Annual Field Burning in Willamette Valley?

[Larry Caldwell]

Originally Posted by Brenda-by-the-sea

A little bit of understanding about the Law of the Conservation of Matter might be helpful here. What happens to the tons and tons of grass that is burned away? It can't be destroyed. Some of it is water vapor that stays in the air. The rest is ash that stays in the air when the weather is warm and then falls to ground level to become part of the breathing resource. .

Grass straw is no longer waste material. It is baled, ultra compressed, and shipped to the Far East as mushroom growing media. The only thing that has been burned in the last 20 years has been short stubble with all the stems removed.

Originally Posted by Brenda-by-the-sea

I used to live south of Corvallis where field burning went on not far away from our house. During field-burning season we would sometimes be awoken at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning by the smoke alarm in our house going off. When the ash concentration in the air is that heavy, it does make you wonder. .

Memories of your childhood are not relevant. Burning fields at night stopped about the time the lumber mills quit using their wigwam burners.

Originally Posted by Brenda-by-the-sea

We should realize that grass is a vanity crop. It isn't needed for human survival, and most grass is planted in inappropriate places. It doesn't need to be 99.99999% weed free. Most lawn weeds come from windblown weed seeds after the seed is planted, not the seed mix itself. Plant a trial plot of grass from seed that is 88% weed free next to one that is 99.999999% weed free. A year from now there won't be any difference between the two.

Maybe your lawn grass is a vanity crop, but pasture grass and winter cover crops are a necessity. Anyone raising farm crops has no interest in planting weed seeds along wth the grass seed. Annual ryegrass is also used for erosion control, because it grows vigorously for a year and then dies, so it doesn't choke out native vegetation. Mix in weed seeds and you don't get a clean site restoration.

I understand how you might think the only place grass grows in is lawns, but you are mistaken. No farmer in the US will risk getting a hard to control invasive established because he was too cheap to plant certified seed.

[Brenda-by-the-sea]

Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell

Memories of your childhood are not relevant. Burning fields at night stopped about the time the lumber mills quit using their wigwam burners.

This wasn't that long ago; it happened in the late 1990's (we didn't even buy the property until 1993). It isn't burning the fields AT night that's the problem. The smoke created by burning field stubble creates a lot of hydrocarbons and fine ash. And it doesn't go bye-bye just because it goes up in the air and gradually diffuses to a concentration level where you can no longer see it. The air-borne particulates stay suspended as long as there is a warm air current beneath them, but when the air cools (at night), all but the very finest particulate ash gradually rains down back to earth. If you live in a valley, and you sleep with your windows open at night, as people in the country often do, the infiltrating air can have enough smoke particulates in it to set your smoke alarm off. It happened to us several times. You can also see the overnight accumulation as a film of ash on your car windshield in the morning.

The whole point of my post was to address the out-of-sight-out-of-mind ignorance that a lot of people have about "getting rid of" matter by burning it. Burning is a form of oxidation that can break carbon-based matter into its constituent components, but it's never really "gone:" if you burn 10 tons of grass stubble, there will be 10 tons of burning by-products created as a result. Those by-products often lead to unacknowledged downstream consequences.

[zitsky]

Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell

At least they won't have grass seed farmers to kick around any more. Very little of the smoke in Eugene was caused by field burning. 90% of field burning happened in just 10 days in August, and they didn't burn until the winds would carry the smoke away from inhabited areas.

We got two weeks of heavy smoke last summer from forest fires in Russia. The same environmentalists who can't stand smoke can't stand the idea of managed forests, so the fuel load builds up until something strikes a spark, then millions of tons of wood go up in smoke.

I lived in Eugene for 2 years. I remember at least one year when the smoke in Junction City was so bad you could barely see. It was reported on in the local papers because it was so bad. That smoke wasn't from a forest fire in another country. It was from grass burning.

[Larry Caldwell]

Originally Posted by zitsky

I lived in Eugene for 2 years. I remember at least one year when the smoke in Junction City was so bad you could barely see. It was reported on in the local papers because it was so bad. That smoke wasn't from a forest fire in another country. It was from grass burning.

Like I said, you won't have the grass seed farmers to kick around any more. If you think the end of field burning is going to clear the smoke out of the air, you are going to be sadly mistaken.

[OregonYeti]

Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell

Grass straw is no longer waste material. It is baled, ultra compressed, and shipped to the Far East as mushroom growing media. The only thing that has been burned in the last 20 years has been short stubble with all the stems removed.

There are also efforts to economically turn hay into ethanol. It seems they are close.