No fires on the prairie this year

COEUR d’ALENE — For the first time in decades, nobody applied for a field-burning permit on the Rathdrum Prairie, though the practice continued on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation.

According to Mark Boyle, air quality manager for Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, this is the first year that he has been with IDEQ where nobody has registered to burn the stubble of their fields.

“We don't have anybody registered out there on the prairie,” he said. “Last year we had two big fields we tried to get burned, and this year we haven’t seen any.”

Boyle said at the peak of field burning on the prairie in the early 1990s, farmers burned about 20,000 acres every fall, but they also came under political pressure to phase out field burning all together. By the end of the 1990s, many of the Rathdrum Prairie farmers sold their properties and moved their grass seed crops down to the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation or Washington where burning was still allowed.

Grass and wheat field burning is still a common practice on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation, but the forest fires have delayed the burn season this year.

“So far this year, our numbers are way down this year,” said Heather Keen, spokeswoman for the tribe. “To date, we have burned 7,758 acres, which is down 60 percent from last year.”

Last year, Keen said, farmers on the reservation burned 20,112 acres of stubble fields.

This year, smoky skies and poor air quality from the wildfires delayed the field burning for a few weeks.

The tribe has a smoke management department that coordinates daily with Boyle’s agency and meteorologists to ensure they are burning on days where the smoke will dissipate quickly.

“We really try to minimize the impacts on the residents, and the highway when we burn,” she said, adding the Tribe allows farmers to burn their fields year-round and some opt to burn in the spring.

She said reservation farmers still have about 600 acres slated to burn this fall, but more could come later in the season.

“We have a couple of farmers who are just holding back to see what the weather does,” Keen said.