AP News, February 8th, 2007
Around the world, golfers, soccer players and proud homeowners tread on grass grown from Oregon seed.
With its mild, rainy winters and warm, dry summers, Oregon is ideal for growing grass seed, and has been the world's No. 1 producer of grass seed for the past 50 years.
But dominance comes at a price: Every summer, after the grass is cut and the seeds are harvested, the farmers in the populous Willamette Valley, Oregon's main grass-growing region, burn away the stubble, creating towering pillars of smoke that make asthma victims suffer and alarm environmentalists.
A state lawmaker wants to end the burning, and is running into stiff opposition from the grass seed industry.
"When people are having to go to the hospital because of this practice, I say it's time for the state to take action," said Rep. Paul Holvey, a Democrat from Eugene, in the Willamette Valley.
With Democrats now in charge of both chambers of the Legislature after retaking the House in November, supporters of a ban think they have a shot.
The grass seed industry plans an all-out lobbying effort to try to kill the bill, saying that field burning helps Oregon's growers maintain their competitive edge by producing some of the purest grass seed available.
Oregon supplies nearly 50 percent of the seed used to grow grass around the globe, including China. Each summer, smoke billows 6,000 feet and higher over the landscape as farmers set fires to kill off weeds and pests and sanitize their fields for the next planting.
Holvey said the burning contributes to global warning and threatens public health. During the summer, hundreds of people often complain of eye and throat irritation or say the hazy air aggravates their asthma.
Dave Nelson of the Oregon Seed Council said the burning accounts for only 2 percent of particulate pollution in the Willamette Valley during the summer. The burning has been sharply scaled back over the years, Nelson said, and banning it altogether would be an overreaction to an "insignificant" environmental issue.
Moreover, a ban would hurt the competitiveness of Oregon's $500 million-a-year grass seed industry, which provides income for 10,000 Oregonians, because it would force growers to pay for chemicals and more frequent tilling to cleanse their fields, he said.
Oregon's grass seed farmers face competition from growers in northern Europe who are heavily subsidized by government and from producers in places like Minnesota and Wisconsin, where land is less expensive than in the Willamette Valley, Nelson said.
"We export seed to every state in the U.S. and to over 60 countries around the world," Nelson said. "The higher we make our costs of production, the more vulnerable we become to competition from other places."
Holvey's proposed ban has the wholehearted backing of Cheryl Baugh, a 61-year-old medical office worker who lives in the foothills of Oregon's Coast Range. Baugh, an asthma sufferer, was among the 1,182 people who filed complaints with the state last summer about smoke.
"I was out in the yard working, but after less than one hour, I could hardly breathe and had to go back inside," Baugh said. "It's a horrible thing when you see those smoke plumes. They look almost like Hiroshima."
The debate over field burning intensified after seven people died in a 1988 chain-reaction traffic along an interstate highway that had become shrouded in smoke.
The furor over the accident prompted the Legislature in 1991 to approve a phased reduction in burning. The number of acres that can be burned each year is now capped at 65,000, or one-fifth of the 320,000 acres set ablaze in 1972.
Over the years, the state Agriculture Department has allowed field burning only when the winds can carry the smoke over the Coast Range to the west or the Cascade Mountains to the east. The science is imperfect, though.
Grass seed farmer Doug Duerst said burning is a more environmentally friendly means of cleansing fields than using lots of chemicals or tilling the soil more. And while those giant plumes of smoke may look menacing, he said they mean the smoke is safely going up and over the mountains.
"When people see those big mushroom clouds, they can be assured that it's not going to fall back down and make it smoky" in populated areas, he said.
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On the Net:
State smoke management program: http://www.oregon.gov/ODA/NRD/smokefaqs.shtml
Oregon Seed Council: http://forages.oregonstate.edu
