The Cost of the Drought on California Air Quality

A really thought-provoking article:

In a region that already suffers from some of the worst particulate pollution in the nation, San Joaquin Valley residents are learning that extreme drought conditions can be as hard on human lungs as they are on local crops.

With periods of extended dryness and water curtailments occurring more frequently due to climate change, growers in California’s Central Valley — one of the most productive agricultural regions on the planet — are increasingly looking to fallow fields or uproot orchards and vineyards for lack of irrigation. Once gathered into towering pyres, the vegetation is then set ablaze, sending lung- and heart-aggravating haze across the valley.

San Joaquin Valley air regulators have struggled for nearly 20 years to outlaw the practice of agricultural burning, encouraging farmers instead to grind up forsaken crops in wood chippers and spread them as mulch. But amid a third year of drought, some fear a resurgence in large-scale burning because it’s cheaper than grinding, and because so many acres are being abandoned due to drought.

Already, 395,000 acres of farmland have been fallowed across California because of the drought, according to UC Merced research. Industry groups estimate 60,000 acres of almond trees and 15,000 acres of vineyards will be removed statewide this year as well.

“If you’re not able to get water, then you’re gonna have a lot of dry stuff that’s potentially going to die. And then what’s gonna happen with that waste?” asked Catherine Garoupa White, executive director of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition. “It’s easier to just strike a match and light it on fire.”

...Over the course of his 30-year career as a physician, Anthony Molina witnessed the effects of San Joaquin Valley air pollution firsthand. He is still haunted by the memory of medical personnel rushing a 16-year-old boy into the emergency room of the Clovis Community Medical Center during an asthma attack on a bad air day. All efforts to resuscitate the teen proved unsuccessful.

“He came in, intubated, but ... his lungs were just clamped down,” Molina recalled. “And so you just couldn’t ventilate him. Trying to pump air into his lungs was like trying to blow up a balloon that would not expand, basically.”

...Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers, said removals and burning have increased due to financial hardship within the grape industry. Recent droughts, Bitter said, have coincided with a seismic shift in consumer preference. A number of California grape products, including varieties of raisins and table grapes, have fallen out of demand.

“What you see in those vineyard numbers was largely due to that shift in the raisin industry,” Bitter said. “That same thing can also be said about table grapes, because that was another industry that was very highly dependent on the Thompson seedless variety, which became out of favor in consumers’ minds.”

In the early 2000s, more than a million tons of agricultural waste was burned in the San Joaquin Valley every year, according to the California Air Resources Board. Hundreds of thousands more were burned at biomass power plants, which were often criticized by environmental groups for emitting pollution and attracting truck traffic.

Officials appealed to farmers to use wood-chipping equipment to convert dead crops to mulch. Many were deterred by the expense, however. It costs about $500 an acre to burn crops, but more than $1,000 an acre to chip and shred them.

In 2003, state Sen. Dean Florez, a Democrat from Shafter, introduced a bill that would phase out agricultural burning by 2010. When Gov. Gray Davis signed it into law, he said he hoped it would curtail air pollution in a region vexed by “air that’s easier to see than it is to breathe.”

Initially, the new law appeared to work. By 2011, the amount of agricultural waste burned in fields had dropped roughly 80%.

But, as California entered a historic drought and large swaths of farmland were taken out of production, the trend dramatically reversed. By 2017, the amount of burned agricultural waste had more than tripled, peaking at 900,000 tons. At the same time, biomass power plants were shuttered, perhaps resulting in more field burning.

Due to drought and economic factors, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District has repeatedly sought permission from the state Air Resources Board to extend the deadline for an end to agricultural burning. Under the state’s most recent plan, the air district has laid out a timeline of burning restrictions that it hopes will virtually end the practice by 2025. That now seems unlikely to occur during a worsening drought. 

“Increased removal of orchards and vineyards will add strain to already existing difficulties faced in implementing this aggressive open burning phase-out strategy,” said Jaime Holt, spokesperson for the San Joaquin Valley air district. “And of course all of this is happening at the same time the region is experiencing worsening air quality impacts due to increasingly severe wildfires.”