Gov. Ted Kulongoski has stepped up his schedule for phasing out and then ending field burning.

Roger Beyer, executive secretary of the Oregon Seed Council, said the governor's natural resources policy director had told him a week ago that Kulongoski now wants the practice ended in three years.

A spokeswoman for the governor's office said today the Department of Environmental Quality had been asked to prepare legislation for the 2009 legislature.

The bill would phase out field burning by 2011. "That's where we would like the discussion to start," she said.

In June, the governor's office said Kulongoski hoped to phase down field burning over the next few years and then end it in 2016.

Groups in the Eugene area, led by the Western Environmental Law Center, have been clamoring for a ban on field burning in the Willamette Valley.

Under existing law, grass seed farmers in the valley can burn up to 65,000 acres of harvested fields each summer. But in recent years the total has remained much below that.

So far this year, there have been nine days of open burning and 14 days of preparatory burning, totaling 27,000 acres. The burning season usually ends when the fall rains start.

Growers used to burn more frequently in order to get rid of the straw and sanitize the fields to get a good crop the following year. Now straw is baled up and shipped out, and the remaining residue is often plowed under.

Roughly half of the valley's grass-seed acreage is in Linn County.