The County That Stopped Mowing

For three decades, road crews in Larch County, Minnesota, mowed the county’s roadsides as though they were lawns. Each summer, tractors cut the grass along roughly 140 miles of county road four times, at a cost the county estimated at $210,000 a year. In 2022, the board voted to reduce that schedule to a single late-season cut on most rural stretches. Three summers later, the roadsides are taller, louder with insects, and, for some residents, considerably less welcome.

The decision was not primarily an environmental one. According to public works director Glen Ashby, the original motivation was financial. “We were losing operators, and the equipment was aging,” he said. “Reducing the schedule was the only realistic option that didn’t involve cutting something else.” The environmental argument arrived later, largely through the work of a field ecologist at a regional college who began counting pollinatorspollinators×Insects or other animals, such as bees, that carry pollen from one plant to another.Useful chunks: attract pollinators · pollinator habitat along two matched routes during the first summer of the change.

Her findings are encouraging but deliberately cautious. Dr. Ines Halloran and her students recorded roughly twice as many bee visits per survey on the unmowed route as on a comparison route that the county continued to cut. The number of flowering species also rose, from eleven to twenty-six over three seasons. “The direction of the change is fairly clear,” Halloran said. “The magnitudemagnitude×The size or extent of something, especially compared with what was expected.Useful chunks: the magnitude of the change · of this magnitude is harder to interpret. Two routes are not a landscape, and three summers include one unusually wet year.” She describes the results as an indication rather than proof: the unmowed route also runs closer to a wooded area, which may partly account foraccount for×To explain the cause of something, fully or partly.Useful chunks: partly account for · account for the difference the difference.

Residents’ objections are less easily quantifiedquantified×Measured or expressed as a number or amount.Useful chunks: difficult to quantify · quantify the effect but no less real. Some farmers worry that tall vegetation will harborharbor×To provide a place where something, often something unwanted, can live or hide.Useful chunks: harbor weeds · harbor pests weeds that spread into their fields. Several drivers have complained that the growth obscuresobscures×Makes something difficult to see, notice, or understand.Useful chunks: obscure the view · partly obscured deer at dusk, a concern the sheriff’s office says it cannot confirm or dismiss with its current crash data. Others object on aesthetic grounds. “It looks like nobody cares anymore,” said Darlene Fisk, who has lived beside County Road 9 for forty years. “Maybe the bees are happier. The road looks abandoned.”

That reaction is easy to dismiss as a matter of taste, but researchers who study public acceptance of such programs tend to take it seriously. Perceived neglect, they argue, can erodeerode×To weaken or reduce something gradually over time.Useful chunks: erode support · erode public trust support for a policy faster than any measurable harm. Similar programs elsewhere have occasionally been reversed within a few years, not because the ecological results were poor but because residents interpreted untidiness as a decline in public service.

Larch County’s response has been a compromise. Since 2024, crews have mowed a single eight-foot strip next to the pavement while leaving the rest of the roadside uncut. The strip improves sight lines at intersections and, perhaps more importantly, signals that the vegetation beyond it is intentional. Small signs reading “Managed for Pollinators” now stand at twelve locations. Ashby admits that the signs were partly a public relations measure. “But people respond differently to something that looks planned,” he said.

The savings, meanwhile, have been smaller than originally projected. Spot-mowing for weed control, sign maintenance, and the edge cut have reduced the annual saving to approximately $95,000, less than half the figure presented to the board. Critics regard the shortfallshortfall×The amount by which a result is less than what was expected or needed.Useful chunks: a budget shortfall · explain the shortfall as evidence of overpromising; supporters note that even the reduced figure represents a substantial share of a small department’s budget.

What the Larch County experiment ultimately demonstrates may be less about bees than about evidence itself. Each group holds data that supports its position and gaps that weaken it. The ecological results are promising but limited; the safety concerns are plausible but unverified; the savings are real but smaller than claimed. Halloran’s team has received funding to add four survey routes next summer, and the sheriff’s office has begun recording vegetation height at crash sites. Neither step will settle the argument quickly. Both, however, suggest a county that has decided to measure the change rather than simply defend it.