New Era in Vegetation Management
New techniques save money and reduce chemical use.
Some may think of vegetation management as an unchanging field: Highway crews, utility employees, and landscapers simply fire up the mowers and spray the strongest herbicides to clear excess weeds, grass, and brush from the sides of roads, rights of way, and housing developments.
Todd Horton, though, knows better. As technical specialist for the vegetation management group of BASF, he’s worked in the vegetation control business for more than a decade. He’s seen big changes in the vegetation management programs of both public and private entities—changes for the better.
“If you look back in time and see how things have progressed, you’ll see that utility companies, say, are more environmentally conscious,” Horton says. “There weren’t a whole lot of environmental concerns way back when. Utilities are now doing a good job of addressing the concerns of landowners along their lines. They’ve tried really hard in the customer-satisfaction area to address people’s concerns. And a lot of those landowners are interested in alternative means of vegetation management. They are concerned about their land, and you can’t blame them for that.”
Horton’s theory is backed by the actions of forest department officials, highway crews, and utility managers across the country who are turning to everything from plant-growth regulators and environmentally friendly basal treatments to grass-hungry goats to solve their vegetation management problems.
We took a close look at several unique vegetation management programs currently in operation. You’ll be surprised at some of the innovative ways in which public and private entities are handling their vegetation issues, and you just might learn some new tricks.
Attacking Vegetation Naturally
Limited by budget cuts, governmental bodies have been forced to turn toward innovative means to control vegetation. Nowhere is this more evident than at the Tonto National Forest in central Arizona. Here at the fifth-largest forest in the United States, one that occupies nearly 3 million acres of land, the latest vegetation management program involves a decidedly old-fashioned tool: goats.
The Payson Wildland Urban Interface Goat Project may have a fancy name, but there’s nothing particularly fancy about the way rangers at the Tonto National Forest’s Payson District are relying on goats to help control vegetation that is highly susceptible to forest fires.
The plan is simple: Goats munch away at enough chaparral and other brush vegetation on a section of forest covering 1,400 to 1,600 acres to significantly reduce the threat of wildfires. The project is also a way for forest officials to help protect nearby Payson, a town located 90 miles north of Phoenix and surrounded by national forestland.
“Since about 2000 we’ve had a real priority to protect these little communities that are entirely within the national forest from wildfire,” says Patti Fenner, noxious weed program manager at Tonto and president of the Southwest Vegetation Management Association. “The goats are just one way of doing this. When the goats eat a fire line it keeps the growth that comes back fresh and green so that fire will have a harder time going through there and into town.”
The project is especially important today as drought conditions have hit much of the western United States since 1996, increasing the threat of fire at Tonto and other national forests.
Aspects of the program sound downright quaint: Forest officials have set up holding pens for the goats to live in overnight. Goat herders are allowed to camp on forestlands while the goat project is running.
The goat project may sound unusual, but it’s actually not the first time that forest officials in the United States have turned to the grass-hungry animals to help manage vegetation. Since April 2003 about 650 goats have grazed Arizona’s Prescott National Forest near the community of Ponderosa Park. Officials at that forest are also relying on the goats to reduce the threat of wildfires.
It’s no secret why rangers with the Payson District are following suit: Relying on goats and other livestock to help manage vegetation will save officials at Tonto money. In a feature story in the Payson Roundup—the town’s local newspaper—John Brock, a professor of ecological restoration at Arizona State University–East, said that goats cost only $173 an acre to clear brush. Other methods can cost as much as $450 an acre. At the same time, goats will have a relatively low impact on the area compared to other methods of controlling vegetation.
Despite these benefits, the goats won’t be the only option Payson District rangers rely on for vegetation management. The rangers will also turn to such traditional measures as prescribed burns. Such burns, of course, come with their own concerns: There is always the risk of fire escaping or releasing pollutants into the area. That’s why Payson officials are so excited about the goat project.
Before allowing the goats to roam the Payson District, though, forest officials first had to decide whether the animals would cause any erosion problems. Erosion is a serious issue at Tonto; the forest was first established to protect the region’s watershed. Low desert areas, such as the Tonto forest, naturally have low ground cover. If much of that ground cover is lost, the forest’s soils will erode. Fortunately, the goats are expected to cause no erosion problems.
“Tonto is fortunate to have a lot of prehistoric cultural sights,” Fenner notes. “We had to consider whether this project would cause erosion around those sights. The goats, though, while controlling the brush, don’t hurt the roots of the brush. They are not killing the brush by eating it, just trimming it back. The roots are still alive. So there is then little impact on erosion.”
