By Brent Oberlink | President, Lanracorp
Here’s something I see all the time in this industry, and it costs pipeline and utility operators a lot of money: they clear a right-of-way, think the work is done, and then watch the ROW come roaring back in two or three years like it was never touched. Sometimes faster.
And they can’t figure out why it seems to grow back even more aggressively than before the first clearing.
There’s a reason for that. A few of them, actually. And once you understand the biology behind what’s happening, you start to understand why a mow-and-go approach — or even a forestry mulch-only approach — isn’t a vegetation management plan. It’s just a temporary setback for the plants.
The Rootball Problem Nobody Talks About
When you run a forestry mulcher through a mature woody ROW, you’re doing something very effective on the surface. The machine chews through stems, saplings, and brush, leaving behind a clean mulched layer. It looks great. It gets the job done.
But here’s the problem: the rootball stays. You didn’t kill any of the woody growth.
That root system is still in the ground, fully intact, loaded with stored energy in the form of carbohydrates and nutrients. The plant is not dead. It’s dormant and it’s ready to thrive.
When you remove the above-ground structure of a mature woody plant and leave the root system intact, that plant doesn’t start over from scratch. It doesn’t grow like a seedling. It draws on a massive energy reserve and shoots new growth from the base — basal sprouting — at a rate that a brand-new seedling could never match. The larger and older the root system, the more energy it has stored, and the faster and more aggressive that regrowth is going to be.
Research confirms what field experience already tells us: trees and brush controlled purely by mechanical cutting demonstrate vegetative sprouting and an exaggerated growth response for at least a few years after treatment. You didn’t slow the plant down. You woke it up.
This is why a ROW that was cut only comes back harder and denser than before. The root system is fully grown. The competition for that above-ground space has been eliminated. And there’s nothing slowing those root-fed sprouts down.
Why ROWs Regrow Faster Than a Normal Cleared Lot
The rootball issue is just the beginning. ROWs have a set of conditions that make them particularly aggressive at regenerating vegetation, and most of those conditions have nothing to do with the treatment method.
1. Edge effect from the surrounding woods
A right-of-way cut through timber or mature woodland creates hundreds of feet of exposed edge between cleared ROW and standing trees. That edge is biologically active. Seeds rain in from the adjacent canopy continuously — wind-dispersed, bird-dispersed, and animal-dispersed. A cleared lot in the middle of a field doesn’t have that pressure. A pipeline ROW through heavy timber absolutely does. The seed source is right there, every season.
2. Disturbed soil activates a buried seed bank
Every time you mechanically work a ROW — mulching and mowing — you disturb the soil surface. That disturbance activates a seed bank that has been sitting dormant in the ground, in some cases for years. Many weed and pioneer species require soil disturbance to germinate. You clear the ROW and inadvertently trigger a germination event from species that were waiting for exactly that opening.
3. Increased sunlight and warmth
Clearing opens the canopy. Plants that were suppressed by shade suddenly have full sun. Understory species and edge species that were struggling become aggressive colonizers almost overnight. The same ROW that had a closed canopy limiting ground competition now has maximum growing conditions for exactly the species you don’t want.
4. Nutrient-rich decomposing mulch
Forestry mulch decomposes over time and returns nutrients to the soil. That’s actually a benefit for erosion control. But it also feeds the next generation of vegetation growing up through it. The mulch layer is essentially a fertilizer bed for the sprouting root systems and germinating seeds underneath it.
5. No competitive cover
On a properly managed lot or pasture, established grass or groundcover competes with woody regrowth and slows it down. A freshly cleared ROW has neither. It’s open real estate, and the most aggressive pioneer woody species will move in first.
Put all of this together, and you have a system that is biologically primed to fill back in — fast, dense, and with a head start most people don’t account for.
Why a Mechanical-Only Program Is Not an IVM Program
I talk to a lot of operations and project managers who run their ROW on a cut-only cycle. They mow or mulch on a three-year schedule, sometimes shorter. And every cycle, the work gets harder, the crew hours go up, and the cost stays the same or climbs.
