Who's Getting Burned? Oregon Taxpayers, for one

[nosmokes]

what really gripes my ass about this is the attitude of the farmers, as if the rest of us should be grateful to give them the tax cut and swallow their damn smoke as well. and grass is a flippin environmental disaster anyhow. all those suburban lawns sucking up water and being sprayed with poisons to keep the weeds away. if we had any sorta sense we'd let 'em grow hemp for the fiber products we're now cutting down our forests for.
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Who's Getting Burned? Seed farmers get tax breaks to discourage field burning, then torch fields anywayBy Diane Dietz
The Register-Guard
Published: Sunday, August 21, 2005


Twenty Willamette Valley grass seed farmers who've collected state tax breaks meant to wean them away from field burning will be torching their fields this summer.
The Bowers family - Nick, his brother Eric and Uncle Dean - together have collected $191,000 in state tax credits to help buy barns, tractors and mowers to rid their fields of waste straw without the choking fires of field burning.
Yet those three farmers signed up to burn 2,209 acres this year in the southern Willamette Valley - up 31 percent over the acreage they were registered to burn five years ago. Granted, they're also farming more land. They say burning remains a beneficial technique.
The fact that farmers burn fields and also collect tax credits meant to encourage them to dispose of the straw by other means apparently passes by state officials unnoticed.
State officials said they've never compared the list of field burners with the roll of grass seed farmers who have received the tax credits of $62,000 apiece, on average. advertisement
"Are the people who are getting tax credits still burning their fields?" asked John Byers, who oversees field burning for the Oregon Department of Agriculture, puzzled. Then he added: "There's nothing in statute that says they couldn't."
The tax credit program is a little-known aspect of the grass seed industry, which in recent weeks has been firing up its field-burning season in the valley. Big burns on Wednesday veiled Eugene-Springfield in a blue haze through the evening, prompting many asthmatics to reach for medication.
About 220 farmers have received $13.8 million in tax credits over the past 30 years to handle the straw left over after harvest by, for example, turning it into the soil to rot or else cutting and baling it for the straw export market. A handful of them collect the tax credits - typically 50 percent of the cost of the mowers, tractors or other equipment they buy - and yet continue to burn.
Lawmakers had hoped the financial incentive would someday extinguish the practice of burning. But farmers show no sign of abandoning the flame. In fact, they burned 8 percent more acres last year than they did eight years ago.
"With the price of diesel gas (for tractors and trucking) and everything else going up, more people lately are wanting to burn," Harrisburg grass seed farmer George Langdon said. "It's the cheapest way to do it."
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much more at the linkage

[xchrom]

1. hey i'm pretty much a government subsidy fan.

but farmers are a dicey group -- they get a lot of different tax breaks -- especially from democrats -- and then piss and moan about the tax breaks that others get.

[tmooses]

2. These last couple of weeks have been pretty brutal in the valley. I

haven't felt this bad since I used to wake up in the morning after spending all night in smoke filled bars. This may be a dumb question- but doesn't anybody keep track of these farmers who take the tax credits, buy tractors and build barns and burn anyway? Or are all the politicians too scared to piss off the farmers?

[joey93turbo]

3. loophole?

You'd think so, wouldn't you? In this day and age of technology it's amazing someone can't compare lists. I wasn't aware farmers had that much political clout.

[0rganism]

4. While the grass burning is assinine, the tax credits aren't exactly big $$

A $62000 tax credit? $13.8 million over 30 years? OK, let's compare it to the bullshit ENRON (aka PGE) pulled over the last seven years: $96 MILLION IN "DEFERRED TAXES" alone, which ended up on the profit column instead of going to the gov't as intended. ENRON has gouged Portland residents, particularly in Multnomah county, to the tune of nearly a billion dollars since Kenny Boy purchased PGE in the late '90s. Yet we still can't muster enough outrage in the tri-county area to condemn the assets and turn it back into a public utility.

Maybe the Eugene-Springfield residents will be more diligent in seeking remedy from the offending burners than Portlanders were in holding ENRON accountable for its crimes, but I'm not holding my breath until then -- so to speak.