For the Love of the Prairie
January 22, 2025
When Bill Sproul was growing up and attending school in a one-room schoolhouse, he wanted to be a cowboy. Later, he figured the closest thing would be to become a rancher.
Over the course of his ranching career, Sproul spent years following the conventional route—until he read conservationist Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanack (1949), which set him on a path to land stewardship. “If you view land as a community, and you’re a part of the community along with everything else…that’s when you can start to really understand how to cherish the land and how to really love it,” he explains in a new four-part interview series, a collaboration between the Ranchland Trust of Kansas and Mark Feiden’s Emil Redmon’s Cow (ERC). The ERC website seeks to preserve the stories of older farmers and ranchers, and this new interview series, supported by a Culture Preservation Grant, spotlights stories of grassland conservation.
“I love the prairie. I love prairie grasses, I love prairie plants, I love the prairie just in general.” With a twinkle in his eye, Sproul adds, “I love my wife, too, but I love the prairie.”
Watch Bill Sproul's Interview
The stories in this interview series are vivid, colorful, and moving. They speak to the purpose of ERC, which is to collect and preserve stories for future generations. And there’s an urgency to the mission: “If we are to preserve the humor, wit and wisdom of a largely bygone era, we must do so now,” the ERC website states.
The Grassland Conservation interview series is educational, sharing the importance of conservation—but the interviews are also personal. They share family traditions and ways of life that are slowly disappearing. These are the kinds of stories that grandchildren beg to hear and will one day pass on to their own families.
For Bill Sproul, being a steward of the land has been a reward in itself. He reflects, “Maybe wealth is not measured in dollars but measured in the community. In soil and insects and whatever it be…. Maybe that’s where the real wealth is.”
The Grassland Conservation Series can be found at http://www.redmonscow.org/grassland.htm.
Join the Movement of Ideas
- WATCH dozens more interviews with farmers and ranchers on the Emil Redmon's Cow website
- ATTEND a TALK book discussion of "Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains" by Lucas Bessire at the Baldwin City Public Library on Febrary 5. Part of the Family Land TALK series.
- VIEW the Volland Store's online exhibition "Deep Roots and New Growth in Wabaunsee County," created as part of the Crossroads: Change in Rural America initiative.