Boon to Crops Goes Bust--Sometimes : Agriculture: Many growers are unable to duplicate the impressive results of an experiment using methanol. But a few succeed, creating a puzzle for scientists.

PHOENIX —  A dramatic discovery that promised to revolutionize agriculture in the hot, arid regions of the Earth is being tested in an extraordinary public crucible spanning several continents. But the results have left scientists and farmers baffled over why the seemingly simple process has failed to work for most researchers, but seems to work so easily for others.

It is a mystery replete with 40-pound watermelons on one hand and disappointing cotton crops on the other.

Attempts to replicate the experiments of Arizona botanist-turned-farmer Arthur Nonomura spread rapidly around the world after he announced in late 1992 that spraying his plants with an inexpensive solution of methanol during unusually hot periods increased their growth rate by as much as 100% while reducing the need for water.

The discovery, revealed in a research paper published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, electrified researchers who saw it as a possible breakthrough in introducing agriculture to dry areas of the planet where starvation is rampant.

Methanol is readily available in its most common form--wood alcohol--so anyone with a few acres of land could try their luck with the process----and many have. Although some experts have claimed “astonishing” success, other researchers insist that methanol did nothing for their crops.

Meanwhile, Nonomura and his partner, plant growth expert Andrew Benson of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, are left twisting slowly in the wind, wondering if their reputations will go the way of cold fusion advocates or if they have begun the long march toward a Nobel Prize.

“I have heard comparisons with cold fusion,” one scientist said, referring to claims by two Utah scientists a few years ago that they had achieved fusion in a test tube. But unlike the Utah duo, Nonomura and Benson have published their work in professional journals and have cooperated fully with other researchers.

Nonomura insists he is not surprised by the mixed results.

“We’re in the first year of testing,” he said recently. “My gosh, what are we talking about? All of this information is preliminary. We can’t say anything conclusive.”

Yet the two scientists were stunned late last year when the Department of Agriculture issued a press release suggesting that methanol “either doesn’t help, or helps only under very limited conditions.” The statement came on the heels of trials involving 14 crops in 14 states, including Arizona, where the technology was expected to work the best. None of the scientists in the department’s Agricultural Research Service, which carried out the tests, saw significant improvement in the crops.

Francis Nakayama of the department’s Phoenix office said methanol was applied in a series of experiments in the Arizona desert last summer, and “we did not see any improvement.”

That would seem to bury the issue, but other researchers around the world reported great success with the process.

“I’ve done it, and it’s awesome,” said Robert M. Devlin, a plant physiologist at the University of Massachusetts.

Devlin said he experimented with wheat, oats and peas and saw dramatic improvement in all three. He said just for fun he also tried it on his bachelor buttons, small blue flowers, and “you wouldn’t believe the difference.”

The flowers, he said, were 2 1/2 times as big as those on untreated plants.

Other scientists in Wyoming, Maryland and several countries also have reported positive results.

Add to that a couple of no-nonsense farmers near Phoenix who claim spectacular improvement in treated crops and you have a scientific mystery of Olympian proportions.

“It worked for me,” said Santiago Gonzalez, who runs a large farm west of Phoenix. Gonzalez said treatments of methanol last summer allowed him to grow seedless watermelons that weighed 40 pounds compared to an average of 18. He said cotton plants treated with methanol used so much less water that he saved about $50 an acre on one 600-acre parcel.

Another farmer, Arnott Duncan, said his vegetables showed dramatic improvement when treated with methanol.

“I see a great potential for methanol,” he said.

Several other farmers reported similar results.

But Jack Mauney, a senior plant physiologist who has seen a lot of highly promising “breakthroughs” come and go, said: “I’m not buying it.”

The veteran scientist was hired by several cotton growers to conduct experiments last summer on three cotton fields in Arizona and one in Mississippi.

“I thought it was going to be easy,” Mauney said, because the process seemed so simple and the effect was supposed to be so great. But because nothing in agricultural research works all the time, he said he would have been satisfied if his crops showed improvement in 40% of the cases.

But instead, he said recently, he was skunked.

“Essentially, I saw no effect at all,” Mauney said.

The lack of results was so disappointing that “most cotton people were ready to hang it up” at the end of the last season, he said, but he hopes to do more tests next year. Mauney is not ready to abandon the effort because he believes methanol may indeed stimulate plant growth, but not for the reasons that Nonomura expected.

Nonomura began spraying his crops with methanol in 1989 because of research he had done at Scripps, finding that it increased the growth of a type of algae that he believed could be used as a substitute for gasoline. When he abandoned research to become a family farmer in Arizona, he noticed that some of his crops wilted during times of high heat stress.

Remembering his work with algae, Nonomura sprayed some of his plants with a solution containing methanol and they straightened up, grew faster and took less water. Nonomura believed then, as he still does, that the methanol supplied the stressed plants with additional carbon that inhibited a process called photorespiration, during which plants reject some of the energy they have collected.

With that as the suspected mechanism, most experiments were conducted last summer using solutions containing 30% methanol, but some nutrients Nonomura included in his solution were omitted because they were believed to be irrelevant. Mauney, for one, believes that may have been a mistake.

Mauney said that “if methanol works at all,” it may be because it causes the plant to absorb nutrients through its leaves.

Benson, Nonomura’s collaborator, believes Mauney could be right.

Plant leaves do not absorb nutrients easily because they are sealed with a wax-like substance, Benson said. Methanol may “soften them up,” allowing nutrients to “slither through cracks” in the coating.

Whatever the mechanism, Benson and Nonomura remain convinced that methanol plays a major role in stimulating plant growth, despite the lack of encouraging results from so many researchers.

“It’s pretty dramatic,” Benson said. Once plants are treated with methanol, “they just perk up and get to work.”

If so, then something is different about the way some researchers are applying it. If it is as Mauney suspects, then methanol could be an important carrier of nutrients that allows plants to take up fuel more efficiently.

But if that is the case, he added, positive results had better come during the growing season this summer.

“If it doesn’t work this year,” he said, “it’s dead.”