Agriculture

On Jack Gurley's farm, the beans are in big trouble. Everything else is thriving in his hand-tilled fields: glossy tomatoes grow beside the summer squash and tall stalks of flowering dill. But the beans - the haricots verts, dragon tongues and fancy wax varieties - are being chewed to bits by yellow beetles. And that's just what the state inspector came to see. "This is nature at work," says Valerie Frances, manager of Maryland's Organic Certification Program, surveying the wilted, damaged leaves.

Facing the prospect of adjusting to new environmental regulations after decades of waking up with the cows and years of disappointing milk and grain prices, Bob and Lydia Korman were looking for a way to retire last fall. But the Baltimore County dairy farmers faced the same problem many farmers do at retirement time: Land is not the most liquid of assets. The Kormans' 144 acres off Black Rock Road in the northwest part of the county would fetch more than enough on the market to secure them financially, but they had no desire to sell.

CHESTERTOWN -- Wayne Bell figures it's about time his students stepped off Washington College's grassy intellectual island and got a good whiff of the Eastern Shore farmland that surrounds them. Instead of turning out a band of "tree-huggers" here at the 2-year-old Center for the Environment and Society, Bell is set on training a cadre of leaders in everything from environmental science to environmental law -- future decision-makers who will know their way around modern agriculture. "Agriculture, Environment and Society" is proving to be a popular course at the 220-year-old liberal arts college, despite his indelicate promise to help students "go out and get some [manure]

The dairy and beef cattle were no big deal. The hog farm was large, the sod farm interesting. But the last stop on the tour was best.Four ostriches on a Bixler Valley farm left the Maryland Secretary ofAgriculture and a group of farmers from around the state shaking their heads yesterday afternoon.It might have seemed like a mirage to the farmers who had been riding in a bus for almost eight hours: Ostriches in the hills of Carroll County."Watch your glasses. They eat glasses," Brenda Untener told the group, mostly members of the Maryland Agricultural Commission.

MARYLAND'S farm industry, which feels that it has been neglected by the state in the past, will take center stage early next year when Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. will be host of an agricultural forum to address the future of farming. "The goal of the forum is to consider all sectors of Maryland's production agriculture, identify overarching issues, and to construct recommendations that will continue to grow and promote agriculture in Maryland," Ehrlich said in announcing the program. "Agriculture is essential to our state's economy, environment and quality of life, and I am committed to promoting its long-term viability," the governor said.

THE TYPICAL environmentalist's dilemma about agriculture and Chesapeake Bay goes like this: Bay restoration can't happen without profound reductions in farm runoff. No effort can be spared to clean up this large pollution source. But your worst enemy is also your best friend. Viable farms are the ultimate defense against sprawl development, whose overall environmental, economic, social and aesthetic impacts far outweigh those of farms. In other words, they hate how you are farming, but they'd hate even more to see you stop.

With more than $200 million in sales a year, agriculture still rates among the top five industries in Howard County. But in a place that once was almost all farmland, the picture of farming continues to change drastically. Homes have cropped up at a rate of 200 a year in the past five years alone. Farms, stables and nurseries now account for only about a quarter of the land, according to Charles Feaga, vice president of the Howard County Farm Bureau. Howard County farmers have learned to change with the times.

HERE'S what I wish I could tell farmers about agriculture's role in the sad state of the Chesapeake Bay: "Yes, the runoff of fertilizers and manure and sediment from farmland is the largest source of pollution. But farms are shrinking while development is expanding with no end in sight. Growth and development is what we really must focus on to clean up the bay. "After all, you guys have been farming for centuries, but it's only as population doubled in recent decades that the bay's water quality and sea grass habitats have crashed.

KHUKRIYA, Iraq - It's tough-love time for Iraq's 600,000 farmers. Sitting cross-legged on a straw mat inside a mud farmhouse, Harteef Ardawi ticks off the things he needs to make his farming operation a success. There's seed for wheat, corn, vegetables and sunflowers. Then he'll need cut-rate fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides. And perhaps most important: a guaranteed price for his harvest. Risk isn't on the list. "We would prefer that the government run such a project," Ardawi says.

The delicate seedlings in Shawn Streaker Lane's expansive back yard look fine until you walk among them. Half of the 2,000 trees she planted in the spring are dead, skeletons standing upright in the soil. It was a trying year to try Christmas tree farming - to grow anything, really, in such dry conditions - but Lane's operation is less about agriculture than about saving her 8-acre homestead in Ellicott City, owned by her family since 1874. Even half-gone, the trees serve an important purpose: lowering her $7,000-a-year property taxes so she will not feel forced to sell as others in Howard County have, the oft-forgotten result of spiraling land values.