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Fields Among the Forests: Keeping Open Land Open

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Photo by Chuck Wooster.

Can you name the three most heavily forested states in the United States? The answer might surprise you: Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, in that order. All three are 80 percent or more forested.

That means that if your piece of land happens to include an old field or meadow, you have something of a rare treasure on your hands. Open fields can add greatly to a property’s value, thanks to the views they afford of nearby hillsides or distant peaks. Open fields are also great places to take a walk, watch the sunset, or fly a kite. On top of all this, open fields provide critical habitat for many of our most beloved species of wildlife. So there are a lot of good reasons for keeping them open.

Doing so, however, can be something of a vexation. Leave the field alone for too long, and you’ll wake up one morning with a young forest on your hands. But try to tackle your field with the lawn mower, and you’ll be out there for the rest of your life.

So what to do?

You have three general options for keeping fields open, depending on how you decide to look at your old field.

First, you can view your field as an agricultural resource. It’s thanks to animals, after all, that we have open fields in the first place. If your field is reasonably flat and fertile, a local farmer may be interested in cutting the hay once or twice per year. This works out well from the farmer’s perspective – free hay for the cutting – and from your perspective as well, since you’re keeping your field open without so much as lifting a finger. Don’t expect to be paid for the hay: the financial benefit in this for you comes from having the farmer keep your field open for free. Ask for a buck or two a bale, and you’ll soon discover the farmer mowing your neighbor’s field instead.

Alternatively, you can run a few animals on the field yourself. Sheep, the original livestock inhabitant of the region’s fields, thrive here, as do horses, goats, and beef cattle. (Dairy cows do too, of course, but that’s likely to be beyond the scope of what you’re after.) In a way, running animals on your own field helps keep someone else’s field open, too, as the animals eat your grass all summer and someone else’s grass (in the form of hay) all winter. You’ll want to speak with your county extension agent for more details on what it entails before deciding to get into the grazing business.

If your avocations don’t run toward the agricultural, a second way to view your old field is, well, as an old field. All you need to do is cut the grass once per year, and the field will remain a field forever. Hire your neighbor with a tractor to come and cut it, which typically costs about $50 per acre. Some people balk at the idea of paying someone to mow their field – shouldn’t the land be able to pay its own way? Sure, but if you’ve already skipped over the part about owning a flock of sheep, this have-the-neighbor-do-it solution could be for you. There’s no simpler way to go, and it’s a small price to pay for maintaining your “million-dollar” view.

But a more fun way to go might be to buy a tractor of your own, outfitted with a rotary mower (often referred to as a bush hog or brush hog). Previously owned, two-wheel-drive agricultural tractors that are perfect for field mowing can be had for a song (okay, a few thousand dollars) these days, and, in addition to delighting all the boys in the neighborhood, can be outfitted with a snow plow for winter driveways. Simply cutting the grass without removing it for hay has the additional advantage of returning fertility to the soil and improving the land instead of carting the fertility away to feed someone else’s animals.

Whether you mow with your tractor or someone else’s, you’d do well to wait as late in the season as possible. Though some landowners like to keep the grass short all summer for the “neatly trimmed” look, doing so comes at a great price for local birds and animals. Before mid-July, your field is likely to be home to red-winged blackbird chicks, young bobolinks in their nests, a host of sparrows, and maybe even a fawn or two, not to mention native insects (one of which, the firefly, is so beloved that people often forget it’s an insect). Waiting until sometime between August and November will still accomplish the task of keeping the field open while sparing the local wildlife.

The third way to view your open field is as a wildlife nursery. If you only knock the grass down only every third year or so, you will still be maintaining the view while also allowing coarser grasses and tree seedlings to take hold in the field. This type of habitat, called “early successional,” is preferred by all of the above species, plus woodcock, snipe, a host of warblers, and hawks on the hunt. Deer will love the winter browse, and don’t be surprised to see fox and coyote hunting rodents year-round.

This type of habitat is so rare and ephemeral (remember, 80 percent of the land in our area is forested) that federal cost-share money is often available for landowners who agree to adopt this every-third-year mowing strategy. That’s right, the government will pay you to keep your field open for wildlife habitat. The current program is called the Wildlife Habitat Improvement Program, or WHIP, and you can find out more information about it from your county extension agent. In general, landowners need to sign multi-year contracts to participate in the program, which ensures that the habitat will remain available to wildlife for years to come.

Though the field-as-wildlife-nursery approach has two great advantages (the abundant wildlife and the federal money), there is one disadvantage to keep in mind: your field won’t be suitable for haying anymore because the grass and seedlings will be too coarse for animal feed. Reclaiming such a field for agriculture in the future will require some combination of animal grazing and tractor work, combined with re-seeding. If you never intend to return your field to the agricultural economy, that’s not a problem. But if you’re waffling on running that flock of sheep, it’s worth mowing every year until you make up your mind.

A final variation on the wildlife-nursery approach would be to let the field grow in until it starts to have tree saplings that are about as thick in diameter as your wrist. Then mow it. If the tractor can bend it over, the brush hog can sever the stem. You might be able to go six or eight years between mowings if you go this route, which is even better for wildlife and even lighter on your wallet. Once the saplings grow fatter than your wrist or so, however, a tractor with mower will be unable to bend them over. At that point, you’ll either be committed to a young forest or facing a very hefty bill to have specialized land-clearing equipment come in to reclaim the field.

Regardless of which of the three approaches you choose for maintaining your field – agricultural resource, old field, or wildlife nursery – you’re doing a great service by keeping it open. The mix of forest and field is precisely what gives pastoral New England its unique character and distinguishes it from areas with steeper terrain, where far more dramatic mountain ranges end up being hidden from view behind thick forest canopies.

That the pastoral aesthetic is an essential part of the New England landscape is clear after even a quick browse through the “regional” section of your local bookstore: there are sure to be a half-dozen or more luscious picture books that feature rolling pastures, pocket fields tucked in among protective forests, or river-bottom holdings windrowed with hay, with each photograph crying out that this is how home is supposed to look. Come to think of it, they’re right!

Discussion *

Feb 10, 2010

A fourth possible option subject to local fire codes would be dividing the field into thirds or quarters by mowing lanes or planting cool season grasses in lanes and performing a controlled burn each year of one third or one fouth of the land. This approach will invigorate the soil and do minimal damage to all critters flora and fauna a like. The burn is best done very early in the day or late in the afternoon in a no wind condition as soon as the snow has melted and the grasses have dried. It should go without saying this is not a one man opperation.

david herrmann
Feb 10, 2010

A fourth possible option subject to local fire codes would be dividing the field into thirds or quarters by mowing lanes or planting cool season grasses in lanes and performing a controlled burn each year of one third or one fouth of the land. This approach invigorate the soil and do minimal damage to all critters flora and fauna a like. The burn is best done very early in the day or late in the afternoon in a no wind condition as soon as the snow has melted and the grasses have dried. It should go without saying this is not a one man opperation.

david herrmann

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