Vegetation Management

Vegetation Management encompasses a variety of activities, such as herbiciding (either aerial sprays or targeted applications), targeted manual cutting via methods such as brushing (described in more detail on another page), indiscriminately clearing large amounts of vegetation through the use of heavy equipment (such as mulchers), and grazing by animals.

The point of applying herbicides is to apply chemicals which will cause mortality in most species, but which will not have a negative effect upon the crop trees that need to be retained. As noted above, the application of herbicides is generally broken down into two methods. Aerial spraying might include very large scale spraying through the use of rotary-winged aircraft (helicopters) or fixed-wing applications (small aircraft such as crop-dusters). On a smaller scale, some herbicide programs rely solely upon manual application methods, where workers traverse through an area wearing backpack sprayers, and manually spray the pesticides across the block. Backpack spraying is slower, but it is generally less expensive and runs less risk of trespasses into no-spray zones such as riparian management areas alongside streams and adjoining bodies of water. With herbicides, naturally, there are a lot of restrictions, and depending on the province, there are varying rules about which ones may be applied, and the exact operational ground rules that come into play.

Targeted applications include processes such as basal bark application, where liquid herbicides are sprayed directly onto the base of trees, shrubs, and shrubby vegetation that need to be eliminated. Basal bark applications are generally performed on non-preferred and non-acceptable species of trees which are competing with the crop trees. The herbicide, in theory, will kill the trees and vegetation to which it is applied. This type of treatment is more effective than aerial applications in areas where the stems being targeted have become too large to be susceptible to a light application of a diluted herbicide.