Fenner says the goat project is just one example of the more innovative projects that vegetation management pros are now turning to. “With funding levels the way they are these days, you really do have to be innovative,” she says. “This was just a really economical way to handle the vegetation here.”
An Outdoor Classroom
The Purdue Research and Restoration Management Project can be considered a very big, very diverse outdoor laboratory. For utility managers, highway department officials, and developers, though, the site—265 acres located in West Lafayette, IN—is more like the ultimate testing center. It provides them with the opportunity to study different ways to manage vegetation, all without having to run, or pay for, the experiments on their own.
For nearly four years, the project, run at the Purdue Wildlife Area under the guidance of Purdue University’s Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, has provided working examples for those who not only need to control or eliminate invasive species on their grounds or in public rights of way but also want to add native grasses and plants to these same areas.
Zach Lowe, a graduate student at the university and project manager for the research project, says that more than 200 utility managers, highway department officials, employees of departments of natural resources, and others concerned with vegetation management have attended the open houses held at the Wildlife Area, which is located about 12 miles west of Purdue University. These attendees not only learn specific techniques that might help them control vegetation along their rights of way; they also discover just how common the problems they face are.
“We get such a wide variety of people in here,” Lowe says. “It’s kind of neat to show these people that their problems aren’t necessarily unique. They can then share a lot of ideas with each other once they get on the same page when it comes to vegetation management. They can bounce different ideas off each other and come up with some truly unique and effective solutions.”
The project’s more than 250 acres are made up of plots laid out side by side, each plot containing an example of a different type of vegetation management. Some may show examples of specific herbicides, others different spraying techniques, and still others a variety of techniques for controlling invasive species during their dormant seasons.
“That provides a visual for them,” Lowe explains. “If they are doing nothing but mowing now, some of the techniques we have to show them may be more effective, and they may, then, reduce the amount of time they spend out on the road. When you are doing some vegetation management that incorporates herbicides, your return time on an area is extended. Instead of every couple of months, you may not have to return to that area for a year or two. You may use a woody-stem control that gets rid of brush or invasive species in an area, or you may use a plant-growth regulator that might keep problem vegetation at bay for a year or more.”
Not all the techniques on display in the research project’s plots are new, Lowe says. Many plots demonstrate old techniques combined with new herbicide chemistry.
Visitors to the plots are especially interested in the dormant-season work Purdue researchers have done, Lowe says. Such work is appealing because highway officials, utility managers, and others don’t have to worry about harming spring plants when they concentrate their spraying and other vegetation management techniques in the dormant season.
Working the dormant season also has another benefit: Highway departments, utilities, departments of natural resources, and other bodies can continue to employ their spray crews for a longer season. These crews can then get into areas that they can’t access as well during the growing season.
One particularly interesting project involves dormant-season stem work. Under this technique, crews during the winter treat brush and other vegetation almost as if it has its spring leaves. Purdue researchers combine an oil-based herbicide with an oil carrier. Researchers add to that mix of anywhere from 5 to 9 gallons up to 100 gallons of water, resulting in a solution that, although it contains tiny oil capsules of herbicide, is made mostly of water. Crews can spray a large volume of the mixture on dormant vegetation while actually hitting the area with a low amount of active ingredient, guaranteeing wider coverage of the stems, buds, and other growing parts of the treated plants.
The water from the application eventually evaporates, releasing the oil into the plants’ bark. In spring, thanks to photosynthesis, those herbicides are pulled through the bark and begin working on the plants.
While an interesting experiment, this process is just one of the many shown off in Purdue’s plots. The plots even include examples of treatments that haven’t worked.
“We do a lot of research on the efficacy of different techniques on invasives,” Lowe says. “People can look at our plots and see what’s worked and hasn’t worked for us. They can look at a plot and say, ‘We should be using this exact mixture.’ Knowing that is an improvement over just knowing you should be using a certain type of herbicide. It’s important, too, to show people the wrong way to do something. That’s why we have plots out there that are noticeable failures. You need to show people why it doesn’t work. That side-by-side comparison is very important.”
Saving Money, Boosting Customer Service
Bob Moseley hates power outages. That’s no surprise, seeing as Moseley is director of operations for Clark Electric Cooperative, a nonprofit, member-owned electric utility based in Clark County in north-central Wisconsin.
What is surprising, though, is that Moseley, with the help of some aggressive vegetation management, was able to do something about those outages he hates so much. A decade ago Clark Electric hired Menomonie, WI–based 4 Control Inc., a vegetation management company, to control the unruly vegetation that had grown alongside the 1,800 miles of electric lines the utility runs through Clark, Taylor, Marathon, Wood, Jackson, and Chippewa counties. The reason for this? Most power outages are caused by fallen trees and branches that snap power lines. By controlling the amount of trees and vegetation surrounding Clark Electric’s power lines, the utility has reduced the amount of tree-caused power outages by 65%, Moseley says.
