And the lumber folks complained about the elimination of all those conical sawdust burners too. Now all sorts of products are made from sawdust.

This is the website for the Environmental Working Group http://farm.ewg.org/.
They have a list by state and county of all the recipients of agricultural subsidies. It might be interesting to know if any of the grass seed growers are on the list.

I have yet to meet a starving grass seed grower.

Not to mention the number of people killed in accidents on I-5 due to the lack of visibility on burning days.

Maybe the next proposal should be that farmers not be plowing their fields since they kick up so much dust?
All that nasty particulate matter in the air and all those asthma and allergy attacks that occur.

The other point the story missed (or barely mentioned) is that many of the grass seed farmers have switched to wheat, taking advantage of current high wheat prices. Leading growers are working to develop wheat varieties even better suited to the Valley.

I see a real win-win here. Having grown up in the Tualatin Valley I know the big plus of getting rid of growers as civilization proceeds. I saw it in Kootenai County, too.

You get rid of all that nasty but brief seasonal burning and then you get those tractor-types the hell out of there.

Now, you can proceed with proper development (Intel campuses, multi-plexes, subdivisions, 4 lane roads over gravel).

You also preform two really effective social actions in getting these rich grass creatures gone:

- you ensure that those growers, (undoubtedly tight-rightys) and their almost literally satanic monies go away.

Now, you've got cheaper land for the proles driven from the city by the better classes who control the municipalities.

No wait, they'll just grow wheat which they should have been doing all along. Evidently.

"Like many farmers, he now uses chemicals instead of fire to clean fields for the next year."

So whatever chemicals that they use are the equivalent of burning? Yikes, gotta wonder how that affects the ground water and run off.

They should just pave over the fields..
That would be civilization too..

Another example of how things were SO MUCH better back in the 70's and 80's - we had all those nice grass seed fires to cause traffic havoc and ruin our air! Things are SO much worse now, aren't they!

Professor Jack -- that was pretty good reading between the lines to pick up the part of the story that wasn't published. How about this:

Farmers must register fields in advance, pay a burn fee of $20 an acre and wait for permission to burn fields, said John Byers, who's managed the state's smoke management program for nine years.

If there isn't much smoke any more, how many people does the state pay to manage it?

http://www.oregon.gov/ODA/NRD/smokefaqs.shtml

This is an interesting topic. Historically, the US had been a large net exporter of grass seed, particularly including exports to East Asia. Facilitating economic activity in sectors where the US is a net exporter is a key strategy to restoring economic growth and increasing employment -- a heck of a lot better than the almost laughable strategies of payroll tax cuts and passing funds along to state and local governments. There really is another side to this story.

My guess is that modern weather forecasting and monitoring is such that the more stringent regulations against burning, adopted some time back, need not need be as tight going forward. If we want a real economy back there's no question that a lot green thinking has to change or moderate -- that's just the way it is.

From a quick scan of the comments, it's clear most of you had no real experience of life under field burning. As a former resident of the Eugene area, most specifically of the part where the smoke was designed to go under the ill-fated "smoke management plan," I'm more than happy to see the burning go away. I lived through enough "Black Whatever" days that I've lost track of them. It's nice now to visit Eugene without the damn choking fire smoke dragging on, and on, and on....

And anybody who thinks the likes of Brownsville and Crawfordsville are gonna be new suburban havens...bwahaha. Only in their wildest SoCal developer dreams...even given Springfield's annexation ambitions.