Ecology Plans More Burn Cutbacks New Rules Will Affect Wheat Growers, Who Burned More Acres This Year Than In ‘97

The state Department of Ecology will set new deadlines for additional reductions in agricultural burning to protect public health.

Mary Burg, Ecology’s top air quality official in Olympia, delivered that news Friday at the monthly Agricultural Burning Task Force meeting in Spokane.

The new regulations will cover cereal crops, including thousands of acres of wheat fields in Eastern Washington.

Wheat farmers burned approximately 229,000 acres of stubble this year, according to Ecology estimates released Friday. That’s a third more than in 1997.

The fields set ablaze in 1998 included 70,361 acres of spring wheat and 158,530 acres of fall wheat.

This fall, several farmers told the agricultural task force that some growers in Whitman County and the Columbia Basin were deliberately burning many more acres of wheat to expand their base acreage to prepare for a state burning phaseout.

There were several other reasons for so much burning in 1998, growers said. It was an unusually rainy year, with thick stubble and an outbreak of diseases and pests.

The increase in wheat stubble burning has angered clean-air activists, who fought for a recent state phaseout of bluegrass burning.

After Ecology agreed in 1996 to phase out bluegrass burning, burned acreage fell from 60,000 acres to 2,000 acres this year.

Ecology is looking for voluntary efforts by cereal grain farmers to further curb smoke, said spokeswoman Jani Gilbert.

Two smoke-curtailment proposals, from the Washington Association of Wheat Growers and the clean-air group Save Our Summers, were presented at the task force’s last meeting in October.

SOS wants a statewide 20,000-acre cap on fieldburning. The growers would like cutbacks to be based on emission reductions rather than acreage limits.

It still will be up to the task force to decide under what circumstances burning will be allowed, Gilbert said.

Ecology hasn’t decided yet whether to base the burning phaseout on acreage, as the agency did in its bluegrass regulations.

Clean-air groups say an acreage limit is the only way to go because it’s the only yardstick that can be tracked reliably through burning permits.

Farmers have said they prefer a combination of “best-management practices” to determine when burning is justified, plus some measurements of smoke pollution.

Ecology decided to step in because it’s unlikely that the growers and clean-air representatives on the task force ever will reach consensus, Gilbert said.

The state Clean Air Act gives Ecology the power to set smoke-reduction goals for cereal grains.

“Ecology will be the one to set the target. Over the next month, we’ll get our scientific and technical information together. There is a lot of science behind this,” Gilbert said.

This sidebar appeared with the story: WHAT’S NEXT Ecology will announce its smoke-reduction goals on Jan. 5. The task force is supposed to establish new management practices for field burning by March. They are to take effect next fall.