Growers, clean-air group meet with mediator

BOISE – A full day of talks on field burning “went pretty well,” Idaho’s state agriculture director said Friday.

“I don’t know that we’re a whole lot further than we were, but they’re still at the table, so we’re hopeful,” Celia Gould said after the sessions at the state Department of Agriculture.

Growers who annually burn their fields met separately with a mediator, as did Safe Air For Everyone, a Sandpoint-based group that opposes field burning on public health grounds, and state agriculture and environmental quality officials. Then the whole group gathered together.

Field burning is prohibited in Idaho except on sovereign Indian reservations because of a federal court decision this year. The process to regain federal approval for field burning in Idaho could take three years.

“If we look toward the program in the future, we need to understand what that might look like, so that’s what we’re pursuing,” Gould said. “We just got together to see if there was any room for trying to find some common ground.”