“The important part about that is continuity of service,” he notes. “It’s all about providing good service for the members of our cooperative. There are cost savings, too, of course, when you don’t have outages. But the main goal for us is to provide reliable service. This program has helped us do that.”
It’s also helped Clark Electric save money in other ways. Before 4 Control began its vegetation management program, Clark Electric paid about $150 a mile to control the box elder, oak, maple, elm, and ash trees that constantly threatened its power lines. Today the utility pays just $35 a mile to do this, largely because 4 Control employees now rely only on low-cost basal treatments to control the vegetation around the power lines.
“We really are happy with the program,” Moseley says. “We were always hoping to get to the point where we could reduce the amount of herbicides and pesticides we needed for brush control. The real surprise is that our stem counts have gotten to the point where about 90% of our application is done by basal treatment. I didn’t expect to get to that point. I thought we’d still be doing foliar applications. Now most of our rights of way along wooded areas are nice, grassy rights of way. It’s good for the habitat and pleasing to the eye.”
Reaching this level was not easy. 4 Control spent the first three years of the Clark Electric project using a foliar application to get the vegetation under control. The biggest problem was that the vegetation in some areas was incredibly thick. To get at it all, crew members would have to sometimes spray herbicides as far back as 45 feet off the road.
Crew members, though, couldn’t do this in one application. The first time treating an area, for example, crew members might only be able to spray their herbicides 20 feet off the road. When they returned the following year, they might be able to spray 35 feet off the road. Finally, the third time around, crews could spray all 45 feet off the road.
Crew members from 4 Control also faced another challenge: They had to please the neighbors living near Clark Electric’s power lines. Many of these neighbors happened to be organic farmers who wanted nothing to do with pesticides. Others were residents who worried that pesticides would harm the apple trees on their properties. The company worked around these requests, not spraying where pesticides weren’t wanted.
The no-spray requests, though, haven’t hurt the overall project. In fact, the vegetation management program has been so successful, the no-spray list has gradually shrunk.
“About three or four years ago we sent out a letter to update our no-spray list. A lot of people came off that list this time around,” says Lee Shambeau, part-owner of 4 Control. “They saw the results of our program. They saw how nice the rights of way look. You can’t put a price on customer satisfaction.”
Today, Shambeau’s crews do 90% of their work for Clark Electric during January and February, when employees on all-terrain vehicles travel along half of the utility’s power lines spraying a basal bark application designed to keep the vegetation surrounding the lines under control. Shambeau mainly uses Garlon 4 from Dow AgroSciences and Stalker herbicide from BASF in these basal treatments. Shambeau estimates that his crews, thanks to the aggressive vegetation management program, have reduced their use of herbicides along Clark’s utility lines by 90% from when the program started 10 years ago.
“What has made this program so successful is that we came up with a program and [Moseley] stuck to it,” Shambeau says. “I see too many times where the intentions are great but it comes to the end of the year, the budget gets tight, and money has to come from somewhere. The easiest place to pull it from is the maintenance budget. That just puts you farther behind. You’re never going to get ahead of it or see the difference if you approach it that way.”
Shambeau’s work with Clark also has an erosion control element to it. When too many trees rise above a right of way, they prevent grass from growing underneath them. With the trees cut back, native grasses have had a chance to return to the rights of way surrounding Clark’s power lines. And with a strong covering of these grasses, erosion becomes less of a concern.
“It’s not like we went out there specifically to do erosion control work,” Shambeau says. “But if you keep the rights of way maintained and get good, healthy grass coming in, that turns out to be good erosion control.”
A Full Toolbox
Randy Swanigan faces an unusual challenge when it comes to vegetation management. He’s the roadside management specialist with the Missouri Department of Transportation, responsible for controlling the weeds and vegetation along 32,000 miles of road surface snaking through the state. The problem is Missouri doesn’t feature a uniform climate throughout its entire length. This means that in early spring the northern section of Missouri is cool and wet, sometimes even a bit snowy. At the same time, the state’s southern portion is warm enough for large amounts of vegetation to have already sprouted.
Swanigan and his crews, then, have to be flexible enough to draw upon different vegetation management tools for different sections of the state.
“There is a variation in climates that lasts close to three weeks between the northern and southern parts of the state,” Swanigan explains. “We have to adapt to that, and treat the vegetation in each section of the state accordingly.”
