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                                                                                HUGH SIDEY'S AMERICA, Page  54

Revolution on the Farm


The plow is being displaced by new techniques that protect
the land and promise even more abundant crops

By Hugh Sidey


    The 150-year era of the great steel plow, central
instrument of American abundance and strength, is ending in an
astonishing revolution now sweeping through Maryland and on to
the Illinois bottomlands and the high hills of Oregon where
corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton are grown. The upheaval in the
long, quiet reaches of U.S. farmland has gone largely unnoticed
in the din of presidential politics, the cries of rage from the
torn inner cities, and the turmoil abroad. But it may mean as
much to this country as all the other changes taking place
around the world -- or even more.

    "It is beyond science and technology now," says Bill
Richards, the Ohio farmer turned chief of the U.S. Soil
Conservation Service, a branch of the Agriculture Department.
"It is a cultural revolution." In the past year scs has named
this new kind of farming "residue management," and its wide
embrace includes techniques labeled no-till, ridge-till and
mulch-till.

    Its central tenet is retiring the old moldboard plow,
which laid the earth open to wind and water erosion. Instead
farmers leave residue from the previous year's crops in place
to hold soil and moisture, then scratch or chisel in seeds,
which sprout through the decomposing residue. Crop rotation is
used to break insect cycles. Weeds are targeted, controlled by
new herbicides that quickly break down and vanish. In this rare
and happy story that emerges from centuries of anguished
agriculture practices and policies, there is the touch of God's
hand soothing the earth and nudging it back a bit toward the
condition in which we found it.

    The techniques were known a half-century ago but not
widely adopted because of stubbornness and no economic urgency.
Now environmental concerns, politics and economic necessity
have fortuitously converged to drive this farm revolution. Many
farmers long ago sensed the damage the traditional plowing cycle
was doing to their land, heaving it up yearly, exposed and
crumbling, to be ravaged by the elements.

    In the Midwest, which still in its renewable fecundity
ranks as the world's greatest natural resource, some farms have
lost half their topsoil as it sloughed off the hilltops into
the gullies and beyond. Stand on a bridge in Vicksburg over the
Mississippi River, the old saying goes, and every hour you can
watch an Iowa farm go by in the current below. And as the soil
moved, it took with it particles of chemical fertilizers and
pesticides that polluted the aquifers below.

    Richards estimates that a quarter of the 281 million acres
of U.S. cropland of all kinds is now under some kind of residue
management. Within two years, half the cropland will be tended
that way because new farm legislation requires conservation. In
order to enroll for crop-support payments, farmers must come up
with plans to protect their land, then put them into effect by
1995.

    But most important is the marketplace. A farmer can now
produce crops 25% to 30% more cheaply with residue management.
Richards ponders a moment in his office along Washington's Mall,
looks west as if he were surveying this huge land, then says,
"By the end of this century, 80% of the cropland will be in
residue management. It will be the greatest change in
agriculture in 100 years." Some will disagree; others will
resist. But there is the feeling in Washington and among the
farmers that the revolution cannot be reversed.

    Roger Sarver, 46, is part of the revolution. Farming 1,000
acres of rented land near Bowling Green, Ohio, he was making
little economic headway, burdened with the overhead from a task
force of monstrous machines with which he planted and harvested
corn and soybeans. Then he went down to Columbus to hear Jim
Kinsella, a Lexington, Ill., farmer who also runs a research and
training center for no-till farming.

    "It was like I was in church," recalls Sarver. "Suddenly
I was aware that he was talking about me." Kinsella was standing
before men who were struggling to survive. "Every year do you
just keep taking your corn check and turning it over to the
implement dealer?" Kinsella asked. Sarver was born again. On a
bus home from Kinsella's school he began to figure how he would
convert to no-till farming field by field. He did not have
enough money to phase in the new methods so he went cold turkey,
sold his seven-bottom plow and the larger of his two tractors,
a 225-h.p. four-wheel-drive John Deere. He used to make eight
trips each season across his fields to plow, disk (two or three
times), plant, cultivate, spray and harvest. Now he makes four
trips -- to plant, spray (twice) and harvest -- saving more than
$25 an acre. He soon found that his yields went up 10% and
something else even more precious: he was helping the land heal
and rebuild its delicate mantle of topsoil, without which
civilization as we know it would cease to exist.

    Sarver's neighbor Dave Petteys, 48, got religion on that
very principle a couple of years ago. He attended a
demonstration with soil samples, one lifted from a field planted
conventionally, the other under residue management. The first
sample was a chunk of earth devoid of worms and compacted by the
relentless assault of heavy equipment. A bucket of water poured
on top of that soil ran off to the sides. The other sample was
spongy loam abundant with worms, and the water disappeared on
its surface and in a few seconds ran out the bottom.

    Petteys' heart stirred. Buried deep in the soul of every
caring farmer there is the understanding that he is only the
land's temporary steward. "I wanted to take care of the land,"
he says simply. "We have to. That's our future." Last year 80%
of the 1,000 acres he farms for landowners was in no-till.

