The Rural Voice, 1993-03, Page 24ry� ,i1j 111'1 , \1
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Trees a fatmer's friend
Many of today's deserts were once fertile areas.
Trees are a key to helping keep Ontario's
farm belt from the same fate, University of Guelph
horticulturalist Henry Kock says.
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree
Trees may have long been loved by poets
like Joyce Kilmer, but for the rest of humanity,
they have oftcn been seen as an enemy, even if
they were essential for existence.
Humans have long treated trees without
much respect says soft-spoken, philosophical
Henry Kock, a horticulturalist with The
Arboretum at the University of Guelph. Plato
lamented the devastation of the forest of ancient
Greece. Ancient Chinese saw the hillsides
stripped of their trees to supply lumber for the
emperors' grand construction schemes with
trees being left only for the emperor's hunting
preserve.
Cut and bum has long been an agricultural
practice in nearly every civilization. Primitive
farmers learned that if they burned off the trees,
the combination of the built-up organic matter
and the ash from the burning left a very fertile
soil. In temperate areas like North America, this
growing plot might be good for 30 to 70 years
while in rain forest areas, the fertility is leached
out in only two or three years.
People become accustomed to the landscape
they see and sometimes don't realize that it
wasn't always so, Kock says. The area of Iraq
where the Desert Storm war was fought, near
the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
was once a fertile crescent where civilization is
thought to have started. The Sahara Desert was
once an area covered with grasslands and
forested watershed, similar to the great plains of
North America. The nomadic people started
settling in pockets along the rivers, cutting trees
for fuel and shelter and grazing their goats and
camels (goats are particularly hard grazers,
letting little grow).
Trees and other plants are the clothing of the
soil, Kock says. "If we were to go outside as
human beings in minus 10 degree weather we
would find that exposure would diminish our
bodies to something substantially less than what
we think they are. But if we are adequately
protected by clothing, we reduce the heat loss of
our body."
The plant world functions in a similar way,
reducing the rate at which temperature changes.
It also works, in a similar way to a mulch, to
reduce the evaporation of water from the soil.
The clearing of the land in Ontario 150 years
ago has resulted in large areas of open land.
Some of the land that should never have been
cleared has been replanted to trees in a program
that started in the 1920s but forest cover is still
scarce in many counties. Open land, Kock says,
is subject to the same desertification processes
that turned the fertile areas of the Sahara and the
Tigris -Euphrates area into deserts.
Without vegetation cover, deserts are subject
to high day -time, low night-time temperatures.
The land is heated up so much, the moisture that
evaporates is pulled into high, towering
thunderheads so that the rain comes down in
violent thunderstorms, with hard-hitting
raindrops that destroy soil structure. The
organic material is dislodged and washed away
into rivers and lakes. All that is left is the sandy,
broken down rock that is the basis of soils, with
no humus left.
"We are experiencing heavier and heavier
storms in Ontario and central North America in
my own memory since I was 10," Kock says. "I
hear other people talk about it. The intensity of
the rain has changed but the average amount of
rainfall has stayed the same. We
only measure *A4tdt"V
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