Fortunately for Swanigan, he and his crews are adept at using a variety of tools to combat excess vegetation along the Missouri highway system’s rights of way. There’s mowing, of course, but Swanigan also relies on herbicides and plant-growth regulators, one of his favorite tools.
Swanigan loves plant-growth regulators—chemicals designed to slow the growth of specific plants—because they save him and his department money. Because roadside vegetation grows more slowly after applications of plant-growth regulators, Swanigan’s crews have to do less mowing. “That saves us both time and money,” Swanigan says. “It’s a safety issue, too. Our folks are not out on the road as much in traffic.”
With the regulators, Swanigan’s crews can also keep roadside vegetation at a uniform height, usually from 8 to 12 inches. Then when crews do have to mow, they’re not wasting time cutting through excessively high vegetation. Swanigan estimates that his department’s use of plant-growth chemicals has saved about $2 million a year.
Though he is pleased with the financial savings—what government worker wouldn’t want to tell his supervisors that he’s saving the state millions of dollars every year?—Swanigan says that safety issues are a larger concern.
“We don’t need to have a mower out there as much moving slower while vehicles are coming in on it,” he says. “Over those hills, around those curves, motorists don’t expect to have a tractor there mowing the shoulder. If we can keep our people in safer situations, then we are happy.”
Missouri first began using plant-growth regulators in earnest in the early 1990s. Since then, the state has steadily expanded its use of the products. As each district within the highway department has success with the products, word spreads. Gradually a greater number of roadside district managers are turning to the growth regulators to also save time and keep their mowing crews off busy roadsides for longer stretches.
Of course, plant-growth regulators are not a cure-all in Missouri. There are situations where road crews must turn to more old-fashioned methods, such as mowing.
“Maybe a certain section of roadside doesn’t have good, solid turf. Then it’s not a candidate for our regulators,” Swanigan says. “Each district manager has to evaluate each of those routes to see what technique works best.”
Preserving a National Treasure
When officials with the Wyoming Department of Transportation in 1995 began widening US Highways 14, 16, and 20—a 30-mile stretch—they knew they weren’t undertaking a typical road project. That stretch of road runs straight through some of the most beloved and well-traveled natural areas in the United States, running from the east boundary of the Shoshone National Forest to the east gate of Yellowstone National Park. The work called for careful planning, from the beginning of construction to the current revegetation of the rights of way surrounding the highway.
“A lot of people were concerned about us possibly changing the character of that road,” says John Samson, an agronomist with the Wyoming Department of Transportation. “Traveling the old road was like driving through a tree tunnel. People wanted to keep that feeling of closeness and familiarity. Our job was to try and match and keep that sense of visual change as the road moves from the high desert foothills into a montane area. People didn’t want the road to become standardized like what happens with so many other department-of-transportation projects. I think we’ve done a good job of keeping that old feel of the road. We’ve had a number of ‘well-dones’ from the local community.”
Because the road traveled through so many different habitats, agronomists used 15 different mixes of vegetation to replace the plants, trees, and brush lost during the widening project. Crews added such native species as bluebunch wheatgrass, western wheatgrass, sheep fescue, Indian ricegrass, native wildflowers, and a host of native shrubs.
Samson estimates that the Wyoming Department of Transportation planted more than 10,000 trees and shrubs in rights of way and in the forest service’s interpretive sites. So far, these plants have shown a strong survival rate, with about 75% of them still standing.
Samson worked closely with officials from the Shoshone National Forest on the revegetation work. Forest officials, in particular, were interested not only in adding native vegetation back to the rights of way, but also in removing some of the many invasive species that had infiltrated the area.
“You have a million people driving the Yellowstone Highway every year,” says Kent Houston, an ecologist with the Shoshone National Forest. “You get a lot of invasive seed spread just from all that traffic. We are finding a lot of spotted knapweed, in particular. In the last 40 years it has really become a problem in a lot of native sage lands in the West, particularly in Wyoming.”
The project also involved some serious erosion control work. Volcanic soil surrounds much of the roadway, and this soil is extremely erosive. Mudflows aren’t unusual. In fact, workers faced two serious mudflows—one resulting from a powerful 50-year storm—during the construction project.
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Construction crews turned to old-fashioned silt fence as the first defense against erosion. They also made sure to use the more aggressive native species in the mix of vegetation they applied to the project. That helps guarantee a strong vegetative cover, a natural way to ease erosion. Crews installed bonded fiber matrix on the steeper slopes surrounding the highway.
“We did a whole lot of erosion control work on this project,” Samson says.
Author's Bio: Dan Rafter is a technical writer based in Illinois.
