Prairie Province Farmers Destroying Shelterbelts, Though They Hold Moisture Even In Worst Droughts

[hatrack]

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This can be a hard sell to a farmer who is fed up with miscalculating and yet again hooking a seeder into the bush. Many shelterbelts were planted decades ago when equipment was much smaller. With today’s larger equipment, they can really get in the way. At harvest time, shade from shelterbelts can delay drying of swaths. Irritations such as these convince many farmers to get rid of the pesky trees.

Shathi Akhter is an agroecosystems scientist with Agriculture Canada at Indian Head, Sask. She cited information that shows, of the more than 51,000 kilometres of shelterbelts within Saskatchewan, 2,490 km were lost in the eight years between 2008 and 2016 — a five per cent drop. Before firing up the dozer, Laroque urges farmers to take a lesson from the past season, and from previous generations. He and his team have spent more than 10 years gathering data for a shelterbelt evaluation and planning tool from farms across Saskatchewan.

The conversations are telling. While younger farmers can be ambivalent about shelterbelts, the long-term view of their parents and grandparents is much different. “Older people would always say, ‘Keep the trees. Keep those trees. You don’t realize what they’re doing,’” Laroque said. “When you’re looking back on a lifetime, (you can see) they’re helping.”

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Trees have value, but it’s not something you can compare apples-to-apples with an annual cash crop. But in a drought year, their value is readily apparent. Laroque said trees catch winter snows, slow down drying winds and protect crops from the worst of the summer sun. “What we’ve measured, there’s a really good moisture content in the soil to about three heights of your shelterbelt. So if the shelterbelt is 10 metres high, it buffers 30 metres in either direction.” Walk out into a crop at the end of a drought year, he said, and you will see the crop is higher and headed out more near the shelterbelts. Test the soil and it will be healthier near the trees, with more organic matter. “One of the things those shelterbelts are doing, whether you realize it or not, is they are improving the soil,” Laroque said.

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https://www.producer.com/news/trees-drought-and-climate-change/

[DURHAM D]

1. Shelterbelt - not a word you hear every day.

Made me smile. Also, it caused me to think about my grandfather. The WPA shelterbelt project was the one thing that he thought FDR got right. In the 80s when farmers started removing them in order to plant a couple more acres of wheat he would go crazy. He thought it was the worst thing those young farmers could do. He was right.