2024 Give to the Max Day!

"Born on a small prairie farm to children and grandchildren of turn of the century emigrants, I first experienced a world without trees. My earliest memories are of a landscape with an incessant wind and a bright open-sky sun. At a quiet and more than shy fourteen I made a first attempt at a new language. The resultant image of a shy fox from my second hand three-dollar camera spoke back to me with a loud, profound and life-changing voice."  

"Nearly fifty years later that voice is still whispering in my ear. The dialect is the same, even though I have tried many versions along the way. I traveled and photographed grand landscapes of the world. Many were covered with alluring luxurious forests and jungles. I even fulfilled a boyhood fantasy to live in a romantic wilderness log cabin beneath towering pines. But the visual language dialect that still seems to translate with the deepest meaning in my work is that of the open sky prairie-like landscape."  - Jim Brandenburg

The prairie was once the continent’s largest ecosystem; today, it has become rare and one of the most fragmented, leaving less than one percent of the original Northern Tallgrass Prairie in the upper Midwest intact. It is arguably North America’s most endangered ecosystem. Through fragmentations, ecosystems that had once relied on its geographical size for its diversity become disintegrated, causing an imbalance in the intricacies of the native environment. Aside from loss of habitat and equilibrium between predators and preys, fragmentation is responsible for inbreeding among species. In turn, inbreeding will result in weakened species that can no longer survive in an already challenged ecosystem. Although such corruption of habitat occurs very quickly, it will take generations of carefully managed restoration to reverse the damage.

Touch the Sky Prairie is part of the Northern Tallgrass Prairie National Wildlife Refuge managed by the US Fish & Wildlife Service. This prairie is located north of the city of Luverne in Rock County, Minnesota. Heavily grazed for over a century, this area is bring restored to a healthy native prairie.  Touch the Sky Prairie currently covers over 1,000 acres of federally-owned land. The Brandenburg Prairie Foundation has been instrumental in securing land and promotion of the unit. With their help, an additional 54 acres of habitat has been secured for permanent protection under a Fish and Wildlife Service grassland easement.

If you would like to participate in permanent protection and restoration of the native prairie in southwest Minnesota, please become a member of the Brandenburg Prairie Foundation. www.brandenburgprairiefoundation.org.