Research has found farmers can preserve soil and protect water quality by planting grass hedges to trap sediment that would otherwise be washed away by field runoff.
Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists at the agency’s National Sedimentation Laboratory in Oxford have calculated how much soil erosion hedges prevent.
The series of studies were carried out over 13 years to assess the effectiveness of grass hedges for erosion control in wide or ultra-narrow-row conventional tillage or no-till cotton systems.
The researchers established single-row continuous swaths of miscanthus, a tall perennial grass, across the lower ends of 72 foot long plots with a 5 per cent slope. They then tracked how much sediment was trapped by the vegetation from both the wide and ultra-narrow-row conventional tillage and no-till fields.
The hedges eventually became a yard wide and were clipped two to three times every year after the grass was 5 to 6.5 feet tall.
The scientists found that the ability of the hedges to trap sediment increased as the hedges matured.
The team also found that hedge effectiveness was enhanced when clippings were allowed to accumulate uphill of the hedges.
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