(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-16
Earthwise is a regular feature on my local public radio station, WAMC. They recently had a story on restoring hedgerows in England.
Hedgerows are lines of different types of bushes and small trees growing very close together typically placed between fields or along the sides of roads in the countryside. The network of hedges throughout rural England dates back to the Bronze Age, or even possibly Neolithic times. As the first farmers began clearing areas of land for cultivation, they left strips of trees as boundaries. Hedgerows act as field boundaries but also protect livestock, support biodiversity, and help mitigate climate change.
There are thousands of miles of hedgerows in England; attention is now being given to restoring and maintaining them. Read the whole thing — or listen at the link.
Big Ag likes wide fields and planting right up to the fence line, maximizing crop yield — at the expense of biodiversity and wildlife habitat. Hedgerows and large-scale industrial style farming are not exactly a natural fit.
Properly cared for with periodic trimming, a hedgerow can be a self-sustaining fence that doesn’t need to be painted or replaced. It can provide a refuge for native plants, habitat for birds, small mammals, reptiles, etc. It can serve as a windbreak, and help mitigate the effects of flooding and runoff. It can also help by storing up carbon.
To the best of my knowledge, hedgerows were never a big deal in America because the emphasis here was on driving out the original inhabitants and clearing as much land as possible.
And how about range wars between ranchers wanting wide-open spaces for grazing cattle versus farmers and barbed wire, as seen in so many Westerns? Hedgerows would not have been practical back then, especially amid the largely treeless expanse of the prairies.
That’s not to say there aren’t places in America where hedgerows might be a viable part of making agriculture more sustainable.
What’s happening in England is a useful reminder that not every measure that that can help adapt to changing climate needs to be high-tech.
One of the things that needs more attention in America is work on restoring native prairie ecosystems - because all those corn, soybean, and wheat fields in the plains states are going to be in real trouble once the Ogallala Aquifer gets pumped dry.
Native prairie vegetation is adapted to drought resistance and is tolerant of fire to the point where prairies actually do better with periodic burns. In a hotter and drier world, that natural resilience combined with intelligent management is one of the strategies we need to pursue — especially if a lot of Midwest farms become non-viable. We’re going to see the return of the Dust Bowl if we just leave the land to dried up crop fields.
Climate refugees are going to be a major issue in America going forward. California already had a housing crisis — how many people are going to move instead of trying to rebuild after the fires we are now seeing? Sea level rise along the coast, disappearing groundwater in the heartland, bigger and badder storms…
Along with everything else we’ll need to do, working with instead of against natural systems is the way to go.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/16/2297246/-If-there-s-a-bustle-in-your-hedgerow-don-t-be-alarmed-now?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
