California air board OKs crackdown on agricultural burning in San Joaquin Valley
Nearly two decades ago, California passed a law that was supposed to stop San Joaquin Valley farmers from burning fields and piles of tree limbs and vines — a practice that chokes the region with smoke and contributes to the Valley’s abysmal air quality.
On Thursday, state air quality regulators finally cracked down.
After a six-hour meeting, the California Air Resources Control Board unanimously approved a plan to begin phasing out almost all agricultural burning in the Valley by 2025, a move that may eventually lead to increased fines for farmers caught breaking the rules.
The move was a long time coming for a region that has some of the worst air quality in the nation, leading to profound health consequences for some of the state’s most vulnerable residents, many of whom are immigrant families living in poverty with inadequate access to healthcare.
Almost one in six children in the Valley have asthma or some type of respiratory problem — compared to a national average of one in 12.
“In some sense, that’s historic,” said Dean Florez, a state air board member who wrote the original burn-ban law when he was a state senator 18 years ago. “I think it really shows where the board is, and how we feel about pollution, particularly at the source. And it feels like this is something that everybody should recognize, for all of those years we’ve passed on this.”
In 2003, state lawmakers passed Florez’s legislation that was supposed to end burning in the Valley by 2010, but state air quality regulators were reluctant to fully crack down amid pleas from farmers it would cripple their operations.
Agriculture is the backbone of the Valley’s economy, and it costs farmers substantially more to bring in wood chippers to process their piles into pieces small enough to be incorporated back into the soil. Hauling slash away to landfills or biomass power plants represents another substantial expense.
Plus, farmers argue that burning is often the easiest way to address many sorts of diseases that plague their crops and keep their operations organic. Several farmers and agricultural associations on Thursday warned that the added costs of the air board’s plan could put small growers out of business.
At the meeting Thursday, Valley almond farmer Stan Chance said it would add tens of thousands of dollars in costs to either buy or contract out for the specialized equipment needed to chip, grind and till the waste back into their soils in the ways environmentalists say farmers should.
“I’m here to say the Valley is not yet equipped for the burn option to go away,” Chance testified. “There’s not enough equipment and systems to meet the demands in the Valley.”
An additional challenge is the numbers of biomass power plants available to farmers to haul their limbs and vines have shrunk dramatically, said Samir Sheikh, executive director of the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District.
He said that at one point there were more than 20 plants for farmers to haul their waste; now it’s down to just five, he said.
“We know that these plants for a variety of reasons are probably not going to be sustainable into the future,” Sheikh said. “We’ve lost well over 500,000 tons per year of woody-material capacity by those plants going down, and we just need to really roll up our sleeves and work to find some alternatives and really handle the very large amount of material that we’re talking about here in our region.”
But biomass power generation comes with its own controversy. Several environmentalists spoke out against increasing the state’s biomass plant capabilities since they, too, release emissions.
Tons and tons of ag smoke
The dilemma of what to do with all the Valley’s ag waste became especially pronounced over the last decade, despite the local air quality district tightening its agricultural burning rules to the most restrictive in the state.
Beginning in 2011, a series of droughts forced growers to remove many of their orchards and vineyards because there wasn’t enough water to keep farming.
The shutdown of so many biomass plants and all those piles of dead trees and vines led to an uptick in burning. The air board estimates that, as a result, approximately 600,000 tons of agricultural waste is being burned in the Valley every year.
The local board launched a pilot program in late 2018 that paid out $12 million in grants to subsidize chipping and other farming practices to reduce burning, but activists say it’s not been nearly enough.
Though farm groups said they’ve already cut back burning substantially, activists said it’s already taken the board far too long to force farmers to comply with the state law on the books, and they said the phased-in plan over the next four years represents yet another delay as the lungs of Valley residents suffer.
“I’d like to see you ask for a 17-year exemption from doing your taxes from the IRS,” said Fresno resident Peter Dorian. “You’re not going to get anywhere. (The 17-year delay) is very, very, very frustrating.”
Valley activist Marissa Acosta agreed.
“We might be the breadbasket of the world providing food to others, but we can’t even provide clean air to breathe for our own locals,” she said. “I hope you will think of those already suffering from asthma and other health problems.”
New board chair’s first big vote
The resolution the air board approved calls for a six-month transition period to create an enforcement plan that includes mapping out “economic feasibility of alternatives to open burning” and finding more sources of cash to help farmers transition away from burning.
The air board estimates that to carry the plan out, it will cost $15 million to $30 million each year, funds from which will need to come from multiple federal, state and local sources.
Florez, the state air board member, called on Gov. Gavin Newsom to approve funding in this spring’s budget to carry the plan out.
“We need the governor to complete this last act,” he said.
The board at its remote meeting held over Zoom on Thursday didn’t directly discuss the issues of penalties for violating the rules, but the plan calls for increasing them.
Currently, the San Joaquin Valley air quality board can fine farmers up to $750 per acre for violating burning rules.
The issue of open-air farm burning is a familiar one in the Sacramento area. In the 1990s, the state began cracking down on Sacramento Valley rice farmers burning their crops after harvest because the smoke was choking the region’s air.
In response, farmers began increasingly flooding their rice fields with river water in the winter to break down their rice straw instead of burning it.
Thursday’s vote was the first major action taken by the powerful California regulatory board under its new chairwoman, Liane Randolph. The former chair, Mary Nichols, retired at the end of 2020 after 13 years leading the board. Environmental justice activists had criticized Nichols for continually passing up the opportunity to enforce the state law.
Randolph said it was clear that after 18 years, farmers need to comply.
“I think it is absolutely clear that this process must end,” Randolph said. “I believe this framework can do that. I believe it can draw that line in the sand.”
This story was originally published February 25, 2021 at 2:55 PM with the headline "California air board OKs crackdown on agricultural burning in San Joaquin Valley."