It’s inevitable that field burning in the Willamette Valley will diminish and eventually stop. But forcing its end through legislation would be a mistake.

The governor’s office says the 2009 legislature will be asked to reduce field burning, in steps, below the 65,000 total acres now permitted and phase it out by 2016.

On the few fields where burning is occasionally needed to produce a good crop, this would mean increasing the application of pesticides from once or twice to 10 or 12 times. It would mean crossing the field with loaded tractors far more often than now. More dust would be stirred up and fuel used, hardly an advantage if the price of fuel keeps going up.

It’s not a solution that in an emergency, growers could use propane flamers, as the legislation proposes. Those old fire-belching behemoths turn the fields black, but they are not as effective as an open burn.

Last summer field burning took place on eight days, most of it on three days in August and one day in September. More than half of the 776 smoke complaints during the season came from Eugene and Springfield. Instruments in those cities recorded no smoke intrusions at all, but on July 10 a burn on a 48-acre field near Harrisburg went badly, sending smoke across west Eugene instead of high into the sky.

Burning already is diminishing, from more than 50,000 acres in 2003 to about 32,300 acres last year. Given changes in agriculture (less grass seed, more wheat), and energy policy and technology (perhaps ethanol from grass straw), smoke from field burning will continue to become less over time. But for the few growers who need to burn from time to time, further restrictions would be an additional burden they do not need.

As long as occasional burning is essential to growing a good seed crop, we should accept the rare smoke nuisance as the price of maintaining an important part of Willamette Valley agriculture, one that does not depend on federal aid. (hh)