July-August 2005
New Era in Vegetation Management
New techniques save money and reduce chemical use.
Some may think of vegetation management as an unchanging field: Highway crews, utility employees, and landscapers simply fire up the mowers and spray the strongest herbicides to clear excess weeds, grass, and brush from the sides of roads, rights of way, and housing developments.Todd Horton, though, knows better. As technical specialist for the vegetation management group of BASF, he’s worked in the vegetation control business for more than a decade. He’s seen big changes in the vegetation management programs of both public and private entities—changes for the better.
“If you look back in time and see how things have progressed, you’ll see that utility companies, say, are more environmentally conscious,” Horton says. “There weren’t a whole lot of environmental concerns way back when. Utilities are now doing a good job of addressing the concerns of landowners along their lines. They’ve tried really hard in the customer-satisfaction area to address people’s concerns. And a lot of those landowners are interested in alternative means of vegetation management. They are concerned about their land, and you can’t blame them for that.”
Horton’s theory is backed by the actions of forest department officials, highway crews, and utility managers across the country who are turning to everything from plant-growth regulators and environmentally friendly basal treatments to grass-hungry goats to solve their vegetation management problems.
We took a close look at several unique vegetation management programs currently in operation. You’ll be surprised at some of the innovative ways in which public and private entities are handling their vegetation issues, and you just might learn some new tricks.
Attacking Vegetation Naturally
Limited by budget cuts, governmental bodies have been forced to turn toward innovative means to control vegetation. Nowhere is this more evident than at the Tonto National Forest in central Arizona. Here at the fifth-largest forest in the United States, one that occupies nearly 3 million acres of land, the latest vegetation management program involves a decidedly old-fashioned tool: goats.
The Payson Wildland Urban Interface Goat Project may have a fancy name, but there’s nothing particularly fancy about the way rangers at the Tonto National Forest’s Payson District are relying on goats to help control vegetation that is highly susceptible to forest fires.
The plan is simple: Goats munch away at enough chaparral and other brush vegetation on a section of forest covering 1,400 to 1,600 acres to significantly reduce the threat of wildfires. The project is also a way for forest officials to help protect nearby Payson, a town located 90 miles north of Phoenix and surrounded by national forestland.
“Since about 2000 we’ve had a real priority to protect these little communities that are entirely within the national forest from wildfire,” says Patti Fenner, noxious weed program manager at Tonto and president of the Southwest Vegetation Management Association. “The goats are just one way of doing this. When the goats eat a fire line it keeps the growth that comes back fresh and green so that fire will have a harder time going through there and into town.”
The project is especially important today as drought conditions have hit much of the western United States since 1996, increasing the threat of fire at Tonto and other national forests.
Aspects of the program sound downright quaint: Forest officials have set up holding pens for the goats to live in overnight. Goat herders are allowed to camp on forestlands while the goat project is running.
The goat project may sound unusual, but it’s actually not the first time that forest officials in the United States have turned to the grass-hungry animals to help manage vegetation. Since April 2003 about 650 goats have grazed Arizona’s Prescott National Forest near the community of Ponderosa Park. Officials at that forest are also relying on the goats to reduce the threat of wildfires.
It’s no secret why rangers with the Payson District are following suit: Relying on goats and other livestock to help manage vegetation will save officials at Tonto money. In a feature story in the Payson Roundup—the town’s local newspaper—John Brock, a professor of ecological restoration at Arizona State University–East, said that goats cost only $173 an acre to clear brush. Other methods can cost as much as $450 an acre. At the same time, goats will have a relatively low impact on the area compared to other methods of controlling vegetation.
Despite these benefits, the goats won’t be the only option Payson District rangers rely on for vegetation management. The rangers will also turn to such traditional measures as prescribed burns. Such burns, of course, come with their own concerns: There is always the risk of fire escaping or releasing pollutants into the area. That’s why Payson officials are so excited about the goat project.
Before allowing the goats to roam the Payson District, though, forest officials first had to decide whether the animals would cause any erosion problems. Erosion is a serious issue at Tonto; the forest was first established to protect the region’s watershed. Low desert areas, such as the Tonto forest, naturally have low ground cover. If much of that ground cover is lost, the forest’s soils will erode. Fortunately, the goats are expected to cause no erosion problems.
“Tonto is fortunate to have a lot of prehistoric cultural sights,” Fenner notes. “We had to consider whether this project would cause erosion around those sights. The goats, though, while controlling the brush, don’t hurt the roots of the brush. They are not killing the brush by eating it, just trimming it back. The roots are still alive. So there is then little impact on erosion.”
