USDA Gets Dirt Under Fingernails as It Digs for Secrets of Organic Farm : Environment: Clinton Administration has proposed reducing pesticide use on 75% of the country’s farm acreage by 2000--and the USDA has gotten the message. No longer are natural-farming advocates pariahs.

To human visitors, the apple orchard at the Rodale Institute Research Center smells of damp soil and ripe fruit. But to a certain brown moth, it’s awash in a dizzying sexual perfume that leaves him reeling--and unfulfilled.

“It’s called mating confusion,” said horticulturist Terry Schettini. “The poor guy doesn’t know where to go.” Unable to find a mate, he can’t produce larvae to feed on the apples.

The result: no wormy apples. And because the trick is done with insect sex attractants, not pesticides, there are no toxic residues on the apples.

The organic apple orchard is a work in progress. But Rodale’s scientists have shown they can raise corn and soybeans without pesticides, and bring in as many crops as farms that use chemicals.

In past years these findings might have been ignored in the dusty halls of the Agriculture Department. But there’s been a change of heart in Washington.

The Clinton Administration--prompted partly by a National Academy of Sciences report warning that pesticide residues could be harming American children--has proposed a package of reforms aimed at reducing pesticide use on 75% of the country’s farm acreage by 2000.

The Department of Agriculture has gotten the message. Suddenly, “Agriculture is on the side of the table that says it’s a good idea to reduce the use of pesticides. That’s a major breakthrough,” said Allen Jennings of the Environmental Protection Agency’s pesticide office.

A decade ago, advocates of organic farming were about as welcome at the Agriculture Department as boll weevils in a cotton field. Production was the focus, and no one quite believed that farms could still rack up impressive yields without pesticides.

There was a brief interlude, during the Jimmy Carter Administration, when organic farming research gained a toehold at USDA. In 1980, Garth Youngberg, an Agriculture Department planner, issued a report concluding that many pests could be controlled without chemicals--and that organic farming could be done at a profit.

“There was a lot of interest in that report, a huge amount of interest,” Youngberg recalled.

His superiors responded by eliminating his job. “Just the statement that organic farming was feasible was enough to get Garth Youngberg fired,” said Rhonda Janke, Rodale’s director of research.

Times have changed, however, and Janke and her colleagues are no longer thought of as unrealistic zealots.

“I think the Rodale people are fairly objective,” said Richard Amerman of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Md. One sign of the change in attitude: Amerman’s agency now stations one of its own researchers at Rodale’s experimental farm.

Rodale has compromised too. It no longer takes an all-or-none approach to pesticide use. Recognizing that many farmers may be unwilling to discard pesticides overnight, the institute is working with a network of private farmers to help them meet the lesser goal of reducing pesticide use.

“We don’t tell farmers what to use and not to use,” Janke said. Experiments in pesticide-free agriculture are confined to the institute’s own fields. “We feel that researchers should take more risks than farmers. We get paid at the end of the week whether we get a crop or not, and farmers don’t.”

Still, though Rodale and other organic enthusiasts may have moderated their aims, they have not moderated their view that chemicals represent a menace--or that the trend in chemical use is alarming.

During the last 30 years, U.S. pesticide use has tripled, and the use of synthetic fertilizers has doubled, according to the World Resources Institute.

Rain washes many of those chemicals into the nation’s rivers and lakes, making agricultural runoff the leading cause of pollution of lakes and streams.

U.S. farm programs have not only failed to protect the environment, they’ve actually encouraged soil erosion and pollution, the World Resources Institute concluded in a recent report.

Farmers are paid subsidies according to how much they produce, independent of the effect on the environment. Furthermore, they are not reimbursed for, say, planting ground cover to control soil erosion and restore soil nutrients. That’s a key feature of Rodale’s cropping systems.

In 1947, decades before these problems became apparent, J. I. Rodale bought a dilapidated, 68-acre farm 60 miles north of Philadelphia to try out some of the ideas he was espousing in his new magazine on organic gardening.

The magazine, now called Organic Gardening, blossomed into the Rodale Press, the publisher of Prevention magazine and other magazines and books.

The farm grew to be the Rodale Institute, a nonprofit research and educational institution. (Rodale Press contributes money to Rodale Institute, but the two are separate.)

The Rodale Institute’s largest study of organic farming began in 1981, when researchers began a side-by-side comparison of conventional farming and organic alternatives. The experiment was designed to show whether organic farming could be commercially feasible.

First, the researchers rejected earlier studies by the chemical industry. “The chemical companies would run experiments and withdraw all pesticides and fertilizers and get, say, 10% of the normal yield,” Janke said.

Their conclusion, said Janke, was, “We’re all going to starve to death without pesticides and fertilizers.”

Janke and her colleagues decided the companies were right--to a point. “You can’t grow corn, soybeans, corn, soybeans and withdraw pesticides,” said Janke.

The key to getting rid of chemicals, Janke said, was to change the crop rotation.

In the Rodale organic cropping systems, rye grass is often used to hold the soil. Legumes like red clover and hairy vetch are planted in between corn and soybeans to prevent soil erosion and to put nitrogen back into the soil.

In some systems, the entire corn plant is harvested and the stalks are allowed to ferment--producing animal feed.

“We went cold turkey when we withdrew the chemicals, and we did have a yield decrease before the organic nitrogen kicked in,” she said. “Since ‘84, though, all three systems have yielded the same” in corn and soybeans.

The organic systems have other advantages too, she said. “We think the nutrient system’s tighter in these systems, and we’ll have less nitrogen leaking,” she said.

Nitrogen, a critical nutrient on the farm, is a disruptive pollutant when it drains off the farm, spurring the growth of choking weeds and algae in lakes and rivers.

The experiment, said Janke, “turned USDA around.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that all corn and soybean farmers can swear off pesticides tomorrow.

The change may require an investment in new equipment, for example. It is also likely to require much more intensive management of the farm.

In conventional crop systems, farmers spray on a predetermined schedule with a mixture of chemicals recommended by the county extension agent. Farmers can plan weeks and months ahead.

In organic and reduced-pesticide systems, farmers must actively monitor the fields, said Michael Sands, another Rodale scientist.

“Some people call it reading the ecosystem,” he said. “How many weeks do I have? What’s the rainfall? How does my crop look? How much nitrogen is in the soil? . . . That takes a bit of thinking.”

At the Agriculture Department, researchers are trying to figure out how to get the word out to farmers. “You have to distinguish between the rhetorical discussions about organic farming and what happens in the field,” said Larry Elworth, who specializes in pesticide policy.