Solution To Torching Grass Fields Still Hazy New Varieties, New Techniques Sought, But Overall Smoke Hasn’T Cleared Much

The last 20 years of grass field burning in North Idaho have generated increasing acrimony and more intense smoke management but almost no drop in the acreage being torched.

Washington, meanwhile, outlawed most grass field fires, only to see a huge surge in wheat stubble burning. The results of two decades of outcry, legal maneuvering and regulatory wrangling look much like a late summer sky in the Inland Northwest: hazy.

That’s not for lack of effort to clear the vistas. Commercial researchers are scrambling to find grass varieties that don’t need fire to provide profitable yields. And growers on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation just last week studied different types of field burning, part of an effort to sharply reduce smoke while keeping the benefits of burning.

In the interim, field burning continues.

Opponents have claimed one important victory: Field burning on the Rathdrum Prairie has been reduced by more than half.

At the same time, the number of acres burned on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation - where smoke from field burning is less likely to sting the major population centers - has increased.

The largest force in that change is urban development. New residents are less tolerant of field burning than the mining-logging-farming folks who once constituted the majority, growers say.

And people’s patience is wearing thin.

“The public has reached a point where they don’t want the smoke,” says Glenn Jacklin, who runs part of the seed company his family sold to Simplot Horticulture and Turf two years ago. “For the last 30 years, we’ve told them we’re doing a lot of research and they haven’t seen a lot of progress.”

That’s one reason Jacklin Seed initiated a 10-year phaseout of grass burning on the Rathdrum Prairie in 1997, Jacklin said. About half the Rathdrum Prairie growers agreed to pare their field burning by 10 percent each year.

Critics say it will take as many as five years to see significant changes as a result of the phaseout. That’s because some of the land that growers pledged to quit torching already was in housing developments and strip malls.

In any case, by 2006 the Jacklins promise to have alternatives - or quit burning fields. Which means, “development will take over,” Jacklin says.

Lawsuits also have prompted some growers to quit burning, Jacklin adds. Two major cases are pending. One was filed in 1997 by Kelly A. McAnally, a Coeur d’Alene nurse. She alleges field burning gave her asthma, a condition that has required her to be hospitalized several times and requires steroid treatments.

Last year the family of Sandpoint resident Sharon Buck filed suit charging her death from a severe asthma attack was caused by field burning on the Rathdrum Prairie.

Controlled burn

Efforts to deal with smoke go back decades. Growers started trying to manage smoke in the early 1970s by selecting burning days according to weather conditions that would dissipate the huge blue-white plumes rolling off of fields. Keeping the air clean for the 1974 Spokane World’s Fair, which had an ecological theme, was part of the impetus, some say.

By the early 1980s, the state Division of Environmental Quality started calling the shots in Idaho. The Legislature stripped the agency of its authority to regulate field burning and replaced it with a voluntary smoke management program in 1985.

Voluntary management, overseen by a citizen-farmer board whose members are appointed by the governor, has ruled Idaho’s smoke-vistas since. One of its most significant recent moves was setting lower limits on the amount of pollution that will trigger a stop-burning order.

Washington’s Department of Ecology, meanwhile, decided the negative health effects of burning far outweighed the benefits, and that there were economically viable alternatives to burning.

A three-year phaseout started in 1996. Now only growers who have slopes too steep for machinery to remove the grass residue can burn - if they obtain a special permit. That means less than 2,000 acres of Spokane County grass fields went up in smoke last year - an historic low.

Valuable vistas

Meanwhile, North Idaho tourism and real estate interests push for less smoke. Property near grass fields that are burned regularly ends up on the market for a long time or devalued, sometimes by several thousand dollars, said Jose Keller, president of the Coeur d’Alene Association of Realtors.

“There are so many homes on the market that people have that choice of purchasing the same kind of property for the same price away from where the burning is,” Keller said.

If there’s a way to burn fields without sending up so much smoke, Keller said, it should be required.

Local officials trying to boost tourism in North Idaho hope efforts by the Coeur d’Alene Tribe and others will mean less smoke cruising across Coeur d’Alene’s scenic vistas.

It’s important to reduce “days when the smoke doesn’t get cleared out, the wind changes and it drops down and blankets the community,” said Jonathan Coe, head of the Coeur d’Alene Area Chamber of Commerce.

Alternatives tried

Growers on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation hope they’ve found one way to battle field-burning haze. These farms - largely owned by non-Indians - operate under tribal air quality jurisdiction.

The tribe is examining a “bale and burn” technique: Farmers remove tons of hay from their fields before burning them. Less scraps of grass make for a less smoky fire, they hope.

Last Wednesday, about a dozen Idaho and Washington growers watched as two 60-acre fields burned, one loaded with hay and the other bare grass stubble with 36 tons of hay baled and gone.

Fairfield, Wash., grower Al Anderberg marveled as he watched the brownish cloud of smoke rising from a baled field. For most of the experimental burn, observers could see through the cloud of smoke. The traditional field, meanwhile, sent a thick and impenetrable cloud high into the air.

“That is a dramatic difference,” Anderberg said.

Grower Chris Ramsey has baled and then burned that same field three times in a row without compromising the grass seed yields, according to Paul Stearns, director of Tekoa, Wash., seed processor Seeds, Inc.

If the practice pans out, bale-and-burn requirements could be added to the tribe’s 12-year-old smoke management plan, said tribal press secretary Bob Bostwick.

“If it’s not the final solution, it’s certainly a step to find that,” Bostwick said.

The experimental technique isn’t without its drawbacks. Baling is costly - $25 to $30 per acre. A bigger problem, growers say, is finding markets to sell baled bluegrass straw. A straw particleboard plant in Plummer will take stubble off some - but not all - growers’ hands.

Selling the hay as animal feed is tough because it’s relatively low quality feed.

New grass revival

When Jacklin Seed led the burning phaseout in 1997, the company announced it also would step up research on alternatives at its 480-acre Rathdrum Prairie research farm.

Bluegrass needs a good dose of sunlight at the crown after harvest in order to produce a healthy seed crop the following season. So Jacklin is experimenting with cutting the field after seed harvest, baling the straw, shaving the field again and then raking off the residue to expose the crown to the sunlight.

Early on, it appears to work. But it needs to prove out over years. And all of that baling, shaving and raking adds $85 an acre to the cost of producing grass seed.

The company, meanwhile, is perfecting ryegrass and fescue, grass crops that don’t need that same jolt of fire.

“The biggest thing to let people know is that we are trying,” Jacklin said.

Some hear that. Hard-charging burning critic Art Long is starting to ease off.

“I think there is an awareness and everyone is trying to deal with the problem,” said Long, past president of the Clean Air Coalition and a member of the Smoke Management Board. “I think the farmers are exercising regimented burning.

“Still, it’s unfortunate grass is being burned.”

Graphic: Grass field burning