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to three inches in diameter on top, and want an eight-foot post five to six inches in diameter for corner posts. The largest hedge posts Bartels cuts, except for special orders, are nine-footers with seven- to eight-inch tops.
The cost of Bartels's posts varies with the size and volume purchased. A rancher or middleman buying a semi-load (2,000 or more ranch posts) gets a better price than someone buying only a few. He sells ranch posts for "somewhat over a dollar," and his largest posts for $12 to $15 depending on diameter and how straight the posts are. Straight posts, especially in the 6½-footers, are desirable, but not requisite. Drive down any Sandhills road and you will see Osage posts so crooked they look like they must have been screwed into the ground, hence the Sandhills description of a devious person as "crookeder than a hedge post." Cost of posts and cost of transportation probably explain why large hedge posts are the rule in southeastern Nebraska rather than in ranching country. Large ranches simply have too many miles of fence to pay $10 a post, and in the dry soils of central and western Nebraska even the small posts last for decades.
Osage orange posts are marketed in Nebraska's range county through farm supply businesses or lumberyards. Some ranchers buy, often a semi-load at a time, directly from cutters. Some sellers haul a load of posts to small towns in the Sandhills, park on main street and sell their posts off the truck. Bartels has Sandhills customers who pick up semi-loads in Tecumseh. While treated pine posts are becoming more common in western Nebraska rangelands, they will probably never replace Osage orange posts that cost less initially and last years longer.
Unlike wire fences, living Osage fences provided numerous other benefits. Walk along almost any hedgerow today. The level of the soil in the hedgerow is typically several inches higher than adjacent farmland, evidence they perform a valuable service in reducing wind erosion of cropland. Certainly they benefited wildlife. Perhaps more than any other species, the bobwhite prospered as hedgerows proliferated.
The bobwhite's principal native range lies southeast of Nebraska. It is a bird of the edge, where woodland meets grassland. Bobwhites were probably not abundant in southeastern Nebraska before settlement. The introduction of miles and miles of Osage orange hedges, though, created miles and miles of bobwhite habitat - habitat made even better by adjacent grain fields and disturbed land where seed-producing weeds and insects prospered. During the late-1800s and into the 1900s, as prairie chickens vanished and before the ring-necked pheasant spread, bobwhites were the game bird in southeastern Nebraska. Before market hunting was outlawed in 1901, huge numbers of bobwhites were trapped and shot in southeastern counties.
Although occasionally suffering die-offs during severe winters, bobwhites prospered in southeastern Nebraska into the 1920s. But even then, agriculture was using the land more intensively. "Originally, every prairie ravine in Nebraska had its plum thicket or weed patch, and every stream its border of heavy underbrush, while later on nearly every farm had its osage orange hedge, all affording good cover protection for these birds," University of Nebraska biologist Myron H. Swenk wrote in 1936. "This cover has since largely been eliminated, and this cover-loving bird does not have a suitable environment, ecologically, to flourish."
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