In Normandy, bocage hedges cover 170,000 kilometers.
And yet, in the Pays de Bray alone, in the north of Seine-Maritime, 90 kilometers have disappeared in 20 years.
For four years, the Arques Watershed Union (SMBV Arques) has been providing technical and financial assistance to individuals, communities and farmers to reappear 35 kilometers of hedgerows in the landscape.
The latest project took place this Monday, February 19 on the farm of Damien Merveille, established for five years in Val Boury, in Neufchâtel-en-Bray.
The union's project managers wanted it to be participatory by inviting around fifty students from two classes of SEGPA (Adapted general and vocational education section) and 6th and 5th grades from Albert Schweitzer college.
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For a whole day, the students planted corm trees, lime trees, cherry trees, walnut trees, but also hornbeams, hazelnut trees and even rosehips, “to obtain a beautiful mixed hedge within 20 years,” explains Clément Crélé , a nurseryman in the Somme whose particularity is to produce a million trees and shrubs per year "i.e. 500 hectares of forest or 500 kilometers of hedges, from seeds that we collect in the wild spaces of Normandy, in the Hauts-de-France and Île-de-France in order to conserve local genetics.
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“Our shrubs are then prepared and placed in open fields for one or two years before being replanted.
We thus obtain hedges adapted to the territory.
Here (in the Pays de Bray) it will be a high hedge which can go up to 20 meters.
And we have to plant them, because for every kilometer reintroduced, six disappear,” assures this specialist.
Of the 1,050 km2 managed by SMBV Arques, 70,000 hectares are agricultural areas.
It was after the Second World War that hedges were abandoned.
The reasons ?
The need to feed oneself and therefore to have larger plots of land, without obstacles, and then the arrival of mechanization.
Also read: A bocage hedge project?
Our advice to make it happen!
Over time, collective awareness of the effects of global warming has changed the perception of things.
On September 29, 2023, the Minister of Agriculture Marc Fesneau presented in Brittany a “Pact in favor of the hedge” with the objective of replanting 50,000 kilometers of trees and shrubs in France by 2030 A budget of 100 million euros is already open in addition to already existing public funding.
“We noticed their many advantages, particularly in preventing soil erosion,” confirms Loïc Thuilliez, director of the SMBV.
Hedges act as a hydraulic brake and encourage sedimentation, which prevents mud on roads, in houses and in filling ponds.
This is important during this period when precipitation is increasingly heavy.
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Very useful hedges but expensive to maintain
“From October 15 to November 30,” continues Loïc Thuilliez, “300 mm of water fell, or a third of the volume that falls on the department in a year in just 40 days.
Hedges also allow better infiltration and filtration of water towards groundwater.
In Seine-Maritime, 100% of the water resources come from these aquifers.
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The director of the SMBV also emphasizes the essential role of hedges in the protection of biodiversity, especially birds and insects and their ability to capture and store carbon “to restore oxygen behind”.
But, he also points out, “they also offer a possible source of income with the use of the resource from pruning to, for example, power a biomass boiler room like here in Neufchâtel-en-Bray.
This is also what interests farmers who, for the most part, are not opposed to replanting them as part of an economic plan.
The only obstacle is the question of the valorization of these hedges, because maintaining them is expensive.”
In the meantime, the young Normans called upon to plant these 490 new plants promise to become “excellent message carriers”.