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Presented in partnership with Syngenta
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Burnout
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Burning the stubble in grass fields after harvest is a long-time practice in the Pacific Northwest. However, because of concerns about air quality, burning has been banned in Washington since 1998, and Idaho is operating under a temporary ban. Oregon, which has been under a phased reduction in burning since 1991, was considering a ban at press time.
The stubble is burned to improve the quality of the next year’s crop by controlling weeds and pests. According to Leah Brilman, Ph.D., director of research at Seed Research of Oregon, “Burning is more beneficial for some grasses, such as bluegrasses and some fine fescues.”
Where burning is not allowed, more chemicals and more tilling are required, says Brilman, and that means more expenses for the growers and the consumers. Additional tilling on fragile soils also can result in topsoil loss and dust storms, another source of air pollution.
Dave Nelson of the Oregon Seed Council says that field burning in Oregon accounts for only 2 percent of the particulate matter in the Willamette Valley in summer.
Opponents, however, say that burning causes and exacerbates health problems, which can be fatal, and in the past burning has caused massive traffic accidents when heavy smoke obscured drivers’ vision.
In Idaho, the temporary ban came about when a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the EPA authorized field burning without considering its effects on health and the environment. The Idaho attorney general’s office may recommend that the state Department of Environmental Quality ask the court to reconsider. A decision is not likely this year, so the state’s department of agriculture is not granting burning requests until the issue has been resolved.
The ban hits Kentucky bluegrass especially hard because Idaho produces about 50 percent of the species grown in the country.
Doug Brede, Ph.D., senior vice president of Jacklin Seed, a division of J.R. Simplot Co., explains that the options for growers are limited. “Bluegrass growers usually break even after the third year, and every year after that is gravy. If Kentucky bluegrass fields are burned, grass can be grown in some fields as long as 10 to 20 years.”
Growers in Washington have been able to grow Kentucky bluegrass as an annual, says Brede, but Idaho’s stonier soil and cooler climate requires planting in the spring to have a crop the summer of the following year. “There’s a 15-month turnaround time that growers in Washington don’t have,” he adds. “In Idaho, growers may just give up.”
The price of Kentucky bluegrass has remained very stable for the past 20 years, but Brede says, with the expected loss of thousands of acres, the wholesale price of bluegrass seed has already risen 20 to 30 cents a pound.
What does the future hold? In Idaho, the ban does not affect the reservations of the Nez Perce, who grow roughly two-thirds of the state’s bluegrass. In Oregon, Nelson, who is also a lobbyist for the seed industry, says he has enough votes to block the proposed ban in the legislature.
For now, at least, it seems some grass supplies will be smaller and more expensive.
Last fall’s Musser/Whitworth Memorial Golf Tournament at Arrowhead GC in Mollalla, Ore., raised $7,600 for turf scholarships. The event, whose proceeds go to benefit graduate students’ turfgrass research studies, has raised more than $504,000 since its 1975 inception. Tee-2-Green Corp. has been an annual sponsor of the tournament, named for H. Burton Musser, the Penn State professor who developed Penncross, and Norm Whitworth, a recent inductee to the Oregon GCSA Hall of Fame. Agrotain International LLC and its parent company Lange-Stegmann recently broke ground on a $20 million expansion of its fertilizer transshipment facility in St. Louis. The expansion includes a stabilized nitrogen technology granulation production center, a new urea center storage facility and an additional 60,000 tons of capacity. When the project is completed this summer, the facility will be able to handle 1 million tons. |
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