Verbiage in Isle of Wight County’s fire prevention ordinance imposing a no-exceptions, five-month burn ban is causing problems for farmers, according to the county’s Fire and Rescue Advisory Board.

Chapter 7, subsection 7-15(d) of the county code stipulates “no owner or other person shall cause our permit such open burning or the use of a special incineration device May 1 through September 30 of each year,” which according to the state Department of Environmental Quality are prime smog months.

For reasons unknown to Isle of Wight County Volunteer Rescue Squad Chief Brian Carroll, who serves as chairman of the Fire and Rescue Advisory Board, the verbiage changed in 2018, replacing a model DEQ ordinance that had been in place since roughly 2006.

“When this was adopted initially, the code was fairly broad with several exceptions to it,” Carroll told county supervisors on Aug. 1.

Among those exceptions was one for “forest management, agricultural practices, and highway construction and maintenance programs approved by the State Air Pollution Control Board.”

“As soon as the burn ban came in, we had a farmer in my district was burning off his cover crop because the cover crop had gotten so thick he couldn’t plant, so his choice was either to burn off the cover crop or he couldn’t plant,” said Smithfield Volunteer Fire Department Chief Chris Edwards. “One in another district was clearing cutover to turn it into crop land … He’s got a certain period of time to be able to have the first crop planted, now he’s got piles of debris because he couldn’t burn and missed that window.”

The Fire and Rescue Advisory Board is recommending the supervisors readopt the state’s model ordinance. Anything other than adopting the state language verbatim, according to County Attorney Bobby Jones, would require the county obtain state approval.

“We had looked into this for several years with several opinions on opting out of what we had opted into, and that obviously became not an option,” Carroll said.

Readopting the state’s ordinance with the agricultural exception “would still prohibit me from burning yard waste from May through September,” Jones said. “That is in the model code; there’s no getting around that.”

State law also requires that any amendment to a county ordinance be put to a public hearing before it’s adopted, Jones said.

Due to a requirement that the county advertise the hearing at least two weeks in advance of the scheduled date, the earliest it could be scheduled would likely be the supervisors’ Sept. 19 meeting.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on Aug. 12 at 3:15 p.m. to remove a speaker’s reference to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency, which does not have a deadline for converting cutover to cropland.