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Landowners → revenue they can't reach alone
A single farm cannot contract a volumetric water benefit, or sell a verified nature outcome, or negotiate feedstock supply. Aggregated across enrolled acres, it can.
01 / The name is the model
The name is the value proposition.
Here is what it means.
PrairieLink restores prairie and opens the door to the markets that pay for it. That facilitation is the business — and it is the honest answer to why do you take a margin?
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Market partners → verified outcomes on real acreage
Companies with water replenishment, Scope 3 and nature targets need outcomes tied to specific ground, measured by third-party MRV partners. We put acres behind the commitment.
Link 3
Today's markets → tomorrow's feedstock market
Attribute and grass markets pay for the acres now. They also build the operating capacity that a prairie-to-RNG feedstock market will require later.
We fund the planting. The landowner manages the ground. Together we build the market — and PrairieLink is paid as a margin on the market revenue flowing back to the farm, not as a bill to the farm.
02 / What you are actually buying
Above ground,
this looks like grass.
The part of prairie that does the work is the part nobody photographs. Keep scrolling and we'll go down with it.
1 ft — Soil
Perennial cover means the ground isn't disturbed year after year. Aggregate structure rebuilds. Organic matter accumulates. Topsoil stays where it is.
3 ft — Water
Open root channels and dense litter slow water down and move it into the profile instead of across it. Infiltration up, runoff down — and the nutrients that travel with runoff stay on the field.
This is the physical basis of a volumetric water benefit, the most mature attribute PrairieLink sells today.
7 ft — Big bluestem
Andropogon gerardii. The warm-season grass that gave the tallgrass prairie its name, and the backbone of most blends we plant.
10 ft — Switchgrass
Panicum virgatum. Dense, fibrous, and durable — forage in the growing season, and the standing biomass that a digester will eventually want.
15 ft — Compass plant
Silphium laciniatum. One taproot, driven deeper than most farm buildings are tall. It takes years to get there — which is why establishment is measured in seasons, not weeks.
Resilient roots.
Everything downstream of this page — the water benefit, the carbon, the grazing, the hay, the feedstock — is sitting on the structure you just scrolled through.
03 / A menu, not a product
Every acre needs something to attach to.
Water is the most mature market we work in today. It is not the business. The business is a growing menu of markets, so that each restored acre has a reason to stay in prairie after the grant money is gone.
Categories group into environmental attributes, physical grass, planting services, and — later — RNG feedstock. Pricing mechanics are shown as units and structures rather than quoted rates; rates are set per agreement.
04 / Where prairie goes
Prairie is not all‑or‑nothing.
You can start with the acres that already underperform and keep farming the rest. For a landowner that lowers the barrier to entry. For a buyer it is how acreage scales — across many farms, not a handful of large conversions.
Same field. Different amounts of it.
05 / How an outcome becomes sellable
An attribute is a difference,
not a photograph.
Establishing prairie creates a monetizable outcome relative to a counterfactual — what the same acres would have done under continued crop or pasture production. Everything a buyer purchases lives in that gap.
Source: Schulte et al., PNAS 114(42), 2017 — the Iowa State STRIPS experiment, in which 10% of a corn–soybean field was converted to native prairie strips. Reported as published results of that experiment, not as PrairieLink's own measurement. We cite it because it describes the mechanism our third‑party MRV partners measure on enrolled acres.
06 / Establishment
Sleep. Creep. Leap.
Establishment is not a fixed schedule. Drag the year to see what the stand is doing, what the landowner is doing, and what can be earned — as ranges, because ranges are the truth.
What moves these ranges
- Seed mix — species richness and the grass-to-forb ratio
- Site preparation — how the seedbed was readied
- Prior land use — row crop, pasture, expiring CRP, idle ground
- Herbicide and chemical history — residual carryover delays everything
- Weather in the establishment window
07 / For landowners and farmers
We fund it. You manage it.
We build the market together.
This is a partnership with obligations on both sides, not a giveaway and not a conservation grant. The up-front cost is covered so the transition is de-risked. The income comes from the markets the prairie attaches to.
PrairieLink brings
- No‑cost restoration. Seed, site preparation and planting, covered up front. Not a cost-share, not a loan.
- A localized seed mix. Blends built for the site, not a bag off the shelf.
- Agronomic support through the establishment window.
- Market access and contracting you could not reach as a single operation.
- Third‑party MRV so outcomes are measured and verified by someone other than us.
You bring
- The ground — and you keep it. Ownership and control do not change hands.
- Management. Prairie has to be managed. Left too tall it goes unproductive and woody species move in; cut or grazed too short it loses vigor and diversity.
- A commitment that matches the market. Agreement length is set by what the attached market requires. It varies — there is no single fixed term.
- Partnership on revenue as markets come online.
Together you get
- New revenue streams on acres that were not carrying themselves.
- Grazing and hay income from management the stand already requires — the work is a requirement, the income is the upside.
- Diversified farm revenue that does not move with one commodity price.
- A margin model you can check. PrairieLink is paid out of market revenue, not out of your pocket.
Who we work with, in priority order
The order is deliberate. Operators who depend on revenue from working land are the hardest to convince — and are therefore the real test of whether these markets work. If the economics hold for them, the economics hold.
- FarmersOwner-operators working their own ground
- Landowners who lease to farmersRow-crop and pasture leases
- Landowners who lease for other practicesIncluding recreational leases
- Recreational usersA benefit of restored prairie, not the reason for it
08 / What's in the bag, what shows up
25+ species, localized to the planting.
Seed mix quality is not where we cut cost. A stand that fails to establish or comes in thin is neither restoration nor a product anyone will buy.
