Farmers Peer Into Future; Find It Costly And Complex Producers, Scientists And Suppliers Visit ‘Fields Of Tomorrow’

Inland Northwest farmers Thursday caught a glimpse of their future, and it’s heavily dependent on high-priced machinery, pesticides and genetically altered plants.

Nearly 1,000 producers, scientists, farm suppliers and politicians from as far away as Minot, N.D., joined Monsanto Co.’s “Fields of Tomorrow” tour on isolated farms 70 miles west of Spokane.

Trampling across land owned by Ritzville’s Dr. Marty Sackmann and others, the crowd witnessed machines that seed wheat without prior tilling, and examined genetically engineered crops that don’t die when sprayed with Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer.

“Roundup-ready canola and soybeans are the wave of the future,” said Grant Miller, one of two farmers who hosted the event. “Those (canola and soybean) seeds were under lock and key until they got here. This is exciting.”

In the midst of the excitement, however, were questions about affects of the farm practices that equipment and chemical companies were promoting.

Some worry that farmers this year will use the special equipment to seed thousands of acres of previously idled land into crops, exposing fields to dust storms that could bury Spokane.

Others worry that herbicide-resistant crops will result in greater use of pesticides, or unleash a new strain of weeds that can’t be killed.

“Biotechnology sold itself as a way to move agriculture away from dependence on chemicals,” said Jane Rissler, senior staff scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. “Yet the major products of biotechnology are going to be herbicide-tolerant crops. It’s a betrayal of their promise.”

But in the green fields of waist-high wheat and canola grown to make cooking oil, far from Rissler’s urban jungle, such concerns seemed overblown.

Here, fourth-generation farmers took care of themselves, pestering Monsanto officials about the cost of the hybrid seed and how the company would kill herbicide-resistant weeds if they developed.

Danny Gigax, biotechnology manager for the St. Louis-based chemical giant, said herbicide-resistant soybeans were approved by federal agencies this year, and canola will be available in 1997. Wheat, if developed, would not be available until the next century.

Gigax said any new strains of Roundup-tolerant weeds could be killed with other herbicides. Herbicide-resistant crops, he said, may actually reduce farmers’ dependence on pesticides.

“We won’t have the canola plant that ate Spokane,” said Joe Dahmen, Monsanto sales representative in Rockford.

But Jack Brown, plant breeder and geneticist with the University of Idaho, said a killer canola is a possibility. All the major chemical companies are developing crops resistant to herbicides, he said, and once the plants begin to cross-pollinate, they’ll be resistant to every weed killer on the market.

“You’ll have canola all over the place, along the side of the road, in your garden,” he said. “I’m just not convinced this is a wonderful thing that everyone says it is. We’re beginning to interfere with nature.”

It also could be expensive. Monsanto, which has spent more than $100 million developing herbicide-resistant crops, charges Midwest soybean farmers a $30-per-acre “technology fee” to grow the seed. Farmers spend another $5 an acre each time they spray their fields with Roundup.

“There has to be an economic return, or growers won’t flock to it,” said Mike Dunlap, regional production manager for Cargill’s Intermountain Canola Co. “Farmers don’t want to poison the environment, they just want to manage the crop.”

Implement dealers were eager to suggest new management techniques to farmers, who were bank-rolled by near-record prices last year. And farmers were eager to learn about the equipment because many are seeding land that for a decade was locked in the federal Conservation Reserve Program.

Higher grain prices have made land more valuable, prompting farmers to opt out of the program that preserves soil and controls grain production.

Beverly Lingle, assistant to Washington State University president Sam Smith, said that shift could cause an unexpected problem for Spokane, which is struggling to avoid serious air quality regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency.

“If all the CRP comes out,” Lingle said as the “Fields of Tomorrow” bus passed a stretch of summer fallow, “we’ll have dust storms in Spokane like you’ve never seen.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo