Askania-Nova: The Steppe the Plough Never Touched

Picture a piece of land that, in all of human history, has never been ploughed. Not a fallow field. Not an abandoned farm gone to weeds. Soil that is still exactly as it was before wheat, before tractors, before us. In the south of Ukraine, in the Kherson region, one such piece survives. Eleven thousand hectares of feather grass that nobody ever turned over.

Your first thought is probably the same as everyone's: it's grass. What is there to protect? It isn't a forest or a mountain. It's flat, empty and windy. And if it's so valuable, why was the rest of it ploughed up for a hundred years without a second thought?

It was ploughed because it was valuable. Under that plain grass lies black earth, chernozem, some of the richest soil on the planet, and the steppe itself made it. A steppe plant lives downward. It grows two to three times more root than the green you can see. For thousands of years those roots died and turned to humus. People sliced off the top and got a breadbasket. And almost nowhere did they keep the original.

The man who kept it was Friedrich Falz-Fein. His family bought this estate in eighteen fifty-six. It already had its German name, Askania-Nova, and it was a sheep farm. Wool, and nothing else. When Friedrich was eleven, he passed his exams and asked his father for a reward. Not a horse. Not a rifle. He asked for permission to build his first enclosure for wild animals. He kept building them for the rest of his life.

He studied in Dorpat, and in his holidays he toured the botanical gardens and zoos of Europe. Then he came home and did something almost nobody did back then. In eighteen ninety-eight he cut five hundred desyatinas of virgin steppe out of his own estate, and declared them protected for good. A desyatina is an old Russian land measure, a little more than a hectare. It wasn't for grazing, and it wasn't for hay. He simply took it out of use. For the owner of a steppe estate, that was a pure loss, voluntary and permanent.

To water his animals he drilled wells seventy metres deep. By the start of the new century, bison from the Białowieża forest were walking his enclosures, along with antelope, ostriches and kangaroos. In eighteen ninety-nine, with the help of the explorer Pyotr Kozlov, a few wild horses were brought from Dzungaria. These were the horses Przewalski had described. At Askania, for the first time anywhere, they were bred in captivity.

That mattered far more than anyone could have guessed. The last of these horses was seen in the wild, in Mongolia, in nineteen sixty-nine. The species was gone from nature. Everything that remains on Earth descends from about eleven wild animals taken out in the early twentieth century, plus one domestic mare.

From that handful, the species was rebuilt. Today there are around two thousand purebred Przewalski's horses. They run wild in Mongolia again. A few dozen were released into the Chernobyl zone, and there are now more than a hundred there. They are all relatives. And every family tree leads back to the enclosures of a landowner in Kherson who simply loved animals.

The owner himself was less lucky. In nineteen fourteen, Emperor Nicholas the Second came to visit. He broke court etiquette, which forbade staying with a private person. After the visit, he made Falz-Fein and his brothers hereditary nobles. A few years later, Falz-Fein had to leave the country. He died in exile, in the German town of Bad Kissingen, in nineteen twenty. The steppe outlived him.

And here comes the real surprise. It turned out that "leave it alone" and "preserve it" are not the same thing. On strictly protected plots, where nobody mows and nothing grazes, a dense mat builds up. It is old dry grass from previous years, packed like a brush. New green only breaks through it by May. And the showy species slowly disappear: sage, sainfoin, scorzonera. A mown steppe is more colourful than a protected one.

Because the steppe always lived under someone's teeth and hooves. Taking people out isn't enough. You have to bring the grazers back. A reserve turned out not to be a vault. It's a living thing, and it needs looking after.

Virgin feather-grass steppe of this kind exists nowhere else in Europe. There is one specimen left. And people are still learning what, exactly, they are holding.

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