Farmers fear ban’s impact
A ban on field burning will speed up Rathdrum Prairie’s transition from agricultural fields to tract homes, a grass seed grower predicted Friday.
“This is the beginning of the end of the open space on the Rathdrum Prairie as we know it,” said Wayne Meyer, a former state legislator.
On Thursday, Idaho officials announced that no field burning permits would be issued this year. The decision was based on a surprise ruling last month from a federal appeals court.
The court ruled that Idaho’s plan for implementing the federal Clean Air Act had permitted agricultural burning when it was written in 1972 but later deleted the provision, which subsequently made agricultural burning illegal in Idaho.
The deletion was inadvertent, said Phil Bandy, deputy director for the Idaho state Department of Agriculture. Federal and state agencies all agree that field burning is a viable method of reducing crop residue, he said. But revising the plan could take up to two years.
By then, Bandy said, “the economic damage will pretty much be done to grass growers.”
Kentucky bluegrass farmers burn the residue off their fields in late summer to spur the next year’s growth. Without burning, grass seed yields plummet by 75 percent, Meyer said. Despite years of research, University of Idaho researchers have not found an economically viable alternative to torching the fields.
“If we can’t burn next year, we’re out of bluegrass,” said Wade McLean, who grows 600 acres of Kentucky bluegrass on the Rathdrum Prairie. He farms land belonging to his mother-in-law, Vonnie Satchwell, whose family has been in North Idaho since the 1890s.
Meyer was 23 when he and his brothers first purchased farmland on the Rathdrum Prairie. Today, family members farm 3,000 acres – some leased, some their own land. Most of the acreage is planted in bluegrass.
In 2002, the latest year for which statistics were available, Kootenai County accounted for nearly 40 percent of Idaho’s bluegrass seed production.
But the flat ground of the prairie has long been coveted by developers. As the cities of Post Falls and Hayden expand their boundaries, subdivisions have risen in place of crops. At current prices, Meyer earns about $400 per acre from seed production. “Almost every farmer who is still in business on the Rathdrum Prairie has sold property at one time or another to keep their operation going,” Meyer said.
Larry Gady, a farmer from Rockford, Wash., also raises Kentucky bluegrass for seed. In 1998, when Washington banned the burning of bluegrass fields, he had to give up torching his fields annually.
At the time, grass seed prices were high – around $1.30 a pound. The high prices gave him just enough margin to invest in costlier methods of raising bluegrass, Gady said.
But Idaho farmers don’t have that luxury, he said. Prices now are closer to 60 cents a pound.
Clean-air advocates, meanwhile, said the end to field burning can’t come quickly enough.
Vivian Evans said she has suffered from asthmatic reactions to the smoke since moving to Rathdrum in 1972.
“I’m excited,” Evans said. “I can’t believe that somebody finally stepped up and said, ‘You can’t do this anymore.’ … It’s going to take a little while for it to sink in.”
Patti Gora, executive director of the Sandpoint-based Safe Air For Everyone, said she’s still “a little stunned” by the ruling.
Gora said the group has documented at least three deaths linked to field burning: Aaron Ditmer, a 21-year old Pullman man with severe asthma who died in 1994; Sharon Buck, of Sandpoint, a 37-year old asthmatic who died in 1996; and Marsha Mason, a 49-year Rathdrum woman who died of an acute asthma attack in 2000, the day after 6,000 acres had been burned. A coroner said field burning contributed to Mason’s death.
“I don’t feel really happy; I don’t feel really sad,” Gora said about the ruling. “It doesn’t bring back the people that we miss and that we love.”
Pat Martin, a resident of the border town of Creston, B.C., said she cried when she heard the news.
“We get totally (engulfed) with smoke up here when they burn,” she said. “It comes into our valley, and it sits here, and it doesn’t leave. … You can imagine how thrilled we are to hear that this is not going to be a smoky summer from Idaho.”
But anti-burning advocates say there’s still more to do. Burning is still permitted on Indian reservations, which Gora said accounts for a large amount of the total burning in the region.
The Coeur d’Alene Tribe is not planning to halt field burning, said Quanah Spencer, tribal council spokesman. Bluegrass seed production is an important part of the reservation’s economy, he said.
“The tribe is always balancing the need to provide its members with an income along with the protection of the environment,” Spencer said.
Said Gora: “I’ve been working on this issue for 10 years, and I’ve learned one doesn’t celebrate until the fire really is out, and I don’t think the fire’s really out yet. … It will be an interesting year or two to see how this all plays out.”