When I was editing Arne Nielsen's memoirs, he took me to his family's farm at Standard where he grew up. He pushed aside the caragana hedge planted around the home place as a barrier against the relentless Prairie wind and showed me a hill a metre high built by dust bowl storms in the 1930s when the hedge trapped encroaching soil. Researching another book I identified a family homestead at Dewberry because its shelterbelt had an unusual stand of lilac bushes. I had seen the ancestors of those bushes around a stone cellar on Georgian Bay that had been the home of the same family before it came to Alberta. The lilacs came originally as a root wrapped in burlap from the Niagara-on-the-Lake childhood home of the wife of the family.
Shelterbelts of hybrid poplar, green ash, Manitoba maple, larch, white spruce, aspen and Siberian peashrub (another name for caragana) line Prairie roads and highways from Manitoba to the mountains, planted by generations of farmers.
Trees reduce wind and erosion, protect livestock and crops, capture snow for dugouts and improve water quality.
Dry land shelterbelts are irrigated, mulched and fenced against cattle.
Where they grow more easily they provide shelter for cattle from the summer sun and winter blizzards.
But trees grow old and die.
A 1997 program by an Alberta-Canada forestry partnership showed farmers how to log mature shelterbelts for wood products that pay for replanting.
For a century, the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA) assisted Prairie farmers planting shelterbelts.
The federal shelterbelt program was halted in 2013 by city slickers in Ottawa.
A coalition of farmers and employees took over the PFRA tree farm at Indian Head Sask.
It has been a hand-to-mouth venture.
Now, Alberta and Saskatchewan have stepped in to help with shelterbelt development.
In Alberta, $5 per tree to a cap of $10,000 is available to farmers and feedlot operators.
Shelterbelts will continue to connect us to the past and the future.
Frank Dabbs is a veteran business and political journalist, author of three biographies, and a contributor to, researcher and editor of half a dozen books.
