08/13/2026
Herbicide Application for Vegetation Management 🌳 Part 4
In power line rights-of-way, targeted herbicide application is an important and cost-effective best practice for controlling trees that would soon grow into electric lines. Crews apply herbicide directly to young, fast-growing trees such as pine and poplar. This stops unwanted growth before it threatens the lines, helps prevent future outages, and supports a longer, more efficient maintenance cycle.
In comparison, repeated bushhogging will certainly cut trees back for the short term; however, it encourages the remaining roots and stumps to produce more and even stronger stems. This is somewhat like clipping plants in a greenhouse to develop a hearty root system. When considering trees in the right-of-way, thicker and faster regrowth would require crews to return and bushhog again on a much shorter cycle, adding greater cost to ROW maintenance. By using carefully targeted herbicide backpack application instead of relying on repeated bushhogging, MEC can control incompatible trees more effectively, reduce long-term maintenance costs, make responsible use of members’ energy dollars, and help keep electric service reliable.
Overall, MEC works hard to ensure a right-of-way vegetation management program that covers all the bases. Your team manages growth from limbs along the sides of the right-of-way, from yard trees growing into and around the line, and lastly, by mitigating trees growing directly beneath the line. Addressing each of these outage causing risks is one of MEC’s top priorities in maximizing your service reliability – which in the end represents our strongest commitment to deliver the best in electric service to you, your family, and your business. Because – YOU MATTER!
