluestem and Johnsongrass — and prepare a clean seedbed for a native mix. This is the single largest intervention the restoration will make, and we want to be transparent about exactly what it involves and why.
We are not converting everything at once. Roughly 45% of the property stays in Tifton 85 for now — kept in hay until the native replanting proves itself out — and we will do our best to hold clean breaks between the standing Tifton and the new native stands. That retained hay carries a small but steady income that helps offset the cost of the restoration while the natives establish.
The treatment
The knockdown is a glyphosate application, custom-mixed for the job. Away from water we use a standard terrestrial formulation; anywhere near the river and its drainages we switch to an aquatic-approved formulation labeled for use over and around water. Here is exactly what goes in the tank.
We are applying it by drone rather than a tractor-pulled boom, and that buys us three things: far more targeted, accurate coverage; the ability to protect individual trees and mottes we want to keep; and reach into the hard places — the brushy, uneven ground along the river where a tractor and sprayer simply cannot go.
Two passes, then never again
We are not casual about spraying, and we do not intend to farm with herbicide. The plan is a limited, deliberate knockdown — at most two applications to exhaust the bermudagrass and Johnsongrass rhizomes — and then no broadcast glyphosate on these acres again. After the natives are drilled, management shifts permanently to the tools a prairie actually wants: prescribed fire, timed grazing and spot treatment of individual reinvaders by hand.
Why glyphosate, and why it’s the right call here
Tifton 85 is a sterile hybrid bermudagrass that spreads by dense rhizomes and stolons, not seed. At field scale there is no mechanical way to remove it that doesn’t also destroy the soil structure we are trying to protect — tillage that fine would invite erosion on our slopes and along the river. A targeted chemical knockdown followed by no-till drilling is the established restoration practice, and it is precisely the method Texas Parks & Wildlife specifies under the Pastures for Upland Birds program: appropriate herbicide treatment to kill the exotic grasses, then no-till seeding of natives.
Glyphosate is the right chemistry for a one-time conversion: it is non-selective (so it takes the bermudagrass, KR bluestem and Johnsongrass together), it binds tightly to soil particles and is broken down by soil microbes rather than persisting or moving readily in most soils, and it has no residual soil activity that would stop native seed from germinating weeks later. Near the river we do not use the standard product at all — the aquatic-labeled formulation (Aquaneat) is manufactured and approved for exactly this situation, without the surfactant that makes terrestrial products unsafe over water.
What goes back down
The seedbed will be drilled with a native grass-and-forb mix designed by Texas Parks & Wildlife for this ecoregion under the PUB program, and sourced from Bamert Seed Company of Muleshoe, Texas. It is deep-rooted bunchgrasses for structure and soil, with a broad set of wildflowers and legumes for the pollinators and birds. The full mix is below.
20 species · 100% blend
The long view
None of this looks like much for a while. A drilled field looks like bare dirt, then like weeds and only years later like prairie — realistically five to ten years before the natives fully take over and the stand carries itself. The conversion is one move in a fifteen-year opening arc, and the grassland it makes will need fire and care for lifetimes after. The last harvest was an ending. This is the slow, deliberate start of something that outlasts us.