Blowing in the wind

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No, not the song, but straw like that in the photo. About ten miles north of my home in Eugene lies the "Grass Seed Capital of the World," where ten thousand farmers raise 600 thousand pounds of grass seed for use in lawns, sports fields and parks. At about the end of April, the pollen starts flying and a whole bunch of people in the Willamette Valley start sneezing. Now, it is harvest time and they cut all those grass stalks, the wind picks up clumps of straw and blows them down the valley. On windy afternoons, you can see them float by and some finds a home on our bushes and lawns. That's not too bad though compared to when they used to burn the stubble in the fields when I first moved here. The sky would turn dark by 5 PM on summer days and the air was filled with smoke and little pieces of burned grass would land on cars and even on you. Farmers insisted that burning was necessary to combat diseases, but we city dwellers were outraged and got laws passed that required them to phase burning out. @Kandae11's comment reminded me of the accident caused in 1988 when the wind changed, smoke obscured the road on Interstate 5 and seven people were killed. They are still in business, so it turned out that burning was just wrong.