COLUMN ONE : Harvesting Limits on Chemicals : Farmers are limiting their use of pesticides and fertilizers to protect the environment--and their health.

It’s planting time again in the grain belt, but this season, many farmers like Ron Salge are sowing a revolution of sorts into the soil along with the seed corn and soybeans.

Salge has reduced his use of commercial fertilizer by about 25%. He’s also gotten stingy with weed-killers, laying them out in narrow strips rather than in broad mists that often blew up his nose and made him nauseous with what folks in Butler County sarcastically call “springtime flu.”

Nearby in Shell Rock, Jeff Reints has decided not to pre-treat any of his corn fields with man-made fertilizer this year. Up the road in Greene, Mike Ruby plans to limit herbicide use to 20 of the 360 acres he’s planting.

“I’ve been in this county 18 years and I’m amazed at how much more conservation concerns there are today,” said Dale Thoreson, the state’s agricultural extension agent for Butler County. “These people have to make a living off the land and they have to drink the water that’s under it. They don’t want to screw it up any more.”

In growing numbers, farmers are struggling to wean themselves of a slavish reliance on the very miracle chemicals and synthetic nutrients that made post-war American agriculture the envy of the world.

“Farmers are increasingly aware of the health risk,” said Marty Strange, director of the Center for Rural Affairs, a Nebraska think tank. “. . . there are a lot of farmers out there that know they’re on the front line in terms of exposure, and the more we learn about these things the less we like them.”

Urged on by some of the same experts and officials who for decades championed the use of chemicals as a panacea, many growers are rediscovering the promise of largely abandoned practices, such as crop rotation and manure spreading, that once were as basic to farm life as rain and sunlight. At the same time, sophisticated new soil testing and pest control techniques have helped to refine low-chemical farming.

It is a movement that should not be confused with organic farming, although advocates of both practices share concerns. Few growers in these parts are likely to go cold turkey, but many of them are beginning to tinker with ways of reducing their heavy dependence on chemicals without seriously jeopardizing yields.

An example: Laying a precautionary “plow-down” of nitrogen fertilizer before planting has been a springtime ritual for Ruby and most other farmers. This year, Ruby skipped the plow-down on all but a handful of acres. Instead, he will periodically test his soil. When tests show that a particular field needs a shot of nutrient, it will be fed on an “as-needed” basis. That should slice about $2,500 off Ruby’s usual fertilizer bill, he estimates.

To outsiders, such a notion might seem prudent and obvious, but for years it has been a tough sell. “A lot of guys figured that if 100 pounds of fertilizer was good, then 200 pounds was better,” said Salge. “That’s why we’ve got the ground water problems we have.”

Here in Iowa, the concept of “sustainable” or “low-input” agriculture is strongly backed by both the state agriculture department and Iowa State University, which has one of the nation’s most respected agriculture schools. Both have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into experiments and demonstration projects. The U.S. Department of Agriculture also has a program.

“Agriculture has been sold a bill of goods by science and those who produce and sell these products,” state Agriculture Secretary Dale Cochran said. “You don’t see resistance to this any more. You don’t see people saying you’re crazy. Over a period of four or five years, I think we’re going to see most all Iowa farmers practicing some form of sustainable agriculture.”

Indeed, not too many years ago, the farm establishment by and large considered followers of such unconventional practices to be kooks or radicals. No more.

At Iowa State, in Ames, a recent opinion survey found that 78% of Iowa farmers questioned said they believed that modern agriculture was too dependent on insecticides and herbicides; 60% of them said they had refrained from using a farm chemical they believed was too dangerous, and nearly as many said they had used chemicals that they thought had somehow affected their health.

The wariness has filtered into the political arena. One Democrat running for governor of Iowa recently called for a special tax on farm chemicals to discourage their use. And one of his opponents urged an outright ban. Not long ago, voicing such ideas in a Midwestern farm state would have been political suicide.

“Whether chemicals are safe or not may still be an open question,” said Paul Lasley, a rural sociologist at Iowa State University. “But a significant number of producers perceive them to be dangerous, and they’re acting on their perception.”

In the rural Midwest, where fads and social causes have always taken a back seat to hard-nosed pragmatism, the movement seems to be accelerating for two reasons:

Some producers have discovered that they can earn more money even with slightly smaller crops if they spend less for pesticides and fertilizers. And there is a gnawing fear among farmers that the products used to poison bugs and weeds may inadvertently wind up poisoning their families as well.

“Down at the elevator in Allison the other day, a guy said he spilled just a little insecticide on his skin and started getting the shakes,” said Salge, who raises hogs along with corn and soybeans on his 720-acre spread. “That’s scary.”

Due to sudden demand, operators of that grain elevator in Allison, the Butler County seat, have for the first time this year begun to stock protective clothing, hats, goggles and gloves.

More worrisome than accidents, however, are the long-term dangers posed by such products as they leach through the soil and into wells, creeks and streams that are tapped both for farm use and city drinking water.

Recent studies have raised serious questions. Near Madison, Wis., half the wells tested last year in rural Dane County contained low levels of atrazine, the most widely used corn herbicide in the country. It is suspected of causing cancer in sufficient concentrations.

Similarly, the Army Corps of Engineers found atrazine contamination approaching the recommended maximum safe levels in three major reservoirs in Kansas that supply drinking water to as many as 500,000 people. Iowa state tests have found detectable, although not necessarily dangerous, levels of farm chemicals in wells and streams that provide drinking water to perhaps 40% of the state’s population.

