COLUMN ONE : Soil-Saving Effort May Bury Plow : The dirt-churning action of the 6,000-year-old tool is under attack, and no-till farming is catching on. New planting equipment is being devised to protect land against erosion.

The gigantic 10-ton contraption creeping across the broad slopes on George Work’s wheat and barley farm looks more like a barn under tow than a tool of revolution.

But Work’s big, yellow “Yielder” and other nimbler apparatus are helping to drive a little-noticed but monumental shift in American agriculture. It is cutting farmers loose from their dependence on one of civilization’s great inventions: the plow.

From its rudimentary origins as a glorified hoe about 6,000 years ago, the plow has been the principal tool for opening the land to planting, destroying weeds and returning organic material to the soil after harvest. Its necessity was unquestioned, and the ritual, performed several times yearly, has shaped the culture and rhythm of farm life.

But today the dirt-churning action of the plow is under attack, cited by conservationists in the U.S. government and elsewhere as a primary contributor to an increasingly worrisome problem: the loss of the nation’s topsoil to wind and water at a rate of 3 billion tons a year.

Now, in response to federal anti-erosion mandates and aided by a steep drop in the price of weed-killing herbicides, a wide assortment of new equipment is accomplishing what has been done by tillage for millennia. The new machines are similar to the Yielder, which surgically drills seed into previously undisturbed ground.

As a 1995 deadline approaches for farmers to comply with federal soil-saving mandates, there has been an abrupt, large-scale shift to so-called mulch-till, no-till and ridge-till farming--all variations on the practice of leaving as much residue atop farmland as possible.

“The thing we’ve got to recognize is the ground needs to be covered more than it is,” Work says. “Think of a cover on the soil as like the skin for your own body.”

And what of the classic plow--workhorse of the American farm since John Deere built one of steel in Illinois in 1837?

It remains farming’s most enduring symbol--emblazoned on the seal of the U.S. Department of Agriculture--and the poet’s frequent metaphor for man’s oneness with the soil. What will we turn swords into if not plowshares (the cutting edge of a plow)?

Besides, the plow’s handiwork--the clean, neatly furrowed field--broadcast the farmer’s pride in property. Status-wise, a stubble-free 40 acres has long been the rural equivalent of the weed-free suburban lawn.

The plow satisfied other needs. The very aroma of freshly turned soil remains so intoxicating to some that they think it is chemically addictive. And the very act of sitting alone on a tractor and dragging a six-bottom (six-bladed) plow across an empty field was valued as therapeutic--the farmer’s escape.

This peculiar therapy “may be the only excuse left” for plowing, says University of California farm adviser Michael J. Smith, based in San Luis Obispo County.

Farm experts say the plow and other types of tillage equipment will always be needed for some crops and soil conditions.

But the venerable moldboard plow--the moldboard is the above-ground portion to which the plow’s slicing implement is attached--is becoming just a secondary farm tool. Built at a rate of nearly 700,000 a year in the 1920s and totaling 23,000 as recently as 1981, the moldboard plow is now being built at a rate of fewer than 3,000 a year.

Work, a nationally recognized conservationist, has 3,000 non-irrigated acres of grain and legumes in California’s central coastal range near Paso Robles. It is a highly erodible region and the only part of the state where no-till farming has much of a following, though some California farmers are working on more traditional ways to reduce tillage to combat erosion.

But row crops in the Midwest and South are the real hotbeds, with Illinois and Iowa leading the way. Nationally, farmers on nearly one-third of the 280 million cultivated acres left at least 30% of the stubble and other crop debris atop their fields after harvest last year rather than plowing it under as tradition teaches.

And fully 10% of the nation’s planted acreage was not plowed at all. It is the approach known as no-till or, in the vernacular, bare-ass farming that was once confined to the fringes of agriculture and dismissed by mainstream farmers as outright loony.

Use of no-till methods jumped 40% last year--from 20 million acres in 1991 to 28 million in 1992--and is expected to jump another 14% this year. In 1980, the total was 3 million acres.

In Iowa, some fields are dotted with no-till signs resembling the universal no-smoking signs, with a slash mark through a plow instead of a cigarette.

It is heretical stuff in a proud profession whose marks of excellence include the cleanly plowed field. Work’s wife, Elaine, says plowing was the essence of the job: “That’s what made you a farmer.”

But lo and behold, farmers who have embraced the new techniques boast that they’re saving not only the topsoil but time, labor, fuel, water, equipment life and fertilizer.

“It’s economics,” says Jim Wilkinson of Oxford, Ind., who reports he has tripled his tractor life, halved his fuel and fertilizer costs, and let a hired hand go since he stopped plowing his 960 acres in 1988. Yields from his corn and soybean crops have been above average.

Some conservation-minded farmers have been going easy on the plow in such crops as corn, small grains, soybeans and cotton since the 1960s. But herbicides, which kill weeds as plows do, and alternative planting rigs were not good or cheap enough to support widespread change.

And the dramatically increased activity of the past few years was triggered less by economics or some new grass-roots farm conservation ethic than by the 1985 and 1990 farm bills.

The federal laws threatened farmers with the loss of crop subsidies and other programs if they did not act by 1995 to come up with plans to halt erosion. Covered is all farmland considered highly erodible, or roughly half the nation’s cultivated land. The preferred plan--instead of crop rotation or other approaches--has proved to be parking the plow.