That’s the trap. Mechanical-only treatment addresses the above-ground plant, but it leaves the root system and the seed pressure completely untouched. Every cut restimulates those basal sprouts. The rootball gets bigger and more established with each cycle. The density of incompatible woody stems can actually increase over time with mowing-only programs because you’re constantly pushing the plants into a regrowth response.
The research on this is not ambiguous. Published economic analyses of 20-year vegetation management programs have found that IVM programs consistently demonstrate cost savings of 25% to 57% over repeated mechanized mowing alone. In one widely cited study, the present value of 20-year management costs using an IVM program was approximately half the cost of mechanical cutting without herbicides. Half.
One utility operating 5,500 miles of transmission line — about 60,000 acres of ROW — moved to an IVM-based program and eliminated mowing almost entirely. Lower per-acre cost, longer treatment intervals, and a ROW that stabilizes over time rather than getting worse.
The savings aren’t just in the direct treatment cost, either. A well-executed IVM program shifts a ROW from high-frequency mow cycles to management-based intervals. Over time, compatible low-growing vegetation establishes itself in the treated ROW and out-competes the woody regrowth that was driving the maintenance schedule. The ROW stabilizes. The access improves. The incident risk from overgrowth drops. All of that has value that doesn’t show up in a line-item cost comparison of one treatment cycle.
What Lanracorp’s SMART-ROW Actually Looks Like in Practice
This is where the approach matters. An IVM program — or our unique SMART-ROW approach — is not just spraying herbicide. It’s a planned program that matches the right treatment to the right plant at the right time in the right location — and documents it in a way that informs future management decisions.
At Lanracorp, our SMART-ROW program integrates GIS-based ROW mapping, vegetative assessment, and targeted treatment prescription before we ever put a crew in the field. Here’s why that matters:
You can’t treat what you haven’t identified. Before we treat a ROW, we map it. That data shapes the prescription and plan. A ROW with high stem density and a history of mechanical-only treatment needs a different approach than a newly converted ROW. Applying the same treatment across a diverse 50-mile ROW wastes money and underperforms.
Herbicide selection matters. For woody ROW species, not all herbicides perform the same. Broadleaf-specific formulations like triclopyr move through the vascular system and down into the root, addressing the rootball problem at the source. Applied at the right growth stage — typically when regrowth has reached 18 to 24 inches, when the plant is actively translocating — you achieve a 90%+ dieback rate that cuts the root energy reserve rather than just the stem. That changes the trajectory of regrowth from an exaggerated response to a suppressed one.
Treatment timing is everything. The window for effective foliar herbicide application is specific. Too early and translocation is incomplete. Too late and the plant has hardened off and the uptake rate drops. SMART-ROW scheduling builds that timing into the program, not as a best-effort estimate but as a mapped and tracked prescription window for each section of the ROW.
GIS documentation creates long-term value. Every treatment we do is logged to a GIS layer. Species, density, treatment type, application date, product, and outcome. The next time that section is treated — or the next contractor inherits the program — there’s a data record that supports better decisions and defensible environmental compliance. That’s infrastructure, not paperwork.
The Conversation the Industry Needs to Have
I understand why operators default to mechanical clearing. The equipment is familiar. The results are visible. There’s no public conversation to have about herbicides. It’s the way it’s always been done. But it’s only one tool in the tool chest. And in a budget-conscious environment, you must start looking at all of the tools available.
When you run the numbers on what it costs to perpetually restimulate an intact root system on a mow cycle, versus what it costs to strategically suppress and transition that ROW with a properly designed IVM program, the gap is significant.
More importantly, a mechanical-only program doesn’t move you toward a better ROW. The ROW isn’t going to stop growing. The rootballs aren’t going anywhere. The seed rain from adjacent timber is going to keep coming every season. The question isn’t whether to manage the ROW — it’s whether you’re managing it toward a stable, lower-cost outcome, or managing it to stay exactly where you are.
SMART-ROW and IVM is how you stop managing the symptoms and start managing the system.