The Case for Hedgerows and a Living Snow Fences Program

Whether they are known as hedgerows, shelter belts, living fences, or windbreaks, people have encouraged, planted, and cultivated woody edges around fields since ancient times. In Roman Europe, for example, hedgerows were used to form defensive barriers around fields and to keep animals contained in pastures. Thus, they delineated property holdings, which became increasingly useful as the use of common lands for pasture gave way to individual ownership.

This is not a uniquely European agricultural technique. The benefits of vegetated edges around fields are numerous, and people around the world have always been adept at taking advantage of that. For example, in pre-Hispanic Mexico, plants like maguey, nopal, and fruit trees were used to create hedgerows that had immediate utility as property borders, windbreaks, and for retaining livestock. Traditional farming has typically included some form of living fences, wherever we go in the world. Similar practices have been documented in Africa and Asia, with more or less emphasis on controlling the movement of people, as well.

In many cases the value of hedgerows has been so clear that farmers naturally established them, without other incentive. Governments have stepped in from time to time to create additional encouragement. For instance, after significant losses of soil to wind erosion, the Canadian government established a shelterbelt management program that helped many landowners create windbreaks around their farmsteads. In Europe, the incentive has sometimes come in the form of regulation such as in the United Kingdom where the Hedgerows Regulations 1997 provides some protection for hedgerows, especially those over 30 years old.

Time changes things. While at one time the value of vegetated fields edges as a windbreak to protect tilled soil was reason enough to justify a hedgerow, now, with modern low-impact tillage, wind erosion is sometimes not as much of a problem. On the other hand, very large agricultural machinery can make it time-consuming to steer equipment around intricate field boundaries. The relative, direct benefit of hedgerows to individual farmers is declining, especially in areas where the retention of soil moisture is not a great concern, and on farms where no one is trying to make a home. Accordingly, we are losing hedgerows, around the world.

Society often has to wrestle with situations in which the benefit to the community is larger than the perceived benefit to the individual. In the case of hedgerows, the public can have a wide variety of gains that may not mean much to the individual landowner.

What are the wider benefits of keeping vegetation on field borders? How can these patches of woody growth be good for the community and the environment? Let us attempt a tabulation of the main benefits of hedgerows.

For our purposes we can group the discussion into three main areas – benefits to society, to the landowner, and to the environment – as shown in Table 1.

Hedgerows have been closely studied around the world. Techniques are well-documented for the establishment of natural hedgerows—as well as very formal ones—and the benefits to society of hedgerows are well established. There is also solid research on trends and the news there is not good; time and again, studies have shown that field edges are being cleared, fields themselves are getting larger, and we are losing these living fences, almost everywhere they occur.

For Rural Woodlands Ottawa this is a puzzle we have faced before. We can demonstrate that there is an overwhelming value to society from some aspect of land use, whether that is the retention of hedgerows, or of forest cover generally, or the sequestration of carbon. Yet the land we are talking about is usually in private hands. Private landowners have the right to make their own decisions, and no one should fault them for making their decisions on economic grounds. That is where society and the individual can see things differently. The economic benefits to society from hedgerows (or forests, or dealing with carbon responsibly) is enormous. The economic picture for the individual landowner can be the opposite.

Sometimes society just imposes on the individual to address such a lack of balance. Governments can make regulations or levy taxes. Regulations have been tried a few times for the protection of hedgerows. When such a scheme surfaced recently in an Ontario municipality the landowners raised an alarm about how it could threaten their farming practices, and the idea was dropped. Rural Woodlands feels that society has to shoulder the costs for societal benefits, so we are not interested in measures that work only as disincentives aimed at shifting responsibility to individual owners.

The loss of hedgerows is serious, but we need the time and political support to move the conservation from disincentive to incentive. At the present time in Ottawa the road department faces significant expenses in trying to reduce winds in transportation corridors that have frequent blizzard conditions. They pay willing landowners to allow the placement of traditional slat snow fences. They also pay some landowners to leave some rows of corn stalks standing after harvest, to catch drifting snow. The program is expensive and it is not entirely successful – not every farmer is interested in what is offered and on windy days the City is left with extremely dangerous driving conditions and lots of drifting snow on some stretches of road.

One of the initiatives Rural Woodlands is exploring with the City of Ottawa and local conservation authorities is the establishment of a Living Snow Fence pilot project in rural wards in Ottawa.

This would develop some demonstration projects that will bring vegetated field margins back into a positive light, for the City, and for the participating landowners. The idea at its base is simply to pay the landowner to allow the establishment of a hedgerow to protect the road from storms. We have been calling this project Living Snow Fences, but the idea goes beyond that. We need to target all the benefits that can accrue, from pollution abatement to erosion control, from the provision of habitat for pollinators to the aesthetics of the landscape. We are confident that after a few years these demonstrations would be far more successful and less expensive than the current snow fencing work.

Living Snow Fences may help us establish some hedgerows but overall the situation is serious. We are losing these corridors of woody habitat just as we are losing the larger woodlands themselves. While the City has established goals for the retention of forested habitat, the forest management decisions for rural Ottawa will of course be made at the private property level. Without clear thinking about positive incentives for landowners the economics continue to favour clearing for development, for bigger farms, and for other uses.

We will not abandon the goal of widespread forested lands, with interconnecting hedgerows and thriving biodiversity, for rural Ottawa. We know we may have to advance this vision one small step at a time but we will continue. If we can see some hedgerows established as Living Snow Fences we will feel that some progress is being made.

Rural Woodlands Ottawa is a volunteer group dedicated to preserving healthy woodlands in a diverse landscape with woodlots, wetlands, hedgerows and natural open areas. We work with the City of Ottawa, conservation authorities and various other environmental groups to raise awareness and take action to preserve and enhance our rural woodlands.