Kabul, Afghanistan ? Springtime is on the way and already hundreds of farmers are tending pale green shoots of Afghanistan’s chief crop and economic mainstay: opium poppies.

It looks to be a bumper year. Some 320,000 acres are blanketed in rows of dandelionlike sprouts that eventually produce almost 90 percent of the world’s heroin.

But drug agents are counterattacking. An army of 500 tractor-driving Afghans hopes to plow the plants under before producers grow powerful enough to corrupt the country’s fledgling government.

“There’s going to be a continuous effort in spring and summer,” U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.

When the Taliban ran Afghanistan, its leader enforced an effective ban on poppy growing under threat of jail. As a result, cultivation dropped to practically nothing in 2000.

But Afghan and Western counternarcotics officials say the hard-line Taliban militia fighting the U.S.-backed government is now implicated in the trade and uses the proceeds to help fund its insurgency.

An Afghan security officer checks the progress as a tractor eradicates opium poppies east of Kabul, Afghanistan. Drug eradication teams tore up crops Monday in eastern Nangarhar province, where dozens of Afghan armed police blocked angry farmers from interfering with the work.

The dramatic increase in poppy cultivation since U.S. forces ousted the Taliban from power in late 2001 has caused alarm in the West, particularly Europe, the destination of most of the drugs.

Getting farmers to stop growing the flowers – which thrive in Afghanistan’s poor soil and abundant sunshine – will take decades, Eikenberry said. Thailand’s largely successful campaign took 25 years. Afghanistan’s crop is being eradicated amid a guerrilla war and some of the world’s starkest poverty. It will take longer, Eikenberry said.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has earmarked $146 million this year for economic development and export-oriented farming projects. The U.S. funds are paying for replanting poppy fields with orchards of apricot, apple, pomegranate and nut trees and grape vines.