Catching the Snow with Living Snow Fences Foreword
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Minnesota's location near the center of the North American continent removes the state from the tempering influences of the oceans. This location produces the most variable weather and climate in the country. Winter air masses affecting Minnesota often move across great expanses of cold, snow-covered land before reaching the Upper Midwest. During some years, winter storms with moderate to heavy snow are followed by cold, strong winds that blow much of the snow horizontally, producing blizzard conditions. In the worst of these winters, blowing snow drifts across highways, creating dangerous driving conditions, that can get so severe authorities are forced to close sections of highways, even interstates, for extended periods. In many areas, rural township roads are abandoned for the duration of the winter.

The effect of closed highway sections and rural township roads can be devastating. Schools are closed because buses cannot pick up or return students to their homes. Commerce is hindered, creating serious threats to public health and safety. Heavy drifting also damages buildings, kills livestock, and raises farm-operating costs.

Few Upper Midwesterners will forget the enormous snow drifts that piled up during the record winter of 1996-97. Closed roads and driveways, buried houses and outbuildings, plugged drainage ditches (and subsequent spring floods), farmsteads without access to emergency services, stressed and dying livestock, dumped milk, stranded motorists, closed schools and businesses, and nonstop plowing were everyday challenges. Many snow drifting problems occur in the same place year after year, creating huge costs (and higher taxes) for snow removal and lost productivity. On federal, state, and county roads in Minnesota alone, it is estimated that there are 4,000 sites totaling 1,000 miles that need snow drift protection. In addition, there are many communities, farmsteads, and drainage ditches that would benefit from protection from blowing and drifting snow.

Early European settlers to this area planted trees around their farmsteads and along railroads to control blowing snow. Some structural snow fences were also used, mainly by the railroads. But the wisdom of these pioneers was gradually lost as mechanization of farm and snow-removal equipment led to destruction of many windbreaks, creation of larger fields for wind and snow to blow across, and a brute-force approach to snow management on roads. The drought years of 1929-33 also caused severe mortality to existing windbreaks. While the Dust Bowl years prompted major new initiatives that established many hundreds of miles of windbreaks throughout the Great Plains and Midwest, farm consolidation, increasing farm size, and federal farm policies have caused the loss of many of these windbreaks and shelterbelts since the 1960s.

The extremely severe winter of '96-'97 in the Upper Midwest convinced many rural citizens and local and state government officials to return to some of the earlier approaches for managing wind and snow movement. Other states in the Great Plains, including Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska, came to this same realization several years ago and have made significant strides in developing effective living snow fence designs and techniques. In Nebraska, a living snow fence program was started at a local natural resource district in 1975. Local, state, and federal organizations worked cooperatively to produce several very impressive fences. Using Nebraska's model, a living snow fence effort was launched in Colorado in 1982. To overcome a lack of funding, a cooperative program was forged where everyone involved contributed a relatively small amount to a "common pot" from which plantings could be established and maintained. Response was so positive that by spring 1989 almost 150 plantings were in the ground with an average length of one-quarter mile per planting. Wyoming's living snow fence program began with two demonstration plantings in 1983. By fall of 1997 state and federal agencies, in cooperation with soil and water conservation districts, private industry, and private landowners, had established an additional 202 plantings.

The common thread throughout all these programs is that they bring together personnel from various government agencies and individual landowners in a cooperative effort. Each has a specific responsibility and input into the program. Establishment of direct lines of communication and viable working relationships was the lifeblood that enabled the programs to get started.

This guidebook is intended to provide information necessary for the proper design, installation, and maintenance of living snow fences and community shelterbelts in Minnesota. The Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT) estimates there are approximately 4,000 snow drifting problem sites in Minnesota, totaling approximately 1,000 miles in length, on federal, county, and state highways that could be improved with living snow fences or other techniques. Living snow fences are a low-cost solution to prevent problems from drifting snow. Strategically placed and properly designed, these living barriers trap snow as it blows across fields, piling it up before it reaches a road, waterway, farmstead, or community. There are undoubtedly several thousand additional sites on township roads, railroads, and drainage ditches and within municipalities that would benefit from installation of living snow fences.

Produced by Communication and Educational Technology Services, University of Minnesota Extension.

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