Fenner says the goat project is just one example of the more innovative projects that vegetation management pros are now turning to. “With funding levels the way they are these days, you really do have to be innovative,” she says. “This was just a really economical way to handle the vegetation here.”
An Outdoor Classroom
The Purdue Research and Restoration Management Project can be considered a very big, very diverse outdoor laboratory. For utility managers, highway department officials, and developers, though, the site—265 acres located in West Lafayette, IN—is more like the ultimate testing center. It provides them with the opportunity to study different ways to manage vegetation, all without having to run, or pay for, the experiments on their own.
For nearly four years, the project, run at the Purdue Wildlife Area under the guidance of Purdue University’s Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, has provided working examples for those who not only need to control or eliminate invasive species on their grounds or in public rights of way but also want to add native grasses and plants to these same areas.
Zach Lowe, a graduate student at the university and project manager for the research project, says that more than 200 utility managers, highway department officials, employees of departments of natural resources, and others concerned with vegetation management have attended the open houses held at the Wildlife Area, which is located about 12 miles west of Purdue University. These attendees not only learn specific techniques that might help them control vegetation along their rights of way; they also discover just how common the problems they face are.
“We get such a wide variety of people in here,” Lowe says. “It’s kind of neat to show these people that their problems aren’t necessarily unique. They can then share a lot of ideas with each other once they get on the same page when it comes to vegetation management. They can bounce different ideas off each other and come up with some truly unique and effective solutions.”
The project’s more than 250 acres are made up of plots laid out side by side, each plot containing an example of a different type of vegetation management. Some may show examples of specific herbicides, others different spraying techniques, and still others a variety of techniques for controlling invasive species during their dormant seasons.
“That provides a visual for them,” Lowe explains. “If they are doing nothing but mowing now, some of the techniques we have to show them may be more effective, and they may, then, reduce the amount of time they spend out on the road. When you are doing some vegetation management that incorporates herbicides, your return time on an area is extended. Instead of every couple of months, you may not have to return to that area for a year or two. You may use a woody-stem control that gets rid of brush or invasive species in an area, or you may use a plant-growth regulator that might keep problem vegetation at bay for a year or more.”
Not all the techniques on display in the research project’s plots are new, Lowe says. Many plots demonstrate old techniques combined with new herbicide chemistry.
Visitors to the plots are especially interested in the dormant-season work Purdue researchers have done, Lowe says. Such work is appealing because highway officials, utility managers, and others don’t have to worry about harming spring plants when they concentrate their spraying and other vegetation management techniques in the dormant season.
Working the dormant season also has another benefit: Highway departments, utilities, departments of natural resources, and other bodies can continue to employ their spray crews for a longer season. These crews can then get into areas that they can’t access as well during the growing season.
One particularly interesting project involves dormant-season stem work. Under this technique, crews during the winter treat brush and other vegetation almost as if it has its spring leaves. Purdue researchers combine an oil-based herbicide with an oil carrier. Researchers add to that mix of anywhere from 5 to 9 gallons up to 100 gallons of water, resulting in a solution that, although it contains tiny oil capsules of herbicide, is made mostly of water. Crews can spray a large volume of the mixture on dormant vegetation while actually hitting the area with a low amount of active ingredient, guaranteeing wider coverage of the stems, buds, and other growing parts of the treated plants.
The water from the application eventually evaporates, releasing the oil into the plants’ bark. In spring, thanks to photosynthesis, those herbicides are pulled through the bark and begin working on the plants.
While an interesting experiment, this process is just one of the many shown off in Purdue’s plots. The plots even include examples of treatments that haven’t worked.
“We do a lot of research on the efficacy of different techniques on invasives,” Lowe says. “People can look at our plots and see what’s worked and hasn’t worked for us. They can look at a plot and say, ‘We should be using this exact mixture.’ Knowing that is an improvement over just knowing you should be using a certain type of herbicide. It’s important, too, to show people the wrong way to do something. That’s why we have plots out there that are noticeable failures. You need to show people why it doesn’t work. That side-by-side comparison is very important.”
Saving Money, Boosting Customer Service
Bob Moseley hates power outages. That’s no surprise, seeing as Moseley is director of operations for Clark Electric Cooperative, a nonprofit, member-owned electric utility based in Clark County in north-central Wisconsin.
