So I got my first on site visit and since it was over a month and really late winter when I last walked it, it was quiet a eye opener. I spent about 3 hours walking the perimeter and visiting various things.
The first shock was how quickly the pasture was being reclaimed - and not by desirables. The eastern red cedar, willow, and seedlings are rapidly taking over the pasture in huge patches. The pasture was also extremely uneven with little tuffs of grass growing 6" higher than the valleys. Not a flower anywhere
The second shock was how little wild life I saw. I saw one Eastern Gartersnake out sunning itself. It lay there staring at me, totally unafraid. I saw 1 crow making a fair amount of noise and caught a quick glimpse of a few turtles that dived as I walked by. And maybe a dozen birds - no song at all frittering past. But I saw no squirrels, no chipmunks, no rabbits, dear, fox or anything else. Not even insects. Clearly there is no abundance of wildlife currently.
The soil on the front portion was in very good condition, the clay middle portion was totally waterlogged still and the the back soil was extremely shallow and stony. I actually broke my soil tester trying to take a sample.I realized that between the slope to the season stream and the howling wind, erosion on the back part has taken its toll. I could literally see for about 4km of uninterrupted fields with no windbreaks or hedgerows. No cover and no protection.
Now the problem with hedgerows and wind breaks is that they shade your fields. If you growing a cash crop requiring as much sun as possible to achieve as much yield as possible, you don't just loose the space the hedgerow takes, but the shaded area also under produces. There is a wonderful app call suncal that allows you to calculate how long your shadow is for a given height for a given location. So for my area today, I would have just over 13m of shadow - during a time you desperately need the sun to get things growing. 19m in fall solstice - right around harvest. So how often should you plant windbreaks.
Thousands of articles later, I found this wonderful bit of research from the USDA. On page 12 it lays out that the distance between wind breaks should be "ten times the height of mature trees". So given a Canadian sugar maple mature height is about 20m, the distance between the windbreaks should be 200m. Or in other words the fields should be 200m. 100mx100m is a hectare, so if you do them in all, that's a 4 hectares or just under 10 acres maximum if you wish to minimize shadow.
I went back to the satellite image and started measuring distances and plotting hedgerows and decided to do a 2x 200m2 fields near the road. 2 x 200m by 100m for the "wetlands" and 2x 200mx100m for the back poor soil. Leaving 2 smaller fields at the northeast back of the property divided simply into 2. This gives full sun, part sun and full wind erosion protection through the whole property.
More importantly though, I hope it encourages wildlife to return, offering them the much needed protection and cover that currently is just not there along with the rich diversity of hedgerows.