Senate Bill 705 aimed to improve air quality in the San Joaquin Valley and called for a gradual phase-out of agricultural burning.
California’s Central Valley is known for its agricultural productivity,
supplying 40 percent of the nation’s fruits and nuts, and is home to more than 250 different crops. For more than a century, farmers in the region torched old crops, diseased plants, and other farming debris, but now they are facing a near-total ban on agricultural burning.
A law taking full effect this year prohibits open burning in orchards and vineyards. This comes two decades after the bill was passed and signed into law in 2003.
Senate Bill 705 aimed to improve air quality in the San Joaquin Valley (part of the Central Valley) and called for a gradual phase-out of agricultural burning.
“It’s hard to beat the convenience of a 1-cent match, but as we face a ban on agricultural burning in the San Joaquin Valley, we must seek sustainable alternatives that protect our [residents’] lungs,” Dean Florez, the bill’s author, wrote in a
post on social media platform X.
Florez said open burns create acrid smoke that is harmful to both people and the environment.
According to the California Air Resources Board,
agriculture is the state’s fifth largest producer of greenhouse gas, at 32 million metric tons per year.
The state recorded 326.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide produced in 2022, based on
data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The state’s agricultural industry makes up roughly 9.8 percent of that total.
The Epoch Times has reached out to Florez and the California Air Resources Board for comment.
20 Years to Implement
Florez, a native of the Central Valley with a
family history in farming, worked as a state legislator for 12 years before becoming a member of the California Air Resources Board. There, he continued advocating for the region’s air quality while working to implement his bill.
After SB 705 was signed into law, it still faced many delays by regulators and opposition from farmers.
At the time, opponents such as the California Farm Bureau Federation and the California Rice Commission were primarily concerned about the need for “flexibility where disease outbreaks occur,” when burning crops may be the only solution, according to the bill analysis.
The concern was later addressed with a conditional permit to allow burning in case of diseases.
According to the California Farm Bureau, this ban on open burning
would affect small-scale farmers in the eight counties that make up the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, consisting of San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced, Madera, Fresno, Kings, and Tulare counties and portions of Kern County.
“Open burning has long been the cheapest and easiest way to dispose of orchard and vineyard removals,” the Farm Bureau said in a recent statement. However, it added that the air district has taken steps to offset new disposal costs.
The program provides incentives for farmers to buy wood-chipping equipment to break down old crops in orchards and vineyards.
Farmers are also encouraged to incorporate the chipped agricultural material into their fields as mulch or have it reused in other ways. In special circumstances, the program also provides incentives for air curtain burners, which allow old crops and debris to be burned in a container that traps and reduces smoke.
CO2 and Plant Growth
Digby Macdonald, a semi-retired professor of materials science and engineering, told The Epoch Times that “nature is part of the carbon cycle.”“The Indians used to do massive burns,” he said.
Macdonald said the environmental effects of fires, whether natural or man-made, have varied throughout history but that “nature has a way of burning things” as a means to release carbon into the atmosphere to keep oxygen levels balanced and promote plant growth.
Macdonald, through his decades of scientific research, concluded that higher carbon dioxide levels lead to more plants and crops.
“The more CO2 the better. And there’s a direct correlation—and again, correlation does not equal causality, but it’s indicative of the trend—between the crop yield of things like corn and wheat and soybeans, and so forth, and the amount of CO2,” he said.
Macdonald said the current global CO2 level of 420 parts per million is far below the 1,200 parts per million needed for ideal plant growth conditions. However, the Earth is able to sustain the global population because agricultural output has risen along with increases in carbon levels, he said.
Respiratory Impacts
While fires produce carbon dioxide, which benefits plants, they also produce smoke, an issue that sparked the introduction of SB 705.According to the state’s Department of Industrial Relations, smoke from fires
contains chemicals, gases, and other particles that can “reduce lung function, worsen asthma and other existing heart and lung conditions, and cause coughing, wheezing and difficulty breathing.”
In a
recent study published in the National Library of Medicine looking at the effects of agricultural burning on children in California’s Imperial Valley, researchers observed increased respiratory symptoms such as wheezing among children who lived closer to agricultural burn sites.
However, they noted that they “cannot determine whether agricultural burning is causing the observed associations with respiratory health symptoms,” explaining that they looked at data from a single point in time and did not consider other potential factors.
Researchers stated that such burns are “relatively brief and intermittent” and that the practice is a “fast, inexpensive method” and can effectively control crop pests and diseases.