When it comes to surface water, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regards agriculture as the most broad-based source of pollution. Tests conducted last year by the U.S. Geological Survey served only to reinforce that indictment. The agency sampled water from 150 rivers and streams in 10 Midwestern states over several months. Low, but detectable, levels of atrazine were found in 90% of the samples taken in March and April, before planting began. Other farm chemicals also were present in many samples.

By late spring, after most fields had been planted, treated with chemicals and flushed by rains, the proportion of tainted samples had risen to 98%. Median concentrations of atrazine were measured at three times the federally recommended safe limit for drinking water. In the fall, about 76% of the water samples contained atrazine, although in less threatening amounts.

“Until recently, people thought these compounds just degraded,” said Dan Goolsby, a USGS water quality specialist based in Denver. “We’re finding some of them don’t degrade, or are degrading far slower than we thought.”

Alarmed by such discoveries, both the state of Iowa and, later, the federal government, clamped restrictions on the use of atrazine earlier this year.

Defenders of the farm chemical industry acknowledge that it has a growing image problem. Still, they insist that many of the doubts about safety are overblown, and they say that an anti-chemical fad could endanger the nation’s food supply.

For one thing, said Ron Phillips of the Washington-based Fertilizer Institute, chemicals have enabled agriculture to maintain high production levels even as the number of farmers has dropped precipitously. Many of today’s farmers supplement their incomes by holding down jobs off the land. Since low-chemical agriculture is more time-consuming, there simply may not be enough manpower in rural areas to make it work on a large scale, Phillips said.

“This idea that farmers can reduce their use of commercial fertilizers and still remain profitable and productive is ridiculous,” he said.

Dick Fawcett, a private soil consultant in Iowa, said the methodology used for testing the quality of well water in Iowa may have exaggerated the contamination problem. Many wells appeared to be tainted by pesticides primarily because they were adjacent to spots where farmers had mixed chemicals or washed out spraying equipment, Fawcett said. Simply moving the sampling sites would lower the readings, he insisted.

Switching from chemical fertilizers to manure and other so-called natural ones also could have its drawbacks, Fawcett warned. If not properly managed, manure can leave even higher levels of potentially carcinogenic nitrates in the soil than artificial fertilizers do, he said.

“It’s great that farmers are coming around to using the least (chemicals) that they have to,” Fawcett said. “The only concern I have is that we don’t start substituting other technologies that are worse than what we have.”

With some reservations, leading farm chemical dealers in Iowa agreed that their business is due for an upheaval, and they said they are preparing to adjust rather than fight it. Dan Frieberg, executive vice president of the Iowa Fertilizer and Chemical Assn., a retailer’s group, said sales of nitrogen fertilizer dropped 10% to 12% in Iowa last year, even while the acreage planted in corn was increased 10%.

To compensate for a continuing decline in sales, many dealers said they will begin marketing services, such as soil fertility testing and scouting for pest infestations, Frieberg said. “If service is 15% of our business now, it’ll be possibly 40% by the turn of the century,” he predicted.

If such trends continued they would mark a dramatic turnabout in the history of American agriculture. In simpler times, the typical Midwestern farm may have raised corn, oats, milo, soybeans, wheat and several other crops. Many farmers also raised cows, pigs and chickens in the barnyard. Animal droppings were used to fertilize the fields. Rotating crops and letting fields lie fallow every few years were tried and true natural methods of recharging the soil and keeping pests to a minimum.

Then, after World War II, came the “green revolution” that ushered in an era of specialized farming. New, man-made fertilizers and pesticides, as well as improved crop strains, made possible huge increases in yields. Pesticide use soared 170% between 1964 and 1982, and the amount of nitrogen fertilizer spread on fields quadrupled between 1960 and 1981, according to the USDA.

Thanks to chemicals, farmers no longer had to rotate crops or haul manure. Many of them began to plant the same crops in the same fields year after year. Some dropped out of livestock production altogether. Government policies encouraged these developments.

According to a lengthy report released last year by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, federal policies actually penalize farmers who adopt conservation methods or try to reduce pesticide applications.

For example, the council explained, crop rotation is a good way to fix nitrogen in the soil naturally, curb erosion and reduce the need for chemical safeguards. Yet price support formulas are written so that farmers who do rotate crops get smaller subsidies than those who don’t, the council charged.

Several measures designed to correct this pro-chemical bias are being considered in Congress as legislation that will dictate federal agriculture policy through 1995 is debated. Under consideration are proposals to grant more money for research into low-input agriculture as well as training in chemical-free farming methods for all county extension agents in the nation.

While the move away from chemicals is only beginning to catch on in a big way, it has long had a small corps of pioneers. Gary Young, president of the Sustainable Agriculture Society of Nebraska, gave up on chemicals 20 years ago, after he sprayed a corn field to kill cut worms and ended up in the hospital.

“I was planting one day and I started getting stomach cramps and felt dizzy and I didn’t know if I was going to make it back to the house,” said Young, who lives in McLean, Neb. “Since I quit, I’ve never gotten sick like that again. I just walked away from using all chemicals. I just figured it was either that or die.” Young insists that his production and profits over the years have been as good or better than his neighbors’.

Few farmers are willing to go as far as Young did, however, and there remains considerable resistance to sweeping change. Tom Smidt, who coordinates a pilot crop management program in Butler County, said that most of the farmers he sees are merely experimenting with reducing their applications of fertilizers and pesticides, trying to determine the most efficient levels.

“In a lot of cases you can have your cake and eat it too,” Smidt said. “If you can get the same yields with less fertilizer, you’re making more profit and there’s less pressure on the environment.”

Ruby, the Butler County farmer, agreed.

“We’ve all got to come to the realization that we couldn’t work without chemicals and fertilizers and still farm. . .but it’s something we can’t abuse or overuse.”