When you drive across the Canadian prairies, you'll soon notice that most farmyards are surrounded by trees. This isn't an accident. For 111 years, the Canadian government operated a prairie agroforestry program to support homesteading, control erosion, and enhance agricultural production. Over its lifetime the Prairie Shelterbelt Program (its final name) gave away 175 million trees, free of charge, to Canadian farmers in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. It changed the face of the prairies.
Growing up in Saskatchewan, I was familiar with shelterbelts. Some farms, particularly in the south of the province, had fields bordered by long hedgerows. Almost every farm had a rectangular box of trees surrounding its farmhouse, barns, and equipment sheds. I never questioned this: it's just how farms were.
Trees Against the Wind explains. The Indian Head Forestry Nursery Station (and later the Saskatoon Forestry Farm) were founded by Norman Ross, who oversaw a research program that identified the best trees for planting on the prairies and established the horticultural techniques needed to successfully grow them. Ross also created a nursery program that grew millions of trees annually, devised shipping techniques for seedlings that ensured the trees reached farmers alive (even in the days when they were transported by train and horse cart), and created an outreach/extension program to mentor farmers in tree husbandry so that most shelterbelt trees survived and thrived. He also publicized and promoted the tree planting program and cultivated the political support that saved it from budget cuts more than once. He also also never hired anyone with a non-British background to a responsible position on his team, and was known for being a bit of a martinet -- and didn't earn enough money to send his only son to University.
Other things I learnt by reading this book:
- Carragana hedges are ubiquitous in the oldest parts of Saskatoon, so I've always known about carragana. As it turns out, carragana shrubs are originally from Siberia, and were the single hardiest tree produced by the shelterbelt program. During the severe drought of the Great Depression, the program focused on growing and distributing carragana because it was the plant most likely to survive.
- The Forestry Farm Park in Saskatoon -- d'uh!-- was originally a secondary tree plantation that was founded to expand production for the shelterbelt program. It operated as a tree farm until 1966, when operations ceased and it was transferred to the City of Saskatoon. The main park area you visit today was conceived as a 'demonstration project' to show farmers what they could achieve by planting on their farms.
- The shelterbelt program originally focused on foresting farmyards. Most of the prairies (especially the southern prairies) were flat and featureless. By creating a treed farmyard, famers could not only shelter their homes from the ceaseless winds, they could capture snow over the winter, and create a tiny oasis where they could grow food plants (fruit trees and vegetables) that would otherwise not survive. In the early years of the program, homesteads with farmyard shelterbelts were much more likely to remain occupied, because they made the farm much more hospitable for farm families.
- The husbandry techniques identified by the program meant that most trees could survive without watering, even in their early stages. The techniques included soil preparation, the depth of planting, tree spacing, the mix of species used, and frequent weeding/inter-row cultivation during the seedlings' first three years.
