Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
If you’re one of those folks who enjoy wildflowers alongside the roadsides and wish to see more of them proliferating, you have a friend and advocate in Hines Boyd, a former county commissioner turned farmer.
Boyd appeared before the Jefferson County Commission recently to talk up the wildflowers and encourage the commission to protect them. More specifically, he talked about the county’s mowing program and a policy established by a former board to enhance the roadsides.
“In 2016, when I turned the District 3 seat over to Commissioner J. T. Surles, I said to him that he probably wouldn’t be hearing much from me, as I was going to fulfill one my passions and be a farmer for a while,’” Boyd said. “And that’s what I’ve been doing and have pretty much stayed out of here. But I want to talk about something now that has to do with roadsides and our roadside mowing program.”
“It’s something that will make the county prettier and save you money,” he added.
Boyd went on to quote a verse from America the Beautiful about the amber waves of grain, which he said was about wheat blowing in the wind. Jefferson County, he said, had its own little version of America the Beautiful, which he called its amber waves of ryegrass.
He went on to talk at length about the ryegrass, which he noted currently stood about knee high.
“And where we have stands of it, in my opinion, it makes a beautiful roadway,” Boyd said, going on to speak also about the beauty and benefits of red clover, which also covers roadsides in the
spring.
His point: “Those stands of ryegrass and clover didn’t get there by accident,” Boyd said. “They got there because of the way that we’ve managed our roadsides for the last 10 to 15 years.”
The county program, he said, had started about 2010, when the then board had asked the ag extension office what could be done to maintain the existing ryegrass and red clover stands, and the answer had been not to mow them too soon.
“Your ryegrass is an annual reseeding crop that reseeds from the prior year’s crop,” Boyd said. “And the clover does the same thing, although the clover seed will last a little longer.”
His ask of the commission, he said, was that it hold off on the mowing of roadsides until the ryegrass and red clover crops had time to mature and seed, which occurred about the first week of May or so.
What had started him thinking about the issue, Boyd said, was that he had been doing fence work that morning and happened to see the county mowers coming down the road, cutting the ryegrass along the roadside. What happened when the mowing occurred early and often enough was that the stands would eventually disappear, he said.
“What I am asking may not seem inconsequential,” Boyd said. “I’m asking for you to reaffirm the policy. I know you’ll get calls from people who can’t stand it if the grass if over five inches tall. But that’s not the way that you manage these roadsides if you want to keep them pretty and keep the ryegrass and clover coming back so that you have a nice green roadside without having brown Bahia grass out there. You may have to take a little flack from a few constituents, but explain it to them. Most will understand.”
And those that didn’t, he said, could mow the areas in front of their own places.
Boyd went on to bolster his argument with hard numbers.
“You add two big tractors, each of about 100-plus horsepower and each pulling a five-foot mower,” he said. “Close as I can get it, looking at Georgia budget estimates, if you mow two strips of 25 feet per side, that’s 50 feet per road, or six acres a mile that you’re mowing. So figure that’s $15 to $17 per acre, not counting the persons in the trucks following the mowers. The bottom line is that you’re spending about $100 a mile almost for mowing that is questionable whether it should be done this time of year. Let’s say you have 200 miles of roads to mow, that’s $20,000 per mowing.”
His bottom line: “You can save the taxpayers $20,000 annually by asking your constituents to tolerate the ryegrass and clover if they don’t like them for a few more weeks until they mature and then you can get the mowers out there. That’s my simple request to you tonight.
The commissioners listened politely to the request, but gave no commitment or indication of what their response might be.
x