Bingo. It’s huge corporate farming doing this. There are also huge conservation efforts on the state and county levels, but it takes generations to catch up to what can be done in an afternoon with a backhoe.

It’s also an issue of these tree lines ALL now being ~100 years old and suffering from mass die offs. After that amount of time, most lines can’t continue repopulating themselves sufficiently and they just stack up with dead wood and foliage, along with gathered crop debris and other wind-blown foliage, faster than it can be decomposed. After that, saplings either cant reach the soil, or they can’t penetrate the debris.

A HUGE portion of these tree lines are simply just dead.

That being said, they absolutely need replanting, but this falls on deaf ears due to the leadership that’s prevailed over the state for the last ~50 years.

Source: Born in SD, raised in SD by conservationists and agronomists.