Rex Graham: Growers playing with fire

The emissions from the burning of this green wood have "much higher levels of PM 10 and are carcinogenic".

We seem to be in another round of orchard fires assaulting our region and destroying beautiful clear days and nights on the Heretaunga plains.

My neighbours have done their best to be helpful as they can and promised to burn when the prevailing wind was away from my home. This is great for my family and I appreciate their concern but the problem is, it just directs the smoke away from us and towards another family.

The last extremely big industry burn-off in St Georges Rd incredibly had a consent that directed the smoke from large piles of burning green wood in our direction. And it came for three days ,covering our property in ash and smoke.

Last week I had a call from a family in Riverslea Rd who had their house covered in smoke periodically over a two-day period.

Let me tell you, if it hasn't happened to you, this is a very distressing experience. You can't go in to your garden, can't hang the washing out, need to keep all your windows closed, not to mention the worry about health issues.

The emissions from the burning of this green wood have much higher levels of PM 10 and are carcinogenic— not to mention the huge carbon emissions.

'No one has the right destroy our air quality and negatively affect the lives and health of their neighbours.'

This is, of course, is not good enough and must stop. No one has the right to pollute in this manner, destroying our air quality and negatively affecting the lives and health of their neighbours.

This is a relatively new practice of pulling old orchard trees and burning them green, stumps and all. It is, in fact, an industrial scale burn-off.

There is, of course, a huge amount of inconsistency and even hypocrisy in anyone being able to get a permit to burn green wood on this scale.

Our local councils spend a lot of time advising and encouraging our region's firewood merchants not to sell green wood and we can prosecute residents who we find burning green wood. Many of these homeowners have gone to great expense to put in new, efficient fires to help with our pollution exceedance days.

For some inexplicable reason, we have allowed the burning of green wood on an industrial scale to continue in the horticulture industry. So while the rest of us are diligently changing our old habits, putting in new fireplaces, planting trees, and doing our best to burn only dry wood, some of our growers are carrying on burning huge volumes of green wood with no care — as if they have an inherent right to do what they like.

There are other ways of doing this, it just costs a bit more but that is the cost of doing business in a populated region such as Heretaunga.

Transferring your pollution costs to neighbours is entirely unacceptable. You can't do these industrial burn-offs in the populated regions of civilised first world countries where horticulture is often situated and our horticulturists, who are international traders and travellers, know this. They are just pushing the boundaries and having us on.

We do make a few prosecutions but the fire has to be pretty bad and we do catch a few "lifestylers" each year burning plastics within the fires, which has also resulted in prosecutions. But the fines are painfully low, easily paid and often seen as a cost of business. And we currently don't publish the names of those prosecuted.

I spent 40 years in the horticulture industry and have great respect for our fruitgrowers in HB. They are in a continual process of innovation, seeking out and growing the world's best apples and have improved production systems by 30 per cent over the last 10 years. Their post harvest systems and logistics to markets are second to none.

They are regularly voted by their international peers as the best apple producers in the world. So they have the ability and capacity to fix this issue, improve conditions for their own families and staff — who are often the first recipients of this pollution — and be even better neighbours on this plain.

One way or another, my commitment to everyone is that this third world act of industrial burning of green wood on the Heretaunga Plains is going to stop.

Rex Graham is chairman of Hawke's Bay Regional Council.