How Much Will Air Quality Improve Thanks to the San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Burning Ban?
Ferguson, Joel
from ARE Update Vol. 26, No. 4, Mar/Apr, 2023
Abstract
In 2003, the California State Legislature passed a bill mandating the phaseout of agricultural burning in the San Joaquin Valley in an effort to improve air quality. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) plans to enforce this ban by 2025. Studying the effects of current agricultural burning practices—as regulated by CARB—on air pollution can give us a sense of the benefits this ban may have. I find that one additional agricultural fire within a 50 km radius of a monitoring station increases fine particulate matter (PM) concentration by about one-sixth of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) 24-hour standard.
Keywords
Crop residues, CARB, fire, mulching, particulate matter, agricultural burning
Citation
Ferguson, Joel. 2023. "How Much Will Air Quality Improve Thanks to the San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Burning Ban?" ARE Update 26(4): 9-11. University of California Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics.
https://giannini.ucop.edu/filer/file/1683135289/20665/