Kansas ranchers burn land despite plea from health officials

Kansas ranchers eager to prepare their land for cattle grazing have mostly brushed off the plea from state health officials to voluntarily cut back this spring’s prairie burning to reduce air pollution during the coronavirus pandemic. With the potential of the pandemic overwhelming the state’s medical facilities, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment on March 26 encouraged land owners and managers to reduce burned acres this spring in an effort to mitigate respiratory concerns connected to breathing the smoke. The reasons vary, experts say. Some landowners may already have had contracts in place with the professionals hired to do the burning. Others have agreements in place to fatten cattle on those acres this summer. And still others do so because that is the way they have always done it and are more comfortable with burning in the spring. “There is a whole infrastructure that is geared up to do this, so it doesn’t surprise me,” said Craig Volland, chairman of the air quality committee of the Kansas chapter of the Sierra Club. Dr. Lee Norman, KDHE Secretary, said on Wednesday that he does not “have the inclination” to recommend now an outright ban on all rangeland burning because pollution levels aren’t consistently above the thresholds set by the federal government. About 2.6 million acres (1.1 million hectares) were burned in Kansas last year, compared to 1.5 million acres (about 607,000 hectares) in 2018 and 2.4 million acres (about 971,000 hectares) in 2017, according to satellite data by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For decades, landowners have burned their fields each spring as a way to control invasive plant species and increase the lushness of pastures where they will graze beef cattle in the coming months. That is especially the case in the Flint Hills, where the rock is so close to the surface and the terrain so hilly that tilling is impractical. Encompassing several hundred miles in eastern Kansas, the Flint Hills are among the last remaining tallgrass prairie ecosystems in the world...MORE