With Regulation Goes Responsibility

Guerrilla tactics, by either side, won’t settle our region’s battle over agricultural field burning.

All that the hostilities of recent days accomplished was to inflame and divide.

Tempers have smoldered on both sides of the field burning controversy for a long time. It’s a classic urban-rural confrontation: Farmers, dwindling in number, encroached upon by regulations and sprawling suburbs, struggle to make a living as the global market collapses the price for their commodities. Urban dwellers, meanwhile, dislike agricultural smoke, dust and chemicals, and unfortunately, could not care less about agriculture’s enormous value to the region.

This is a contest that farmers, being far less numerous than city dwellers, can’t win - especially with a made-for-TV issue like grass-field burning, which pits clouds of agricultural smoke against wheezing children and their militant moms.

This year, the Washington state Ecology Department banned field burning by grass seed producers. In the future, it will decide whether farmers may continue to burn wheat stubble.

Reluctantly, for they fiercely opposed the ban, farmers now are trying to find a way to dispose of grass straw without burning it. This will be expensive and the new methods may hurt their yields. But most are trying to comply.

However, some farmers apparently want to defy the ban. Yes, wheat prices are disastrously low and farmers feel on the brink. But this is futile. It’s impossible to hide a column of smoke or a scorched field. In addition, it is not fair to law-abiding farmers, who are sacrificing financially to develop their industry’s economic future.

During the past week, a group of Columbia Basin farmers detained two Ecology Department inspectors who ventured onto a field without a warrant. Days earlier, a couple of clean-air activists trespassed onto a field with cameras, provoking a confrontation with farmers, who of course were less than friendly.

Regulatory enforcement ought to be handled by professionals, in a professional manner.

Showy confrontations won’t get the grass seed business where it needs to go.

Investment and innovation will. In July, the Ecology Department awarded grants for more study of alternatives to burning. One, already proven feasible, is the conversion of stubble into particleboard. The next step ought to be larger state grants, to help create viable factories and market systems for stubble disposal.

Having confiscated some of the farmers’ scarce profitability with its regulation, the state now has a duty to help them make the transition so their vital contributions to our region continue.