U.S. CONGRESS TO LOOK AT SOIL PROGRAM EXEMPTIONS

  The Senate Agriculture Committee is
  expected to take up a bill tomorrow that would exempt from
  government conservation regulations those farmers who have
  rotated alfalfa and other multiyear grasses and legumes with
  row crops, committee staff said.
      Under current so-called "sodbuster" law, farmers who planted
  alfalfa and other multiyear grasses and legumes on highly
  erodible land in the years 1981 through 1985 lose federal farm
  program benefits if they produce a row crop on that land in
  later years.
      Sen. Edward Zorinsky (D-Neb.), sponsor of the measure, said
  recently that those crop rotating practices resulted in less
  erosion than the practices of many farmers who produced
  strictly row crops.
  

