North Dakota County Has The Highest Concentration Of Shelterbelts

Growing up in Grand Forks, North Dakota we didn't have much to brag about.

Sure, we had the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux hockey team (now the Hawks), and the Red River of the North is a pretty big Catfishing destination (something I could never get into, Catfish), but that was about it.

Grand Forks County was mainly known for historic floods, brutal winters, and mosquitos that can literally change the TV channel on your remote.  Again, not much to boast about.

Grand Forks County and the entire Red River Valley are so flat that you can practically see from Grand Forks to Fargo.  Okay, so maybe that's a bit of an overstretch, but believe me, the scenery is lacking.

Grand Forks is "World Class" however for one thing other than hockey and Channel Cats.

According to the University of North Dakota Geography and Geographic Information Science, Grand Forks County boasts the HIGHEST concentration of shelterbelts in the world.  I remember seeing the signs as you entered the county when I was growing up.  I looked for them yesterday as I made a quick visit to my hometown, and they are now removed from I29.

I also noticed fewer shelterbelts in general as I drove through the county yesterday.  Most likely due to the changing of farming practices.  As commodity prices have increased over the years, and trees began to die out, many shelterbelts are just being removed to increase acreage for row crops.

Shelterbelts were widely introduced into North Dakota in the 1940s.

Especially, in counties like Grand Forks, where erosion is a problem with flat land that experiences a lot of wind.  The Great Plains Shelterbelt Project was the government's answer to the 1930s dust bowl to combat water evaporation and erosion.  By 1942 the United States Forest Service had planted 220 million trees, stretching from Texas all the way to North Dakota.

Now, more and more of those tree rows have not been replanted over the years, and the number of shelterbelts is dwindling not only in Grand Forks County but across the state.

Hopefully, we won't see another dust bowl era anytime soon, but history sure seems to repeat itself as people tend to forget.