This is the first of several posts on hedgerow removal, and how it makes living in rural Ontario increasingly dangerous or impossible.
On a January morning outside Hepworth, near Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula, the road looks deceptively clear. The plows came through before dawn, leaving dark pavement and low banks of snow along the shoulder. There has been no snowfall since yesterday afternoon. And yet, within minutes of leaving the hamlet, the horizon begins to blur. A pale veil lifts off the fields and drifts across the road, first in thin streaks, then in thicker sheets. Visibility collapses without warning. Drivers slow to a crawl. The snow seems to appear from nowhere, even though nothing is falling from the sky.
This is the kind of winter driving that leaves people uneasy. Not the steady accumulation of a storm you can plan around, but sudden whiteouts on days that are supposed to be manageable. Roads that are plowed again and again, not because snow keeps falling, but because it keeps coming back. For many Canadians who live in snowbelt regions—downwind of the Great Lakes, in exposed rural corridors—these conditions feel increasingly familiar. Winters, by most measures, are getting warmer. Yet driving feels less safe.
Our dogs are carefully exploring 5-feet-high snow drifts from a neighbour’s field.
The paradox is that warmer winters bring more snow to the snow belt. The warm pacific air interacts with the jetstream, pushing cold arctic air over the Great Lakes. Waming changes local wind, water, land use, and policy in ways that increase weather volatility and and our exposure to it. It feels trivial to say “The danger on the road today is often not snowfall itself, but snow in motion”.
Snow risk comes in two forms, though they are often conflated. The first is falling snow: precipitation that reduces visibility, accumulates on pavement, and requires plowing. This is the risk most people think of when they hear about winter storms. The second is blowing and drifting snow: snow that has already fallen and is later lifted, transported, and redeposited by wind. Blowing snow can reduce visibility to zero on an otherwise clear day. It can fill in a freshly plowed road within minutes. And because it depends less on what is happening in the sky than on what is happening on the ground, it is far less predictable for a traveling driver.
Road safety failures in winter occur not only during storms, when drifts create white walls where I cannot see the front of the car. They are treacherous after the stomrs died down, when people have to return to the roads. On our own farm, we are often trapped because 3 ft snow drifts from a neighboring field, without municipal plowing services because no new snowfall. This happens whenever snowfall leaves dry, low-density snow on open ground. A cold front brings a bit of wind. Snow is lifted from fields and carried across kilometres of open terrain until it meets resistance—often the road’s own snowbank. Drivers encounter sudden whiteouts with no visual warning. Municipal crews are called back out, sometimes repeatedly, to clear the same stretch of pavement. Despite improved weather, from the plow operator’s seat, it feels futile.
The science of blowing snow is less intuitive than that of falling snow, but it is well understood. Snow behaves differently depending on its density, cohesion, and liquid water content. Dry, freshly fallen snow consists of loosely bonded crystals that can be lifted by relatively modest winds. Wet snow, by contrast, tends to clump and resist movement. Temperature matters only indirectly, as a proxy for snow type. A day at minus ten degrees Celsius is dangerous because it is likely to leave behind dry, erodible snow that can be mobilized once the wind picks up.
Once snow is entrained, wind speed and surface roughness determine how far it travels. Over rough terrain—forests, hedgerows, wetlands—wind slows and snow settles. Over smooth terrain, it accelerates. Modern agricultural landscapes, with their large, uninterrupted fields, are remarkably efficient at producing blowing snow. In winter, they function less like farmland and more like conveyor belts.
Fetch length—the distance wind can travel without obstruction—is critical. The longer the fetch, the greater the volume of snow that can be lifted and transported. Roads often sit at the downwind edge of these open fields, where snow finally drops out of suspension. In this sense, many rural roads are not just victims of weather; they are part of the snow transport system.
For generations, this system was moderated by landscape features that have largely disappeared. Hedgerows, shelterbelts, woodlots, wetlands, even uneven ground created by seasonal flooding all added friction. They slowed wind, trapped snow, and broke up fetch. Snow accumulated where it caused little harm.
It is important to be precise about what these features do. Hedgerows do not make snowstorms weaker. They do not reduce the amount of snow that falls from the sky. What they do is reduce wind speed and turbulence near the ground. By forcing snow to settle before it reaches the road, they prevent whiteouts and repeated drifting. In aerodynamic terms, they function much like engineered snow fences—porous barriers that reduce wind energy without creating dangerous eddies.
When hedgerows are removed, the effect is decisive. Snow that once settled in fields now travels. Roads that once required plowing after storms now require plowing between them, again and again. School busses need to be cancelled, schools remain closed – six weeks in 2024/5, and already 4 this winters. Risk shifts from land to infrastructure, from private fields to public budgets. And rural dwellers carry the private cost when they miss work, cannot rent out houses, and recover from accidents.
