Demoville Prairie

The DeMoville Prairie Grazing Land Conservation Project, focuses on habitat restoration, conservation, and management of a 243-acre site in Chickasaw County, Mississippi. This site will serve to demonstrate best-management practices in a critically imperiled habitat type, the Black Belt Prairie region of Mississippi and Alabama.

Less than 1% of this native prairie habitat exists today after centuries of agricultural development and other disturbances. Existing remnants remain threatened by development, erosion, fire suppression, and other activities.

The project will demonstrate that private landowners can simultaneously manage a livestock grazing operation and restore and manage native grassland while maintaining positive economic returns.

The project is named for its former owners, Jock DeMoville and his daughter, Margaret Jock DeMoville. At the request of Margaret, the DeMoville site was enrolled in an Agricultural Land Easement (ALE), held by the Mississippi Land Trust (MLT), in early 2021. She owned the first and only Grassland Reserve Program project in Mississippi, also only a few miles from this DeMoville Conservation Project.

Mississippi’s Prairies

Mississippi has two distinct prairie regions that are collectively referred to as the Blackland Prairie. Named for their dark, rich soils covered by immense open plains of grasses, it is now more often known for its chalky white exposed subsoils and cedar trees.

The largest of the Blackland Prairies is the Black Belt Prairie. This crescent-shaped region that covers 8,787 square miles (5,623,680 acres) and extends some 806 miles from McNairy County, Tennessee, south across east-central Mississippi, and east to Russell County, Alabama. Development of the Black Belt was chiefly from chalk, a soft limestone, with small concentrations of clay and silt. The “blackness” of the soil as described by early explorers and settlers is a result of humus of the grassland that forms dark-colored topsoil.

A second prairie region in Mississippi, the Jackson Prairie, encompasses 1,088 square miles (696,349 acres) and extends from Hinds County to the eastern border between Alabama and Mississippi. The fine-textured soils of this prairie were derived from calcareous clays and are well-suited for cultivation.

Ecological Significance of Mississippi’s Prairies

The remaining remnants of the Blackland Prairies support an incredibly diverse and distinct flora and fauna, including species of plants and insects found primarily in the Great Plains. These disjunct distributions and fossil evidence suggest that this prairie may have had a prehistoric link to the Great Plains and served as a refugium for the prairie biota during the last glacial period.

The Blackland Prairie is described in Mississippi’s State Wildlife Action Plan. The plan lists habitats associated with it as critically imperiled. Conservation actions and practices such as prescribed fire, invasive species control, restoration of natural vegetation, developing landowner incentive and assistance programs, and providing corridors between patches of prairie habitat are encouraged in this region.