What is surprising, though, is that Moseley, with the help of some aggressive vegetation management, was able to do something about those outages he hates so much. A decade ago Clark Electric hired Menomonie, WI–based 4 Control Inc., a vegetation management company, to control the unruly vegetation that had grown alongside the 1,800 miles of electric lines the utility runs through Clark, Taylor, Marathon, Wood, Jackson, and Chippewa counties. The reason for this? Most power outages are caused by fallen trees and branches that snap power lines. By controlling the amount of trees and vegetation surrounding Clark Electric’s power lines, the utility has reduced the amount of tree-caused power outages by 65%, Moseley says.
“The important part about that is continuity of service,” he notes. “It’s all about providing good service for the members of our cooperative. There are cost savings, too, of course, when you don’t have outages. But the main goal for us is to provide reliable service. This program has helped us do that.”
It’s also helped Clark Electric save money in other ways. Before 4 Control began its vegetation management program, Clark Electric paid about $150 a mile to control the box elder, oak, maple, elm, and ash trees that constantly threatened its power lines. Today the utility pays just $35 a mile to do this, largely because 4 Control employees now rely only on low-cost basal treatments to control the vegetation around the power lines.
“We really are happy with the program,” Moseley says. “We were always hoping to get to the point where we could reduce the amount of herbicides and pesticides we needed for brush control. The real surprise is that our stem counts have gotten to the point where about 90% of our application is done by basal treatment. I didn’t expect to get to that point. I thought we’d still be doing foliar applications. Now most of our rights of way along wooded areas are nice, grassy rights of way. It’s good for the habitat and pleasing to the eye.”
Reaching this level was not easy. 4 Control spent the first three years of the Clark Electric project using a foliar application to get the vegetation under control. The biggest problem was that the vegetation in some areas was incredibly thick. To get at it all, crew members would have to sometimes spray herbicides as far back as 45 feet off the road.
Crew members, though, couldn’t do this in one application. The first time treating an area, for example, crew members might only be able to spray their herbicides 20 feet off the road. When they returned the following year, they might be able to spray 35 feet off the road. Finally, the third time around, crews could spray all 45 feet off the road.
Crew members from 4 Control also faced another challenge: They had to please the neighbors living near Clark Electric’s power lines. Many of these neighbors happened to be organic farmers who wanted nothing to do with pesticides. Others were residents who worried that pesticides would harm the apple trees on their properties. The company worked around these requests, not spraying where pesticides weren’t wanted.
The no-spray requests, though, haven’t hurt the overall project. In fact, the vegetation management program has been so successful, the no-spray list has gradually shrunk.
“About three or four years ago we sent out a letter to update our no-spray list. A lot of people came off that list this time around,” says Lee Shambeau, part-owner of 4 Control. “They saw the results of our program. They saw how nice the rights of way look. You can’t put a price on customer satisfaction.”
Today, Shambeau’s crews do 90% of their work for Clark Electric during January and February, when employees on all-terrain vehicles travel along half of the utility’s power lines spraying a basal bark application designed to keep the vegetation surrounding the lines under control. Shambeau mainly uses Garlon 4 from Dow AgroSciences and Stalker herbicide from BASF in these basal treatments. Shambeau estimates that his crews, thanks to the aggressive vegetation management program, have reduced their use of herbicides along Clark’s utility lines by 90% from when the program started 10 years ago.
“What has made this program so successful is that we came up with a program and [Moseley] stuck to it,” Shambeau says. “I see too many times where the intentions are great but it comes to the end of the year, the budget gets tight, and money has to come from somewhere. The easiest place to pull it from is the maintenance budget. That just puts you farther behind. You’re never going to get ahead of it or see the difference if you approach it that way.”
Shambeau’s work with Clark also has an erosion control element to it. When too many trees rise above a right of way, they prevent grass from growing underneath them. With the trees cut back, native grasses have had a chance to return to the rights of way surrounding Clark’s power lines. And with a strong covering of these grasses, erosion becomes less of a concern.
“It’s not like we went out there specifically to do erosion control work,” Shambeau says. “But if you keep the rights of way maintained and get good, healthy grass coming in, that turns out to be good erosion control.”
A Full Toolbox
Randy Swanigan faces an unusual challenge when it comes to vegetation management. He’s the roadside management specialist with the Missouri Department of Transportation, responsible for controlling the weeds and vegetation along 32,000 miles of road surface snaking through the state. The problem is Missouri doesn’t feature a uniform climate throughout its entire length. This means that in early spring the northern section of Missouri is cool and wet, sometimes even a bit snowy. At the same time, the state’s southern portion is warm enough for large amounts of vegetation to have already sprouted.
Swanigan and his crews, then, have to be flexible enough to draw upon different vegetation management tools for different sections of the state.
“There is a variation in climates that lasts close to three weeks between the northern and southern parts of the state,” Swanigan explains. “We have to adapt to that, and treat the vegetation in each section of the state accordingly.”
