Do you think you can tell a bison-grazed prairie from a cattle-grazed prairie? I bet you can’t.

Bison can be found in many parts of North America’s Great Plains and Midwest landscapes and I’ve been fortunate enough to visit many of those locations. I also work at and visit a lot of sites grazed by cattle. I’ve photographed all of the above. As a result, I can present today’s visual quiz: Bison or Cattle?

There are 12 photos below. Each was taken at a prairie grazed by either cattle or bison. All the sites were either being grazed when the photo was taken or were grazed the previous year. In addition, all the prairies have been under grazing management for many years. Your task is to guess which photos were taken at bison-grazed sites and which were at cattle-grazed sites. If you want to study a little first, you can read this 10-year-old post I wrote about the differences between cattle and bison.

Good luck!

Well, how do you feel about your guesses? Have you recorded them? It’s cheating if you don’t write or mark them down before you get the answers. Otherwise, how will you prove you were right or wrong?

Now’s your chance to go back through them one more time before I give you the answers.

Ready?

Here we go:

I made this as easy for you as I could by separating the photos into two groups. The first 9 photos (#’s1-9) are all cattle-grazed sites. The last three (#’s 10-12) are in bison-grazed sites.

How did you do?

I’m guessing you found this quiz difficult. It was supposed to be. There are a couple takeaways I hope you’ll get from it.

First, bison and cattle are more similar than they are different when it comes to their grazing. Both favor grasses over forbs (broadleaf plants), but forbs make up a significant part of the diet for both cattle and bison. When all else is equal, bison are a little more selective toward grasses than cattle.

The key phrase in that last paragraph, though, is “when all else is equal”. The stocking rate and grazing system being used have much more to do with the results than the species of grazing animal. Both bison and cattle are extremely picky about their food when they’re given the chance.

If you put them in large pastures at moderate stocking densities (animals per acre), both animals will walk around and choose only the plant species (and parts of each plant) they really want. Those diet choices vary across the season, and even day by day. Under higher stocking densities, both cattle and bison have to be less selective and eat what is available.

A second important point is that both bison and cattle can be used to create a wide range of habitat structure while maintaining high plant diversity. In contrast, both of them can be grazed in ways that degrade habitat quality and plant diversity. It’s up to the land managers to put either animal in situations that lead to positive results.

The final point I want to make is that you should always be cautious about reading too much from photos. Photography is a great way to share what’s happening at a site, but you only see what the photographer wants to show you. It’s really important to keep that in mind – with anyone, including me.

In this post, I was very selective about the photos I used to represent the points I was trying to make. I could have shown you photos from both bison and cattle sites that would make it appear that their grazing was doing awful things to those prairies. Similarly, I could have selected only photos that made grazed prairies look fantastic. I did a little of both in this post because I was trying to trick you and make the quiz difficult – and to support the idea that both bison and cattle can be used effectively (or not) for good prairie management. All of the sites shown in this post are well-managed and in good ecological shape.

If you’ve not worked with either cattle or bison, it’s really hard to describe how fascinating it can be to watch grazing animals interact with a prairie. While I’m pretty good at anticipating general patterns of behavior, I’m surprised all the time about the choices both bison and cattle make. I enjoy that, but I also understand how others might find that slight unpredictability frustrating, or even scary.

Grazing doesn’t make sense in all prairies. However, in sites where it’s feasible and fits with land management objectives, grazing – by either cattle or bison – can be a really flexible and dynamic stewardship tactic. And yes, horses, goats, and sheep can all be used effectively too, depending upon what a manager wants to accomplish and how they set up their grazing schemes.

If you take nothing else from this post, I hope you remember this: the results of grazing treatments, regardless of the grazing animal, are determined mostly by stocking rate and grazing system. A smart land manager constantly evaluates and adapts as they go, regardless of whether grazing is involved or not. When they do, good things can happen with bison, cattle, goats, or even gerbils. Gerbils take pretty specialized fences, though.

