Those landing at Dayton International Airport next year will descend from the spacious skies into the fruited plains. Thanks to aviation director Terrence Slaybaugh’s groundbreaking prairie grass program, they’ll be greeted by songbirds, wildflowers, and shoulder-high grass instead of the typical turf.

Dayton International isn’t doing it for the views. In an effort to make the airport greener, less expensive to maintain, and safer from bird strikes, the airport is turning nearly 300 acres of airport land into native prairie grasses. If a three-year trial proves environmentally and economically effective, 800 more acres may follow.

Slaybaugh has a background in urban and environmental studies. When he took the director’s chair in 2011, he immediately began looking for ways to make the airport more sustainable, applying for federal grants and rekindling a long-dormant relationship with the nearby Aullwood Audubon Society. “Frankly, we were very poor stewards of our property before this project,” Slaybaugh says. By returning swaths of airport land to their natural state, he hopes to ensure the airport’s economic and environmental future—to move forward by looking backwards.

According to Charity Krueger, Aullwood Audubon’s executive director, “prairies once covered 3% of Ohio.” That number is shrinking fast. The disappearance of the state’s prairies is detrimental to the its environmental health: the grasslands are great at detoxifying soil, retaining water runoff, and absorbing carbon, but about 95% of them have been replaced by farmland, urban development, and other CO 2 -spewers. Dayton International was part of the problem—in the 1990s, they leased about 1,200 of their spare acres to a farmer, who turned them into soybean and corn crops.

By turning hundreds of these acres back into prairie, Slaybaugh aims to mitigate the airport’s environmental impact. As part of a recent sustainability initiative, Dayton International Airport compared the potential carbon footprint of different land uses and found that rewilding would put them in the black: for every acre they switched from farmland to prairie grass, they would eliminate about 66 tons of greenhouse gas production. Add that to investments in alternative energy and green building materials, and Slaybaugh hopes the whole property will soon be “more sustainable and more resilient.”