Why the Ground Needs Work
None of this is a story about neglect. The land was farmed and grazed by people who worked it hard and followed the best advice available at the time. What we inherited is the honest result of those decisions, plus twenty years of a grass doing exactly what it was planted to do.
Tifton 85 across the working field
Planted on USDA recommendation and hayed for nearly twenty years. It is good hay and it held the soil, but at this scale it crowds out native grasses, forbs and volunteer trees, and the ground beneath it supports very little else.
Fewer dove, quail and raptors
Structure is what upland birds need — bunchgrass to nest in, forbs for seed, brush to escape into. A single-species sward provides none of it, and the birds followed the habitat out.
Cut banks and a scoured drainage
Decades of grazing to the water’s edge, seasonal flooding and a drainage corridor running fast in Tifton have left an eroding riverbank and a runoff channel that carries soil off the property instead of soaking it in.
Oak wilt and fallen giants
Erosion, flood scour and oak wilt have killed or dropped many of the largest trees along the river. Without replanting there is no next generation of canopy in the sections that need shade most.
Unchecked deer and feral hog
High white-tail numbers and a persistent feral hog population remove seedlings faster than they can establish. Every planting plan here has to account for protection, not just species choice.
Each condition is answered somewhere in the plan of record — section by section, in a deliberate order. The sequence and the seven sections are on The Land.
Nothing here is a finding against the people who farmed this ground. It is a starting inventory, written down so the work can be measured against it.