Bloom windows — a blend is built so something is flowering from April through October
09 / The year on the ground
Prairie is managed, or it stops working.
Biomass has to come off. That is agronomy, not preference. Grazing and haying revenue exist because the stand needs the work done anyway.
Indicative windows for an established warm‑season stand in the tallgrass region. Actual timing is set by stand maturity, species mix, nesting season, and the agreement the acres sit under.
10 / The long game
Where this is going: prairie as feedstock.
Our working theory is that prairie biomass is harvested in the dormant season and converted to renewable natural gas through anaerobic digestion. That is the strategic reason to build market capacity now — and it is where the engineering story belongs.
Headroom left in waste feedstocks
Regulatory and policy change needed to open RNG to prairie biomass
PrairieLink's own working estimate, not a forecast from a third party. The window is why attribute and grass markets are being built first: they keep acres in prairie until the feedstock market exists.
From standing stand to pipeline
- 1Standing biomass
Mature stand, dormant season, after seed set and after nesting.
- 2Harvest & bale
Cut, cure and bale on the same equipment that makes hay.
- 3Logistics
Staging, storage and haul radius — the constraint that decides whether an acre is in range.
- 4Anaerobic digestion
Co-digestion with existing feedstocks; biomass pretreatment is the open engineering question.
- 5Upgrading & injection
Biogas cleaned to pipeline specification and injected.
Digestate
A fertilizer product to develop alongside the gas.
Biochar
A parallel thermal pathway we intend to explore.
Policy instruments
D3 RINs for cellulosic biogas; the 45Z clean fuel production credit.
Not every restored acre is destined for a digester. Acres attach to the market that fits them — water, carbon, nature, grazing, hay, seed. Feedstock is one door among several, and it is the one that isn't open yet.
PrairieLink is operated by Roeslein Alternative Energy, which has run renewable natural gas projects for over a decade. That operating experience is why the feedstock question is one we are prepared to answer — and it is the only part of this program where the engineering story is the point. More about the team →
11 / Scale
Scale comes from many farms,
not a few large conversions.
The tallgrass ecoregion once ran from Manitoba to Texas. Most of it has been converted to other uses, and what remains is fragmented. Putting prairie back means putting pieces of it back — on thousands of fields, in the configurations each one can carry.
40,000acres under the USDA AMP award — the starting point, not the goal
~170Macres of tallgrass prairie across North America before conversion1
The ecoregion is the opportunity. The dots are what the opportunity actually looks like: edge-of-field practices and partial conversions spread across working farms, each one small, together large.
1 Samson & Knopf, BioScience 44(6), 1994. Ecoregion extent shown for orientation; it is not a map of enrolled acres.
12 / On the ground today
6,000+acres restored to date
750M+gallons of water replenished1
~4,800metric tons CO2e2
1 Estimated annual water replenishment based on modeled and calibrated project performance. 2 Average carbon sequestration rates for cropland set aside to native prairie grasses; DOI 10.1890/08-0649.1.
13 / Measurement, reporting, verification
Someone other than us does the measuring.
Outcomes are modelled, measured and verified by third‑party MRV partners. To be exact about what that means: our partners verify outcomes. They do not guarantee a buyer's corporate goals, and verification is not assurance over a company's reporting.
- 01Baseline
Establish the counterfactual for the specific acres: prior land use, yields, soils, slope, drainage.
- 02Model
Project the outcome — volumetric water benefit, nutrient and sediment change, carbon, habitat condition.
- 03Measure
Field and remote monitoring on enrolled acres to calibrate the model against what actually happened.
- 04Verify & report
Third‑party review, then reporting a buyer can take into a water, Scope 3 or nature disclosure.
14 / For market partners
Named deliverables, on named acres.
If your commitments are volumetric water replenishment, Scope 3, or nature and biodiversity targets, the question is not which label this sits under. It is what gets delivered, how it is measured, and on which ground.
What you receive
- A specified outcome — volumetric water benefit, nutrient and sediment reduction, carbon, habitat condition
- Tied to identified acres with a documented baseline
- Modelled, measured and verified by third-party MRV partners
- Reporting shaped for the framework you report under
What this is not
- Not an investment. You are a partner and a customer, not an investor, and there is no return to discuss
- Not a land acquisition — landowners keep ownership and control
- Not a single-attribute product. The same acre can carry water, nature and grass outcomes
- Not regenerative agriculture. This is land conversion to perennial native prairie, which is a different category with different measurement
Where to start
Most conversations begin with a target: a replenishment volume, a sourcing region, a watershed, a reporting year. From there we work backwards to acres and configurations.
Start a conversation15 / Indicative screen
Check your ground.
Answer five questions and we'll show which configurations and which markets are most likely to fit, and send it along with your note. This is an indicative screen, not an offer — a real assessment looks at the parcel.
Your result appears here
Example shown below is for 160 acres of row crop in north Missouri with eroding slopes and a waterway.
16 / Get in touch
Two doors,
one conversation.
Tell us which side you're coming from and roughly what you're working with. Someone from the land team or the markets team will pick it up.
- Landowners & farmers — acres, county, current use, and what you'd consider converting.
- Market partners — the target, the framework you report under, and the region or watershed that matters.
About
An awardee of the USDA Advancing Markets for Producers initiative.
PrairieLink is managed by Roeslein Alternative Energy as a Prairie‑to‑Markets program under a USDA AMP award. For the duration of the award, 65% of program spend goes directly to farmers. Within that constraint the work is to drive down the per‑acre cost of restoration until prairie competes with alternative land uses on its own terms — without cutting the seed mix to get there.
The team combines prairie establishment, agricultural markets, renewable natural gas engineering and applied research. Meet the team →