Climate change has intensified this dynamic in ways that are easy to misinterpret. Warmer air can hold more moisture, increasing the potential for heavy precipitation events. At the same time, winters are increasingly characterized by marginal temperatures—storms that hover around freezing, frequent freeze–thaw cycles, and a shortening of the period when snow reliably persists on the ground. This does not produce a simple trend toward more or less snow. It produces variability.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the Great Lakes region. Historically, the freezing of the lakes acted as a stabilizing force in winter. Once ice cover formed, evaporation slowed dramatically, and lake-effect snow diminished. Winter weather became more predictable. Snowbelts were still snowbelts, but the extremes were tempered.
Today, ice forms later, if at all. Open water persists deep into winter, providing a steady source of heat and moisture. When cold air passes over these lakes, snowfall can be intense. And cold air fronts persist as the warming Arctic dislocates cold into the great lakes! But the key change is not just the amount of snow; it is the loss of an “off switch.” Moisture supply is stabilized, while snowfall outcomes become more volatile. When conditions align, snow can fall hard and fast, leaving behind large volumes of dry snow that are later mobilized by wind.
Arctic warming adds another layer of complexity. The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, reducing the temperature gradient that drives large-scale atmospheric circulation. Scientists are careful in how they describe the implications of this shift, and with good reason. The polar vortex does not simply “collapse,” nor do cold winters vanish. What does appear to be changing is variability. Under certain configurations, cold Arctic air can still reach southern Canada, even when temperatures in the Yukon reach unprecedented winter warmth. These cold outbreaks remain essential triggers for high-impact snow and blowing snow events here in Southwestern Ontario.
Yet climate is only one aspect of the story. The other part lies in how Canadians have adapted—often rationally, sometimes shortsightedly—to pressures that originate far beyond the snowbelt.
Drought and heat stress in major agricultural regions have increased global competition for arable land. At the same time, domestic policies, particularly biofuel mandates, have intensified demand for crops not as food, but as energy inputs. These forces combine to create land scarcity, even in regions where the climate remains relatively favourable. The response has been predictable: agricultural intensification.
Fields have grown larger. Hedgerows, wetlands, and woodlots have been removed to make way for efficient machinery. Drainage systems—tile drains and straightened ditches—have been expanded to dry soils earlier in spring and extend the growing season, and their construction requires tree removal. Marginal lands that once functioned as buffers are now brought into production.
From a winter safety perspective, these private decisions of farmers are disastrous. Drainage smooths the landscape, eliminating wet depressions and uneven ground that once trapped snow. Larger fields increase fetch. The removal of vegetation reduces surface roughness. Together, these changes create ideal conditions for blowing snow.
The burden of this transformation does not fall on those who benefit. It falls on municipalities tasked with keeping roads passable. It falls on rural dwellers who need roads to commute to work and get their children to school. Let’s not even speak of those impacted by road accidents ! Blowing snow forces repeated plowing, even when no new snow has fallen. Crews are dispatched again, and again, to the same stretches of road. Fuel costs rise. Equipment wears out faster. Salt use increases, with downstream impacts on water quality. Labor budgets are strained, especially during long cold spells when crews are already stretched thin.
These costs appear in municipal budgets, in deferred maintenance, in higher taxes or reduced services elsewhere. They also appear in collisions, injuries, and near-misses that never make headlines but shape how people experience winter. Parents worry about school buses. Seniors avoid driving. Emergency response times increase. The risk is diffuse, but all to real.
What makes this situation particularly frustrating is that solutions already exist. Across Canada, municipalities have experimented with living snow fences—strategically planted rows of trees and shrubs designed to trap snow before it reaches the road. These programs are not radical. They are based on decades of research and practical experience. In many cases, they save money by reducing plowing frequency and improving safety.
Provincial governments have acknowledged the value of these measures, at least in principle. Snow fencing appears in legislation and guidance documents. Pilot projects are launched. Money is available through agricultural grants or tree planting grants. Townships and conservation authorities offer carrots. Yet farmers are not picking these up in ways that would improve the landscape, in the contrary. Our broader landscape continues to “prairie-fy” as Ontario’s cash crappers are removing one treeline after the other. Preventive design is overshadowed by reactive maintenance. The plow, not the hedgerow, remains the primary symbol of winter readiness.
A big part of the challenge is that winter risk is rarely framed as a land-use issue. Weather is seen as external, unavoidable. Roads are treated as isolated corridors rather than as features embedded in a wider landscape. The connection between a drained field and a whiteout kilometres away is not obvious, even to those who live with its consequences.
Returning to that road outside Hepworth, the wind eventually dies down. The snow settles. Drivers resume their speed, shaken but relieved. By afternoon, the road looks clear again. The episode will not appear in any climate dataset or storm record. It will show up only in overtime hours logged, fuel burned, nerves frayed. And another accident in the OPP database.
Resilience, we are often told, is about preparedness. But preparedness is not just a matter of equipment and response. It is a matter of design. The conditions that make winter driving dangerous are shaped long before the first snowflake falls—by policies that govern land use, by economic pressures that favour efficiency over redundancy, and by a collective failure to recognize that stability is something we build, or dismantle, together.
In a warming world, winter is not disappearing. It is becoming more punchy, less forgiving. And the road, like the landscape around it, reflects the choices we have made and continue to make. We can do better.
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