Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 16, 1990                   TAG: 9003162739
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS BUSINESS WRITER
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE                                 LENGTH: Medium

'SMART' FARMING HAILED

However, speakers at the fourth annual Virginia Sustainable Agriculture Conference urged boosters of new methods of farming not to be overly critical of conventional farmers who depend on large applications of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

"A farm is an organism. It's not a factory," said Fred Kirschenmann, a former academic and North Dakota farm manager. "Organisms take time to change."

Food-safety groups, who have targeted farm chemicals, lack a practical agenda because they don't recognize the amount of time it takes for American farmers to change the way they farm. An immediate ban on all chemicals would cripple farmers' ability to feed the nation, he said.

Kirschenmann, who has a 3,100-acre grain and cattle farm, said a good transition from conventional to sustainable farming can take from five to 15 years. He predicted that a new way of thinking about farming is coming slowly and one day sustainable farming will be conventional farming.

The concept of sustainable agriculture encompasses a variety of farming techniques known by other names: organic, biological, ecological, regenerative and others. Roughly defined, sustainable farming tries to protect natural resources by using fewer chemicals while at the same time producing food profitably.

Some of the confusion surrounding sustainable farming comes from attempts to define it too precisely, Kirschenmann said. Sustainable agriculture is an ongoing system. There are no final answers, he said.

There is no one way of defining sustainable agriculture, said Neil Schaller, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Low-input Sustainable Agriculture Program. "I don't think there should be, because it's a way of thinking," Schaller said.

Sustainable farming treats the farm as a system, not a set of independent parts, Schaller said. You must think in terms of everything being related to everything else. It's "farming in partnership with nature," he said.

Another speaker, Charles Benbrook of the National Academy of Sciences, said the question facing society is how to grow food without imposing unintentional and unforeseen costs on future generations.

"We're learning that we can farm smarter," Benbrook said. "We're learning that we can enlist biology and ecology as allies to increase efficiency."

The movement of farmers toward sustainable farming constitutes a revolution in agriculture, Schaller said. He compared it with the recent revolutions in Eastern Europe. Each was unexpected. Each questioned traditional ways. And each involved the pursuit of ideals and learning by doing, he said.

This year's federal budget contains $4.45 million for research in sustainable farming, Schaller said. The research program faces reauthorization in the farm bill Congress is wrestling with this year.

The conference, which runs through today, was well attended. Conference co-chairman Bill Wolf of the Necessary Trading Co. at New Castle said 220 people had pre-registered. Some farmers were kept away by the balmy weather, he said.

One of the goals of the conference was to get farmers thinking more about what customers want, Wolf said. Virginia Commissioner of Agriculture Mason Carbaugh, who opened the meeting, said he foresees an increase in farms growing specialty crops in the years ahead.

"The U.S. produces the most safe food in the world. The challenge is to improve on that," he said.

In its session just completed, the Virginia General Assembly passed a bill authorizing the private certification of organically grown produce in Virginia. A federal bill to set standards for organically grown food is on a fast track in the U.S. Senate, said Roger Blobaum of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Because his group recognizes the difficulty in monitoring the use of farm chemicals, it has adopted an approach that encourages farmers to move away from chemical use, Blobaum said.