Hugh Sidey's America: Revolution on the Farm

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.