The Triumph of the Bromes

submitted by Fred Schueler, Fragile Inheritance Natural History

Brandon Mayer’s recent article “Weed Spraying Facts” provides facts about the excuses that are used for roadside herbiciding, but neglects the question of what’s lost by this practice. Even the final account of why one might put up “No Spray” signs doesn’t include the floral or insect biodiversity that are the major reason the signs are deployed.

The article pitches subservience to the Noxious Weeds Act as a justification for the spraying, but doesn’t give a history of this practice, or present the other options for roadside management, though the floral diversity along provincial highways suggests that this Act doesn’t compel such spraying. If you want to see if your roadsides are scheduled to be sprayed in any year, go to the Counties website at “services/ roadside-spraying” – this year in North Grenville, a selection of municipal roads east of Hwy 416 and north of Millars Corners.

Municipal roadside herbiciding ended in the 1980s due to public protests. Then, the one good thing done by the Harris government in the 1990s was to reduce funding for roadside mowing, which has led to continuing spectacular floral displays along the remaining provincial highways, and was initially emulated by counties and municipalities. In the 2010s, herbicide salesmen increased their sales by exploiting concern about “Poison Parsnip,” and indiscriminate spraying suddenly resumed. My first thoughts on this kind of thing, dating back to the 1960s, was the "Theorem of the Stupid Worker," which proposes that managers assume their employees are so incapable of learning to distinguish species of plants that they just have to spray indiscriminately. We saw a lot of this as herbiciding was resumed, where Parsnip spraying often took out Milkweed – the food plant of the at-risk Monarch Butterfly – but missed the Parsnips, though recently there has been somewhat better discrimination.

The herbicides used in this spraying only affect broadleaved Dicot plants, leading to what is called the "Triumph of the Bromes," where the roadsides are green mostly with wind-pollinated invasive alien grasses, such as Brome Grasses and Reed Canary Grass. There’s also a lot of the non-native dicot Bladder Campion along many roads, and this species is resistant to commonly used herbicides, as is, to a lesser degree, the flouncy Cow-parsley (Anthiscus sylvestris), which is spreading along roads in Brockville and Kemptville. One of the under-emphasised features of much of eastern Ontario is the absence of native species which haven't been able to recolonize after a 19th Century of intense wood-

It’s been decades since farmers were allowed to “sever” — or carve out — single residential lots from prime agricultural land, under a long-defunct policy that allowed them to build retirement homes. The recent proposal would have again permitted some farms to sever as many as three housing lots, which Min- cutting, tillage, and grazing. There’s now a long-delayed movement of introducing forest floor herbs (“spring wildflowers”) to plantations and secondary forests, and the same thing ought to be done with native species along roadsides. This is the “pollinator garden” movement. Since roadsides make up such a large portion of public lands, establishing native flora on the roadsides should be a major goal of biodiversity management.

“It has never been our intention for severed lots to be transferred or sold to nonfamily/farm owners, nor for these lots to have anything more than single-family homes,” the minister wrote in a May 29 letter to the President and Vice-President of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA). But the proposal to allow up to three severances is now off the table.

“We will not be moving forward with the proposal on rural lot severances,” Clark’s press secretary, Victoria Podbielski, said in a May 31 statement.

The Ontario Farmland Trust, which opposed the new severance allowance, estimated that between 145,000 and 510,000 housing lots would be carved out of Ontario farms, equivalent to losing 1.25% to 4.3% of the Province’s farmland. Oxford County planner Dustin Robson told Farmers Forum that his county alone would have seen as many 18,500 new residential lots carved out of local farms.

Huron-Perth OFA director and Seaforth dairy farmer Ethan Wallace applauded the proposal withdrawal.

In addition to ending herbicide spraying (except for very particular problems with invasives such as Dogstrangling Vine), this restoration of roadsides should also include the scheduling of mowing with regard to the seasons of bloom of roadside flowers in each community and habitat. There's also the question of the nutrient status of the roadsides. Roadsides accumulate mineral plant nutrients (fixed nitrogen, phosphorus, & potassium), both from the nutrients in precipitation that runs off the pavement, and from the bodies of road-killed animals.

In the prairie provinces, the roadsides are cut as hay, taking off a substantial amount of nutrients in the plant material. In Ontario, the cuttings are just left to decay, and I think that the resulting accumulation of nutrients encourages roadsides to be dominated by grass. Lower nutrient levels in roadside soil makes room for diverse flowering herbs, though of course excessive nutrient depletion might lead to erosion, so there's a balance that would need to be maintained if mowed roadside biomass was to be removed and used in some way.

Some of us are beginning the process of diversifying roadsides by sowing the seeds of native Foxglove Beardtongue (Penstemon digitalis) along roads near Bishops Mills. The Environmental Advisory Committee is discussing pollinator gardens on municipal land along Wellington Road, and South Nation Conservation has sown native prairie species in much of the new Mill Run Conservation Area. We have to hope that management will increasingly take into consideration all aspects of the utility and ecology of the roadsides.

“Farming is often a multi-generational family enterprise, and our government has been asked by many farmers to make it easier for the next generation to live and work in the same place where they grew up,” she said by email. “At the same time, we have clearly heard the concerns that have been raised about the need to preserve Ontario’s farmland – and we share that goal.”

The government is still accepting public feedback on the proposal through the Environmental Registry of Ontario and recently extended the submission deadline to Aug. 5. The OFA, the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario and 10 other farm organizations had banded together on May 18 to complain about allowing more rural severances at a time when Ontario is already reported to be losing 319 acres of farmland daily to development. The prospect of more houses going up amid farms would also make it “difficult or impossible” for livestock farmers to operate, expand and grow their farms, ac-

Wallace said he was “very thankful the government took the opportunity to listen and hear us, and to change their plans after seeing how it could affect rural Ontario and agriculture.”

He acknowledged that Ontario does “need to find a way” to build 1.5 million homes over the next decade — a Ford government goal — in light of the housing crisis. However, Ontario farmers still have the option of building at least one extra house (called an “accessory” dwelling) on their farms under existing law, according to municipal officials. In many municipalities, they are eligible to build two new homes for a total of three dwellings on the farm. Another proposed update to the Provincial Policy Statement would standardize and limit the number of farmhouses on one farm property to three across the Province.

Minister Clark introduced a separate, unrelated piece of legislation, Bill 97, related to rental housing which has no bearing on the farm-lot issue but, because of the timing, is often conflated with the severance proposal.

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