Skeptics predict that the surge in such conservation practices will level off when the 1995 deadline is reached. Meanwhile, farmers who do not take part in federal crop subsidy programs--and that includes a big share of California growers--would have no government hammer over their heads to implement such methods.

But others believe the change is deeper than that, shoring up the partnership between the farmer and his land.

Says David Schertz, national agronomist for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service: “Agriculture is in the midst of profound change. Early on, a lot of farmers thought this (trend) would just go away. But the attitude changes have been dramatic.”

Farmers have discovered that the stuff left behind after the wheat, corn or cotton harvest--called trash by farmers who religiously plow it under--serves to anchor the soil in place against the wind while deflecting rainfall’s powerfully erosive effect.

In prairie snow country, where wind would sweep away not only the snow but the exposed topsoil, the standing stubble left behind by the new techniques traps the snow in place so that it replenishes the ground water in spring.

And there is the earthworm boom. Many farmers report a big increase in earthworms since they buried the plow--”worms don’t like to be cut in half,” says Work--and the channels that worms create in the soil help retain water that would otherwise run off and take costly fertilizer with it.

“We’ve got guys in North Dakota who have doubled their yield because of the added moisture,” says Frank Lessiter of Brookfield, Wis., whose arcane publication No-Till Farmer is coming into its own after 20 lean years.

Advocates call this cultural shift a serendipitous event--but one that demands a revolution in attitude and a more management-oriented farmer.

Nor are the new practices, which the USDA calls “residue management,” without their problems and limitations. The jury seems to be still out, for example, on whether combatting weeds and diseases demands significantly greater use of herbicides in lieu of traditional plowing.

To Richard Johnson, agronomist at Deere & Co., the large Midwest farm-machinery maker, it is no coincidence that the makers of weed-killing herbicides are running television commercials in the Corn Belt pushing their products for no-till farming. The no-till approach requires more “chemical farming,” though how much more is in dispute.

Indeed, a collapse in prices of key herbicides--notably Monsanto Co.’s widely used, all-purpose Roundup--since the expiration of patents in recent years has helped make no-till economically viable. A pint of Roundup that once cost $30 can now be had for $7.

A leading advocate of residue management, John Becherer at the Conservation Technology Information Center in West Lafayette, Ind., a government-industry-grower technology transfer center, cites USDA studies showing “no significant difference in chemical use” with the new techniques.

Replies Deere’s Johnson: “It blows my mind when they say that. The chemical (use) goes up, with negative implications for water quality.”

But then Deere, whose founder opened up the Great Plains with his steel-bladed plow, has its own plowshare to grind and has taken its lumps in the debate. Indeed, if such changes are leaving more topsoil in place, they are kicking up dust in the fast-changing farm marketplace.

New and old players in the fertilizer, herbicide and farm-equipment industries--riveted by the implications of, say, a tractor lasting three times as long as it used to--are scrambling to protect or capture turf. Reduced plowing means fewer trips across the field, and that would eventually cut into sales of the all-important tractor.

Still sitting astride the agricultural implement industry like one of its oversized tractors, Deere has been accused of holding back the no-till movement by only belatedly serving the new market, hoping that such anti-plow trends--a presumed threat to its traditional tillage equipment--would peter out.

“Every chance I get, I like to poke John Deere in the butt, and it was not in their interest” to lead the way, says Keith Saxton, an agronomist with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Pullam, Wash. “They made their money on deep-tillage equipment, and they saw it as a threat.”

Deere calls such charges unfair, noting that it introduced the first no-till seed drill in the late 1960s and nobody bought it. Its philosophy is to follow farmers’ needs, not lead them, a company spokesman said, and Deere now dominates the still-modest no-till market by virtue of its sheer size.

Meanwhile, Deere has had to join dozens of smaller companies in offering specialized cultivation rigs for this emerging market, which does not offer the high sales volumes the company is used to.

For example, it is one of 19 companies chasing after the tiny market for ridge-till farming. Ridge till, a conservation technique favored by Nebraskans but used on just 1% of the nation’s planted acreage, forms ridges for planting and uses them year after year, minimizing the need to till and disrupt the land.

Says Deere’s Johnson, “It’s had a serious impact on our markets. We’ve had to get a lot smarter. We need to make a profit on lower volumes.”

Dozens of smaller manufacturers of alternative-tillage rigs have jumped into the fray. The sometimes passionate advocates of competing technologies attack each other’s approaches, occasionally declaring that civilization itself is on the line if the topsoil isn’t handled right.

“All these factions are shooting at each other. Some of them are almost fundamentalist in their beliefs,” Johnson says. “We’re sort of sitting in the cross-fire, trying to serve everybody.”

Both hero and victim of the no-till wars is the Yielder, the Gargantuan machine that still plies the hilly fields on Work’s farm. Produced by a now-defunct company in Washington, it cost $120,000 in 1982. Work and a neighbor bought it together. Today, simpler outfits costing $25,000 or $50,000 do much the same thing.

Like some ancient gas-guzzler from Detroit, it is viewed with scorn by some, affection by others. The huge price tag is said to have set the movement back and bankrupted some farmers. Says Deere’s Johnson, “It only bankrupted the dumb ones. The smart ones never bought it.”

On the other hand, it was the Cadillac of its era, built to last forever, and Work’s copy looks as if it might. Says Dave Ernst, associate editor of No-Till Farming, “They say it can literally drill seed through asphalt.”