    When something new like this is born, something else must
die. The self-scouring polished-steel moldboard plow is not
going to expire totally. But history's chapter of giants in the
earth with their plows is closing. It has been a glorious story,
mistakes and all.

    John Deere hammered out the first simple steel plow in his
blacksmith shop in Grand Detour, Ill., in 1837. He used a
discarded saw blade. The genius was in the metal, sturdy and
sharp enough to cut the strong, matted roots of the high-stemmed
prairie grass and turn up the rich earth below for planting. The
slick surface of the moldboard (the portion of the plow above
the share, the cutting edge) kept the plow from gumming up, the
curse of wooden moldboards. By 1839 Deere was making 10 plows a
year, then 40, and by 1850 production had soared to 2,100 and
the huge farm-machinery company was on its way.

    The prairies were a deep lode of mother earth to be mined
by the plow, and the settlers rushed in and onto the Great
Plains, once called the great American desert. The Great Plains
should never have been plowed, and the size of that tragedy was
only fully realized decades later when the drought-dried soil
was lifted by angry storms and carried as far east as the
Atlantic coast.

    By that time the plowman and his instrument were rooted in
the American myth, a symbol of hard work, virtue and abundance
that fed and freed most other Americans for pursuits beyond the
farm. Plows of mounting complexity and size were hooked behind
teams of oxen and horses and then to crude steam engines. In
1894 Nebraskan Sterling Morton, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture,
decreed that the great seal of the Department of Agriculture
would no longer have a shock of wheat in the center; it would
have a shock of corn -- and a plow.

    Nebraska author Willa Cather made plowing seem poetic,
even sensual. "There are few scenes more gratifying than a
spring plowing in that country," she wrote, "where the furrows
of a single field often lie a mile in length, and the brown
earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of
growth and fertility in it, yields itself eagerly to the plow,
rolls away from the shear, not even dimming the brightness of
the metal, with a soft, deep sigh of happiness."

    Iowa painter Grant Wood placed the plow in the foreground
of his landscape Fall Plowing, which hangs behind the desk of
John Deere president David H. Stowe Jr. The painting has been
used in countless texts on art and history and is worth more
than $1 million. By 1922 nearly 700,000 moldboard plows were
being built by all U.S. manufacturers. Then came the giant
rubber-tire tractors that made it possible to link as many as
24 plow bottoms that turned the earth in great rooster tails as
if it were water off the bow of a ship.

    By the 1930s farmers had made plowing an art form and were
competing in county fairs. Herb Plambeck, an enterprising farm
reporter and colleague of Ronald Reagan's at Des Moines' station
WHO, brought the contestants together in a national match that
thrust plowing into power politics. In 1948 Harry Truman headed
for Dexter, Iowa, where 100,000 people had come to witness the
meet. Truman gave the 80th Congress hell, delightedly kicked
some newly turned clods of earth as if they were Republicans,
and came away with a huge grin, convinced that the reception he
got from the dirt farmers meant he would beat Tom Dewey, who had
snubbed the plowmen. From then on the plow meet became a must
campaign stop for aspiring Presidents.

    In the next years, out beyond the burgeoning urban areas
where suburbanites were grilling marbled steaks and roasting
sweet corn to perfection, farmers were in economic distress, and
they began to experiment with residue management. Surpluses
forced millions of acres to lie idle. Plowing was no longer so
sacrosanct. Though 60,000 moldboard plows were manufactured in
the nation in 1970, the plow was fading. Last year only 6,300
moldboard plows were sold. Today John Deere does not even
manufacture the plowshares and bottoms for the few thousand
completed plows it sells. Its new world is about tractor-pulled
machines called mulchers, tillers, rippers, drills and disks --
the tools of revolution.

    But the romance of the plow will endure in memory. It is
too great a legend to lose. Besides, some land will still need
plowing. Down Highway 70 below Bowling Green near tiny
Frenchtown, Bill Goettemoeller's family feeds 1,000 head of
cattle, and it is necessary to plow in the manure and straw from
the feedlots, though even the Goettemoellers plow only about
half as much land as they used to.

    The love of plowing is in the Goettemoeller genes. Old
Lou, the patriarch now dead, started plowing with horses and
was a national champion in 1956 and '57. One of his small hand
plows decorates the mailbox of his son Bill, 55, who was a
national winner along with his brother Jim. Every spring when
the weather mellows, Bill feels the pull of the land and the
urge to put his hand to a plow. "There is nothing I'd rather do
than plow," he says. "My father used to say, `A good plowman is
a good farmer.'"

    Bill heads arrangements for the National Plowing Match in
Convoy, Ohio, this August. And his son Gary, 31, twice a
national champion, will compete. If history repeats itself, Gary
will bring home another trophy to put with the collection
already in the Goettemoeller farm home. More important than the
trophy to Gary is the fellowship of other skilled plowmen and
the feel of turning the earth with precision and beauty. Gary's
special joy lies in the patterns of cultivation, the symmetry
of plowed fields and ruler-straight furrows carved meticulously
beside one another. "I have in my mind what good plowing should
be," he says. "When I get to the end of the field and look back
and I see it is the way I wanted it to be, that is a beautiful
moment."