Fortunately for Swanigan, he and his crews are adept at using a variety of tools to combat excess vegetation along the Missouri highway system’s rights of way. There’s mowing, of course, but Swanigan also relies on herbicides and plant-growth regulators, one of his favorite tools.
Swanigan loves plant-growth regulators—chemicals designed to slow the growth of specific plants—because they save him and his department money. Because roadside vegetation grows more slowly after applications of plant-growth regulators, Swanigan’s crews have to do less mowing. “That saves us both time and money,” Swanigan says. “It’s a safety issue, too. Our folks are not out on the road as much in traffic.”
With the regulators, Swanigan’s crews can also keep roadside vegetation at a uniform height, usually from 8 to 12 inches. Then when crews do have to mow, they’re not wasting time cutting through excessively high vegetation. Swanigan estimates that his department’s use of plant-growth chemicals has saved about $2 million a year.
Though he is pleased with the financial savings—what government worker wouldn’t want to tell his supervisors that he’s saving the state millions of dollars every year?—Swanigan says that safety issues are a larger concern.
“We don’t need to have a mower out there as much moving slower while vehicles are coming in on it,” he says. “Over those hills, around those curves, motorists don’t expect to have a tractor there mowing the shoulder. If we can keep our people in safer situations, then we are happy.”
Missouri first began using plant-growth regulators in earnest in the early 1990s. Since then, the state has steadily expanded its use of the products. As each district within the highway department has success with the products, word spreads. Gradually a greater number of roadside district managers are turning to the growth regulators to also save time and keep their mowing crews off busy roadsides for longer stretches.
Of course, plant-growth regulators are not a cure-all in Missouri. There are situations where road crews must turn to more old-fashioned methods, such as mowing.
“Maybe a certain section of roadside doesn’t have good, solid turf. Then it’s not a candidate for our regulators,” Swanigan says. “Each district manager has to evaluate each of those routes to see what technique works best.”
Preserving a National Treasure
When officials with the Wyoming Department of Transportation in 1995 began widening US Highways 14, 16, and 20—a 30-mile stretch—they knew they weren’t undertaking a typical road project. That stretch of road runs straight through some of the most beloved and well-traveled natural areas in the United States, running from the east boundary of the Shoshone National Forest to the east gate of Yellowstone National Park. The work called for careful planning, from the beginning of construction to the current revegetation of the rights of way surrounding the highway.
“A lot of people were concerned about us possibly changing the character of that road,” says John Samson, an agronomist with the Wyoming Department of Transportation. “Traveling the old road was like driving through a tree tunnel. People wanted to keep that feeling of closeness and familiarity. Our job was to try and match and keep that sense of visual change as the road moves from the high desert foothills into a montane area. People didn’t want the road to become standardized like what happens with so many other department-of-transportation projects. I think we’ve done a good job of keeping that old feel of the road. We’ve had a number of ‘well-dones’ from the local community.”
Because the road traveled through so many different habitats, agronomists used 15 different mixes of vegetation to replace the plants, trees, and brush lost during the widening project. Crews added such native species as bluebunch wheatgrass, western wheatgrass, sheep fescue, Indian ricegrass, native wildflowers, and a host of native shrubs.
Samson estimates that the Wyoming Department of Transportation planted more than 10,000 trees and shrubs in rights of way and in the forest service’s interpretive sites. So far, these plants have shown a strong survival rate, with about 75% of them still standing.
Samson worked closely with officials from the Shoshone National Forest on the revegetation work. Forest officials, in particular, were interested not only in adding native vegetation back to the rights of way, but also in removing some of the many invasive species that had infiltrated the area.
“You have a million people driving the Yellowstone Highway every year,” says Kent Houston, an ecologist with the Shoshone National Forest. “You get a lot of invasive seed spread just from all that traffic. We are finding a lot of spotted knapweed, in particular. In the last 40 years it has really become a problem in a lot of native sage lands in the West, particularly in Wyoming.”
The project also involved some serious erosion control work. Volcanic soil surrounds much of the roadway, and this soil is extremely erosive. Mudflows aren’t unusual. In fact, workers faced two serious mudflows—one resulting from a powerful 50-year storm—during the construction project.
Construction crews turned to old-fashioned silt fence as the first defense against erosion. They also made sure to use the more aggressive native species in the mix of vegetation they applied to the project. That helps guarantee a strong vegetative cover, a natural way to ease erosion. Crews installed bonded fiber matrix on the steeper slopes surrounding the highway.
“We did a whole lot of erosion control work on this project,” Samson says.