Bill would let farmers torch reserve farmland

BOISE – An additional 4,000 acres of farmland could be burned in North Idaho next year under a bill that cleared a House committee Wednesday.

“This will promote healthy soils and wildlife and it will allow producers to use burning as a tool,” Wayne Hurst, an eastern Idaho farmer and president of the Idaho Grain Producers, told the House Agricultural Affairs Committee.

The measure, proposed by his association, would allow field burning on land that’s in the federal Conservation Reserve Program.

The committee voted 6-2 to pass House Bill 593, which now moves to the full House.

Idaho’s field-burning laws now allow burning only after a field is harvested. Land in the reserve program isn’t harvested, however.

The federal program pays farmers not to harvest the land, essentially to let the soil rest.

If the law is amended to allow burning of conservation land, federal officials would have to approve the burning.

“This bill allows CRP landowners to be better neighbors in controlling weeds and pests,” Hurst told the committee.

Rep. Wendy Jaquet, D-Ketchum, said, “I think some of us would like to see a diminishment or a reduction in burning. If I vote for your bill, will there be more burning?”

Hurst replied, “There would be a slightly larger amount of burning throughout the state, but it will be legal and supervised.”

Rep. Mack Shirley, R-Rexburg, said many farmers who take part in the Conservation Reserve Program already burn those fields. “This bill will bring them into compliance,” Shirley said.

In response to questions from the committee, Hurst said Idaho has close to 800,000 acres enrolled in the federal program.

“No one really knows how much of that will be burned,” he said.

But according to rough estimates from the state Department of Agriculture, at most 16,000 acres of CRP ground would be burned each year, he added. In the northern part of the state, probably 4,000 acres would be burned, Hurst said.

George Robinson, chief of the Agricultural Resources Bureau for the state department, said close to 110,000 acres of registered farm fields were burned across the state last year. About 90 percent of the burning was in North Idaho.

Unlike annual summer grass field burning, CRP land could be burned at any time of the year, said Dar Olberding, lobbyist for the grain producers.

“It doesn’t have to be burned at a bad time of year,” Olberding said.

A Sandpoint-based group that opposes field burning on public health grounds lamented passage of the bill.

“This is pretty shocking. … I’m sorry I wasn’t there today,” said Patti Gora, executive director of Safe Air For Everyone.

“I have a hunch that there’s an awful lot of land that could potentially be burned – much more than they’ve been telling us. And how will we know?”

Gora noted that the Agriculture Department has refused to divulge the location of upcoming field burns, citing a 1992 public records exemption regarding seed crops.

“People really do have a right to know when and where burns are going to happen,” she said.

Rep. Tom Trail, R-Moscow, has introduced a bill to make the department notify local authorities and the public of upcoming approved burns.

It has not yet had a committee hearing.