Expansion for 'living snow fences' sought in rural areas

Gibbon site

illustrates benefit of program

By FRITZ BUSCH

Journal Staff Writer

GIBBON -- Gibbon Mayor Floyd Kent remembers how high the snow can drift at the intersection of State Highway 19 and Sibley County Road 2.

Last winter, he got a call stranded motorists call from a couple with a small child that were unable to drive west of Gibbon.

He told them the community center was always open and that people in town voluntarily open up their homes to stranded motorists. At times, Gibbon has been snowed in for three days, Kent said.

He has pictures of his daughter standing on top of drifts in the 1965 winter. The drifts reached a street light that was located at the Highway 19 and County Road 2 intersection.

Thanks to the expanding Living Snow Fence Program, future snow storms may not pile snow as high in Gibbon.

Living snow fences include plants like dogwood and lilacs that trap snow 150-300 feet from highways. The program pays farmers and landowners for designating part of their land for living snow fences under the Conservation Reserve Program that was part of the 2002 Farm Bill.

Kent voiced support for the program.

"It's so pleasing to see different government departments working together," he said. "It's a good use of tax money."

On Tuesday, farmers, landowners, living snow fence practitioners and government representatives celebrated program expansion and governmental partnerships at a two-year-old, 10-acre living snow fence site just west of Immanuel Lutheran School in Gibbon. Most living snow fences contain 1.5 acres and are a quarter-mile long and 50 feet wide.

The Gibbon snow fence site has an average daily traffic count of 2,700 people. If Highway 19 were closed for just 12 hours each year, that could affect more than 1,000 people.

Other living snow fence sites along Highway 19 near Gibbon are on the Joan Eckert property on the east edge of town and on the Chris Guggisberg property between Gibbon and Winthrop.

Farmers and rural landowners in the program will be paid an inconvenience payment, .20 per lineal foot per year for the property and half of the CRP land rental rate.

The Minnesota Highway Department is identifying problem sections in state highways that are frequently closed due to blowing and drifting snow. The department's goal is to work with public and private partners and encourage landowners to plant living snow fences at 500 problem drifting sites on 12,000 miles of Minnesota highways through county work groups.

A new agreement links the Minnesota Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency and Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Minnesota Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts.

Farmers can now receive payments under the Conservation Reserve Program and support from the Minnesota Department of Transportation for living snow fences that save lives, money and time by keeping highways open, Mn/DOT Commissioner Elwyn Tinklenberg said.

"Besides being aesthetically pleasing, they are an environmentally sound solution for making transportation safer and more efficient during Minnesota winters," Tinklenberg said. "Aggressive efforts should be made in this program to help prevent traffic deaths. Six hundred people died on Minnesota highways last year. We're on pace for 800 traffic deaths this year."

Closed roads mean reduced visibility, white-out conditions, farmsteads without access to emergency services, travel delays, dumped milk, stranded motorists and closed schools.

The cost of having to close Minnesota's transportation corridors during a 24-hour period are $118 million in non-recoverable money, $66 million in lost wages and salaries, $27 million in retail sales, $17 million in federal taxes and $8 million in state and local taxes. (Data was compiled at the April 1999 North American Snow Conference.)

Routine maintenance activities for living snow fences are scouting (assessing plant condition), controlling noxious weeds, mowing, re-anchoring landscape fabric, replanting and watering.

For more information, visit: www.livingsnowfence.dot.state.mn.us.