I’m not the first to write about how Jujutsu won me over. I’ve seen it off and on, and each time it came across my feed it was bumped a bit higher in my “list of things to look at eventually”. It finally reached the top spot, I think, when I saw Tony Finn’s post and made some time for it that week. I was skeptical; jj is one of many git-but-not-git tools currently and previously on my “list”, and I have kept an open mind but ultimately have always been underwhelmed by such endeavours.

Jujutsu is a version control system. They aim to be independent at some point but for now it is a heady frontend on top of git (a big advantage – all of your existing git repos and tools are trivially compatible with it). Like many other tools in this niche, the jj pitch begins from the thesis that git’s user interface is bad. Every time I’ve heard this pitch, for jj or otherwise, my enthusiasm has rapidly waned. I really like git! I think that its internals are the platonic ideal version control system and its porcelain¹ makes a lot more sense if you grok its internals – though indeed I would agree that the porcelain is far from perfect.

Every not-git VCS I have evaluated over the past few years have soured me by answering the “git’s user interface is bad” premise with “and therefore we should simplify it to the lowest common denominator”, which is to say, “we are taking all of your toys away, power user, for the sake of the noob”. I began to explore Jujutsu expecting to find more of the same. Where jj differs, however, from the other not-gits, is that it begins from “git’s user interface is bad” and follows with “but you, power user, your workflow is the correct way to use git, and our raison d’être is to make it easier.” Wow! Consider me flattered, and intrigued.

As a git power user, I rely heavily on git rebase to edit my git history as I work, frequently squashing and splitting and editing commits as I work, and I used “stacked diffs” without branches before it was cool. jj makes every part of my workflow easier and faster. Enough ink has been spilled presenting jj in depth, so instead I’ll just share with you an anecdote of my “wow” moment with Jujutsu.

One day I was working on a large-ish change. I had written a few commits over the course of the day towards this end. However, I noticed that I had overlooked something in a commit three or four commits earlier. So I touched up the relevant code and then ran jj squash -i -t <commit ID> to squash the changes into the earlier <commit ID>. This command fires up an interface similar to git add -p, which interactively presented me with hunks out of my working directory to choose from. I found the one I wanted, selected it, then dismissed the interactive thingy with a quick keystroke. And it was done!

There are some hidden details in this story that I want to draw your attention to. When I edited this earlier commit, I was in the middle of working on something else and I hadn’t committed or even staged it. I did not run git stash, nor git commit -m"WIP", nor git add, nor git checkout, nor git rebase, at any point. The only command I ran was jj squash.² When it was done, I was returned immediately to where I left off, with a half-written, uncommitted change in my workdir. It took all of two seconds to complete this operation and pick up where I left off.

The “wow” moment came when I realized that I had done this several times that day without finding it particularly remarkable. Jujutsu makes editing history absolutely effortless.

Before I add any further breathless praise for jj, I will note three criticisms.

First, jj lacks any first-class support for the git send-email workflow that I depend on for almost all of the projects I work on. Second, jj lacks a “jj grep” command, and the recommended workaround is Not Good™. I work around both problems by using jj with a co-located git repo at all times, which causes jj and git to share the same repository in the same directory and allows for either git(1) or jj(1) to be used as the need demands.

I would have contributed patches to address these shortcomings if it were not for my third criticism, which addresses the elephant in the room: Jujutsu is a Google employee’s “20% project”, and thus all contributors are required to sign the Google CLA to participate. I refuse to sign any such thing and so should you. I have raised the issue on GitHub but it hasn’t attracted any sort of official response. This stiffly limits my enthusiasm for the project and any kind of collaboration. I would be very excited to work on Jujutsu, and in particular explore some very interesting possibilities regarding integrations with SourceHut and email generally, if it weren’t for this problem.

Nevertheless, I have adopted jj as my daily driver for private use, and if and when the need arises I will maintain some personal patches until the Google problem goes away. Feel free to email me your own patches if you want to share them around but don’t want to sign the CLA, either.