LISA YOUNG: My first question, Steve, is what is that window? Is it typically a spring activity or does some of the agricultural burning take place also in the fall?
STEVE HALE: Yeah, you know, we need to maintain the ability to have the 'right to farm' here and the right to burn, you know, throughout the year when it's appropriate. Now, we have red flag warnings. We have other times of the year where it just doesn't make sense to have a fire, obviously. But when there's clearing brush or areas that need to be reclaimed or maybe take the vegetation down, those activities can happen throughout the year.
I mean, we were clearing brush and weeds during the winter and certainly if it was dry enough material, we, on a calm day in January, we were burning. So it really doesn't happen only only in the Spring But it, it primarily is Spring when people are getting their ditches and right of ways in order for the irrigation season, especially. And so, yeah, that's a lot of it in springtime for sure.
YOUNG: Tell me a little bit about the reason why ag producers, farmers, and ranchers do these burns. How does it benefit you? How does it benefit the land? And what is kind of that overall purpose for doing it?
HALE: In the maintenance of a farm and ranch. I think the two main areas that folks do traditionally burn are their ditches and perhaps drainages that carry water. And a lot of times when, during the course of the growing season the previous year, a lot of vegetation grows up around these ditches. If that is not burned out, it becomes very, hard to get proper water flow through that ditch the next year. A lot of trash, a lot of backups and floods and, you know, it just, it needs to be cleared out.
The the most effective way to do that in a lot of ways is burning the dead chop. So burning ditches has been a kind of a tradition in a lot of ways. Now, we've reduced the need to burn a lot of ditches because we've literally put miles and miles and miles of ditches in underground pipe and other conveyances that don't have open ditch anymore. So that's helped a great deal to ensure that we have water flow to the fields.
Now, the other component of burning a lot of times is to reduce or get rid of residue from crops previously grown. And, you know, one of the problems here in the arid West is that we don't have much humidity and hardly any rainfall. You know, back East and where you have faster decomposition of that organic material. Here a lot of farmers have relied on burning the fields in some regards, you know, sometimes corn stock, sometimes stubble from previous wheat crop or something like that. And it has been a tool. Also to reduce the amount of litter or trash that's on the surface for the next year as they, you know, prepare the fields.
Although this has been a long standing tradition, what we're finding now is that there's so much value in that organic matter if it's tended to in a proper way. Some people say, well, 'my pasture always does better if I burn it.' Well, what happens is the thatch builds up sometimes from previous years growth and it tends to get so thick that burning will invigorate some growth if it's done right time. And we are, when we wholesale burn a field though, we have to recognize that we're, we're giving up a lot of organic material and we're burning off that carbon that goes into the atmosphere rather than trying to get it into the ground where carbon is best used. So there's other techniques that we really promote at the conservation district and other places to encourage people to capture that residue rather than burning it off.
There's great ways to do that in terms of no-till farming or minimal till for techniques that can capture that residue and put it in the ground to let it slowly degrade and decompose. And that is the longest benefit, long-term benefit of the soil health, when a person can do that. So we're seeing some movement in that as far as the number of acres that used to get burned routinely.
We're seeing more and more folks go to the no-till approach of farming, which is an exciting thing.
YOUNG: So what I'm hearing you say is that there's actually less agricultural burning taking place than there used to be in years past, is that correct?
HALE: Yeah, you know, again, we have a lot of ditches that are underground pipe now. I think what people tend to think, ' oh my gosh, look at all these burning.' Well, there's just a lot more people in the valley to see it. Out here in the countryside, there didn't used to be as many neighbors as we now have that are not traditionally farmers and ranchers. You know, suburban type of small acreage owners and they enjoy the country living. But it's one of those things that a smoky day from burning or dust, those are minor inconveniences, but they do affect the quality of life some days.
