Funding for living snow fences to be made available through Perth County stewardship program

To improve safety on county roads in the winter, Perth County will fully fund the planting of living snow fences on private properties through its annual stewardship program.

Though some of the details still need to be worked out by staff and reviewed by councillors, county council approved the new funding stream in principle at its June 5 meeting. According to county resiliency and stewardship coordinator Hannah Cann, encouraging local farmers and landowners to plant living snow fences along road-facing sections of their properties can have a number of benefits.

“Living snow fences are rows of trees, shrubs or standing crop oriented in a strip parallel to the roadway with the primary purpose of reducing snow drifting and visibility concerns during winter months,” Cann said. “There are several other benefits of living snow fences including lowering operational expenses related to treatment materials like sand and salt. Other benefits of living snow fences include increased safety for the road user and meeting several goals within our county and local agencies including addressing winter hazards.”

Living snow fences also have environmental benefits including increasing biodiversity by adding new habitat for pollinator species, thereby potentially improving crop production, improving soil conservation through the natural stabilization of soil by the trees or shrubs’ root systems and increasing carbon sequestration.

The county’s public works department maintains an inventory of areas within the county road network that are more susceptible to drifting and blowing snow conditions. Most of the roads are oriented in the north-south direction and experience northwesterly winds, which often carry lake-effect snow from Lake Huron. However, other roads of concern oriented on more of an east-west tangent also experience drifting under certain conditions. Wind direction and wind speed can vary considerably during winter storms, so drifting and blowing snow can occur in any area.

The general best practice for placement of living snow fencing is 35 metres from the road edge. This distance provides a sufficient offset from the travelled portion of the road to allow for snow to accumulate as it falls. For many county roads, and most local municipal roads, this offset is beyond the limits of the public road allowance and falls on adjacent private property, necessitating the need to work with and incentivize private landowners to plant these snow fences.

According to Cann, living snow fences can take some time to grow; they can offer some protective benefit within about five years, with full benefits between eight and 10 years after planting.

“I think this is a great program. I’ve been hoping to see something like this for a number of years now,” Coun. Matt Duncan said. “ … It’s going to take buy-in, there’s no doubt about it, but when we allocate tax dollars to this, this is a benefit to everybody that lives here. It’s not just a benefit to that landowner; it’s a benefit to everyone who drives down that road and I think this is a really good allocation of tax dollars to try and make our roads safer through natural means.

“I received a number of communications this year, definitely about (Perth Line) 86, about drifting snow over the winter and I think the more these living snow fences we can put up along our county and municipal roads, it’s going to save a lot of winter maintenance and possible accidents in the future.”

According to Cann’s report to council, the county’s agriculture working group recommended Perth County implement a funding stream specific to living snow fences under the stewardship program and that successful applications made to that funding stream be fully funded to cover the cost for the planting and maintenance of a treed living snow fence under a 20-year agreement with the landowner. In doing so, Cann said the landowner is incentivized to plant this type of wind break while the respective municipality receives the future benefit of mitigating drifting hazards on the adjacent county or local road.

Other county councillors, however, were left with questions they wanted answers to before this funding stream opens for applications. Those questions included what would happen if a property with a living snow fence changed ownership during the 20-year agreement with the county; whether farmers would be compensated for the loss of productive farmland; how the snow fence would affect access for large equipment to the farmland between the snow fence and the roadway; and who would be responsible for replacing snow-fence trees if they were to die.

While the next application-intake period for the 2025 stewardship program is set to open on July 2, council voted to have staff bring back more details about the 20-year agreement at its July 3 meeting, during which councillors will review those details, make any changes and approve the agreement before staff begin accepting applications for that particular funding stream.

During this discussion, councillors also asked John McClelland, the county’s executive director of public works, whether staff was also looking at asking farmers to leave up some of their crops to serve as living snow fences through the winter. McClelland said staff are looking into that this year and noted it would require a strip of roughly 12 rows of corn located 35 metres back from the road to serve as an effective snow fence.

McClelland said the county would likely need to compensate farmers for leaving those crops unharvested through the winter and said he’d bring a report back to council later in the year with more information.