Hugh Sidey's America Revolution on the Farm

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."