Field shelterbelts were never the right solution

Sometime in the mid to late 80s when drought, soil erosion and terrible grain farm economics were plaguing the sector, I recall a Save our Soils meeting in my hometown.

A portable sign was employed to advertise the meeting, but someone rearranged the letters to spell “Save our Souls.” That actually captured the sentiment at the time as it was a dismal feeling to watch the soil erosion and be so helpless to stop it.

The government response was to support various practices in an effort to stop soil from blowing away and that was the gist of the meeting. One of the initiatives at the time was a small subsidy to plant shelterbelts. Trees were already free from the PFRA Tree Nursery at Indian Head, but the money was meant to help with planting and maintenance costs.

Many shelterbelts, often with the extremely hardy, but not particularly attractive caragana trees, were planted in the 80s. Many had been planted years before that. In my farmyard, the oldest caragana rows are probably more than 80 years old.

Caragana trees do eventually get old and die, but they seem to continually regrow from the base. Spray drift never seems to faze them and they’re actually a legume that fixes nitrogen.

Today, many of the field shelterbelts in the southern grain belt are being removed even though removal takes a lot more effort than planting did in the first place. With the value of hindsight, we now know that shelterbelts were a mere band-aid in the widespread wind erosion crisis. We could never plant enough trees to make much of a dent in the problem.

The true savior was direct seeding and reduced tillage made possible by equipment advancements and a dramatic decline in the price for glyphosate herbicide.

But why remove existing shelterbelts when they’re already in place?

Equipment has become larger than anyone would have imagined back in the 80s. In many cases, shelterbelts are so close to the road that seeding and spraying equipment can’t even make a single pass. Away from the road, the tree rows create narrow fields that can cause a great deal of equipment overlap. The larger you can make a field, the more efficiently it can be farmed.

Talking recently to a neighbour, another problem was highlighted that I had never thought about. While the tree rows are generally quite straight, they weren’t planted with the benefit of GPS so they aren’t always square to the field edge and that creates even more inefficiencies.

While shelterbelts provide wildlife habitat, they also harbour crop pests. Last year in the drought regions, voracious grasshoppers often ate the leaves off caragana trees before laying their eggs. This year, crop damage from emerging grasshoppers is coming from underneath the shelterbelts.

Local communities and shelterbelt champions typically decry the removal of trees and it certainly does change the appearance of the landscape. But if they are actually as beneficial as some people claim, how come no one is showing much interest in establishing new shelterbelts?

It was a huge mistake when the former Conservative government closed down the PFRA Tree Nursery at Indian Head. Even if field shelterbelts are a concept of the past, there are many other excellent uses for trees in the landscape.

However, we shouldn’t vilify farmers who invest the time, effort and money to remove shelterbelts. Making field operations more efficient is also an environmental benefit.