Abstract
Blowing snow adversely affects winter transportation by reducing driver’s visibility, creating icy roads, and depositing snow drifts in the travel lane. Blowing snow is prevalent in snowy and windy climates where landscapes lack sufficient vegetation to trap snow. Maintaining safe driving conditions on roads with blowing snow can be a costly challenge for transportation agencies. Living snow fences (LSFs) are semi-permanent living structures that can reduce blowing and drifting snow and offer environmental benefits, such as carbon sequestration and wildlife habitat. Recently, shrub willow cultivars (Salix spp.) have been evaluated as a potential LSF due to the relative ease of planting, reduction in plant material costs, fast growth, and ability to establish well given proper site preparation, planting techniques and maintenance. To evaluate the potential of willow for LSFs this study analyzes the costs of planting and establishing a willow LSF and the viability of harvesting biomass. This study finds that the costs of planting and establishing a willow LSF is $8.11 m−1 for a two row snow fence. Biomass harvest is prohibitively expensive for the typical willow LSF due to the small scale of production. However, corridor length willow LSFs, in which planting and establishment costs are defrayed due to payments for the transportation benefits, can produce biomass at a cost of $30 dry-Mg−1.
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Notes
The erosion control, including labor and machinery, cost a total of $1819 or $4.01 per meter.
Teenagers from local non-profits groups were utilized and compensated for many of the activities.
Due to timing and funding the experiment was unable to follow the best management practices that had been developed for shrub willow experiments at the research station. Therefore, the site was hand weeded in plots where it was a problem. The total cost for hand weeding was $314 and $628 for the two and four row willow LSFs or $0.69 per double-row meter. This cost was not included in this paper.
Details of the application timing can be found in the chemicals section.
The price of the willow cuttings is based on the purchase of with the volume discount of 500+ plants and out-of-state purchasing.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a grant from the Minnesota Local Road Research Board (LRRB) and Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT Contract 99008). The authors are thankful to the University of Minnesota Southern Research and Outreach Center for the use of the farm equipment for use in the study. Special thanks to Drs. Dean Current and Gregg Johnson for providing valuable inputs to the project, and to Gary Wyatt (University of Minnesota Extension), Eric Ogdahl (Graduate Research Assistant) and to Dan Gullickson (MnDOT) for providing information to conduct the economic analysis of the study.
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Smith, D., Zamora, D.S. & Lazarus, W. The economics of planting and producing biomass from willow (Salix spp.) living snow fences. Agroforest Syst 90, 737–746 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-016-9935-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-016-9935-x