I wouldn’t be surprised if Niagara County commuters are battling carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s been a winter of white-knuckle driving as it seems like every day, for weeks on end, we’ve had to grip our steering wheels like we’re trying to squeeze the juice out of them when navigating our snow-covered rural roads.
That’s no fault of our plow drivers, who I count as the best in the USA and Canada. They’ve been busting their butts, plowing and carving at all hours.
We’ve received plenty of snow. But, that’s not the problem. Snow is manageable. Wind, on the other hand, is difficult to keep up with. A snowplow can make a pass and, on the return trip, it can look like the road was never touched. Winds in excess of 15 miles per hour, with many days seeing gusts above 30, have been the norm the winter, leading to significant drifting and whiteouts…and countless accidents.
This was most dramatically seen earlier this week when an eight-car pile-up happened in Gasport. It started with a two-vehicle head-on, but quickly devolved into more as incoming drivers had zero visibility. A video of the aftermath can be found on Facebook, shared by someone who was in the accident. Luckily, she wasn’t hurt and just one person was taken by ambulance. But, if you’ve seen the video you know that’s a miracle – the carnage was jaw-dropping.
Those reading this column who are of a certain vintage likely don’t recollect the roads being like this years ago. Even then, with vehicles less capable of handling the roads (before the era of SUVs, all-wheel drive, and trucks in abundance), the drives seemed less stressful. That’s because they were: Snow used to accumulate in large drifts rather than drifting across the road.
It all goes back to past farming practices. At one time, there were more -- and smaller -- farms. In 1954, there were 4.78 million farms in the United States, averaging 242 acres in size. Those farmers used hedgerows as boundaries for either their property or fields of differing use. Those hedgerows became windbreaks and prevented blowing snow from spreading all across the land.
Fast forward to 2025. Because of the ongoing transformation of America away from an agrarian society, coupled with developments in farming technology and economics, it takes fewer farming enterprises than it once did to feed the masses. There are now 1.8 million farms in the US and they are much larger. Today’s operations purchased those smaller ones that dominated days gone by and added them to their property portfolios. By doing so, there is less of a need for property-delineating hedges. And, with a focus on larger, single-crop fields, there is less of a need for crop-dividing strips of trees.
Just as I did with plow drivers, I’m not going to fault farmers for our predicament. It’s an unintended consequence of an entirely different industry and economy. Every hedgerow equals a loss of revenue. In a state like this in which it’s difficult to do business, let alone a business the health of which hinges entirely on the prospect of good weather, the same business the profits of which are decimated by things such as federal milk policy, literally every single penny matters. Theirs is a struggle most of us cannot relate to.
To make the roads safer, it will take local and state governments working with those farmers.
You certainly can’t ask farmers or local road crews to put up snow fences. We have too many roads. Niagara County alone has a whopping 1,700 miles of pavement. Can you imagine the man hours it would take to fence even a fraction of that?
Living snow fences, like the aforementioned hedgerows, are the answer. They worked when my parents were kids. They worked when I was a kid growing up on a farm road. And, these fences don’t have to be trees.
With the development of the state budget underway, Albany should create voluntary incentive programs for farmers in troublesome areas to plant windbreaks. Incentives are necessary because we can’t ask someone to forgo revenue from abandoning fair-sized strips of arable land.
Some states grant significant property tax deductions for the use of windbreaks. Indiana, for example, assesses windbreaks at a rate around $1 per acre. Farmland in New York is assessed at an average of $4,150 an acre. If we had a $1 assessment here for land repurposed as public benefit, imagine the participation.
Other states pay outright for windbreaks. Minnesota gives farmers $1,000 an acre to leave corn stalks standing in 12 row increments through April (when done over a mile stretch of road that is one acre). That contract runs in one-year installments, and allows for use of other barriers, so a farmer isn’t bound if he chooses to alternate crops. The state’s Department of Transportation keeps this focused, in terms of safety and cost, on a few thousand specific trouble zones that are adjacent to state highways.
These states have shown, quite successfully, that there is a cure for snowy roads that make our drives so dicey. We just need some local and state officials to hedge their bets with hedgerows, getting help from – and at the same time helping -- the ag industry.
From the 22 February 2025 Greater Niagara Newspapers and Wellsville Sun
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