Some years ago I spent a day burning ditches around my peach orchard, as many growers do every spring. The location near I-70 allowed passing cars to see the fires (mine and couple others), and several grabbed their cell phones to report what apparently looked like an out-of-control wildfire. At highway speed, they could only see the fires for a few seconds, and couldn’t know that they were properly permitted, and carefully controlled. They simply assumed any open fire was a crisis.
Agricultural burning in Mesa County has been debated for a century and is a perennial political issue, often led by well-meaning activists who do not understand the reason such open burning is necessary, at least in some places. They occasionally move to Western Colorado from places that do not have the same climate (few places do), crop mix, or range of weed species to deal with. This is a text book example of why “one size fits all” government does not work.
One thing Western Colorado does have in common with most agricultural areas is the simple old adage my dad often repeated, that you cannot grow crops and weeds in the same field at the same time. The weeds always win.
Two things make our area different from much of the country. First is the need for irrigation. In the field, you control weeds mainly with mechanical equipment, especially disking and harrowing between the rows (grassy cover crops used in California orchards do not work as well in Mesa County because they also require water). But on the edges of fields you cannot use such equipment without destroying the ditches. Weeds grow best there, of course, wasting vast amounts of water and choking the ditches’ capacity to deliver water. So there are two choices for keeping the ditches open: chemicals, which cause other problems, and burning. Once a year, when the weeds are dry and dormant, they burn like gasoline, very quickly. The second key difference in Mesa County is the large number of orchards and vineyards, which are vital to the Valley’s economy, history, and culture. The need for annual pruning, and for periodic tree replacement, generates mass quantities of dead wood and brush. It could be hauled to landfills, of course, but only at tremendous expense. Burning it in place has always been the better alternative, after marketable firewood is separated. These practices are recognized by county codes, but also carefully regulated.
Area growers have made tremendous strides toward replacing open-furrow irrigation with gated pipe, concrete ditches, and drip water systems, which use considerably less water, apply it more efficiently, and eliminate the need for many ditches. That work continues, though it is very expensive. There is some public assistance from soil conservation and salinity programs, and agricultural burning today is a small fraction of what it once was. Farmers have always been the leading conservationists.
Incidentally, most agricultural burning occurs during such a brief period that the smoke dissipates quickly. There is no evidence that it causes any lingering air quality diminution in Mesa County, which meets all EPA air standards – except during major forest fires, by far our greatest source of air pollution.
The latest effort to stop agricultural burning is pushed by a group called Citizens for Clean Air, whose mission statement is straightforward: “To research and reduce air pollution and promote improvement of air quality in Mesa County and the Western Slope through grassroots involvement with local, state, and federal efforts.”
Everyone wants clean air in Mesa County, so we should all be together on this. But this group does not even mention better forest management. It raises money to add air quality monitors across the Valley, a very worthy initiative. But it also lobbied for the Obama Administration’s “clean power plan” to kill the coal industry, wants to force irrigation districts to open canal banks as trails, lobbies against energy development, and pushes other issues unrelated to local air quality. It suggests buying filters, making homes more energy-efficient, mopping floors, eliminating scented candles, and discontinuing fried food – and it wants local candidates to promise to ban agricultural burning. None of that would stop the wildfires or the dangerous pollution they cause.
If such dedicated citizens spent even a fraction of the time they devote to farmers burning their ditches to the real problem of forest mismanagement, they could do a great deal of good for air quality. They might also help save millions of trees, and perhaps improve public health.
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