Lentil Underground

by Liz Carlisle

  Sproull, a breezy twenty-two-year-old who had learned about methane digesters while working as the night caretaker for the local sewage treatment plant, was just the teacher Dave had been looking for. Devouring Sproull’s DIY diagrams and quirky Buckminster Fuller quotes, Dave started to formulate a plan. His final assignment was to build a solar collector and install it somewhere. His classmates had already started asking around Missoula, looking for a sympathetic homeowner who might lend them a roof. But Dave knew just where his collector was headed. Eight years after leaving Conrad, Dave was going home. Unbeknownst to Gudrun and Orville Oien, their farmhouse was about to get one heck of a retrofit.

  The Oiens hugged their son, at once happy to see him and concerned about how their most free-spirited child would make a life here in Conrad. Even shrewd Orville, a self-trained certified public accountant who had followed federal commodity program incentives to a tee, couldn’t pencil out a way to make a viable living from this farm anymore. It was too small. The economics of modern agribusiness depended on a massive scale of production, which seemed to be the only way to afford the expensive package of machinery and chemicals necessary to grow the new high-yielding grain varieties. “Get big or get out,” Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz had proclaimed. Orville didn’t remember anything in that speech about solar collectors.

  But instead of worrying about balance sheets and fertilizer prices, Dave was coaxing his sixty-four-year-old father on top of the house, hammer and DIY zine in hand. What the younger Oien had in mind was an extension of the north roof. The addition would create a reflective shed, large enough to accommodate the solar water-heating system he had dreamed up. Orville couldn’t argue with the cost savings of the new outfit—250 to 300 dollars a year in fuel oil plus 75 to 100 dollars a year in domestic water heating. So he grabbed some nails and joined his harebrained son.

  Day after scorching day, Dave and Orville hammered away, arousing the curiosity of their neighbors. They built ninety-six square feet of liquid collectors, then installed a battery of 120-gallon water tanks in the basement. Silently sweating through their long-sleeved work shirts, the two men remembered a happy moment they had both let slip out of their memories long ago: Orville making rounds on the tractor while six-year-old Dave sat on his lap, staring up at the hawks.

  Working alongside his dad in the blistering sun, Dave could touch all the pieces of his world. Chicago-style community organizing. The wisdom of elders Black Elk, Rachel Carson, and Orville Oien. The satisfaction of literally taking matters into his own hands. Dave had spent the past eight years caught between utopias that needed each other, utopias that kept moving farther apart in their pursuit of a perfect future. For the first time, he could imagine them coming together.

  2

  AGAINST THE GRAIN

  When the Oien family’s solar retrofit was completed in 1977, it was the first of its kind in north-central Montana. But it was not the last. Dave lost no time climbing atop his neighbors’ roofs, hammer and gospel in hand. He stopped referring to his hometown as Conrad and instead embraced its new identity as “Sun City,” energetically assisting a number of solar conversions on the grittier side of the railroad tracks. In 1981, the same year Ronald Reagan took Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the White House, Dave was heralding the arrival of a new renewable energy store in Sun City’s downtown. He converted not only the Presbyterian church, but also its pastor, who added 125 square feet of active solar air collectors to his own home. “Ordinary citizens are beginning to generate their own power,” Dave wrote boldly in the pages of a nonprofit newsletter, betting 100 dollars against the completion of the Montana Power Company’s proposed coal plant. “Small scale hydro and wind electric systems are sprouting up across the country … we’re at a point in history where we can make a difference, and we’d better do it.”

  But back on the Oien farm, Dave had to admit, he was still relying on a lot of dirty energy. The farmhouse had shrunk its footprint, but the farm itself was driven by petrochemicals. It was oil that made the fertilizers, oil that made the herbicides, and oil that powered the tractor. If we can have a solar-powered house, Dave said to his dad, why can’t we have a solar-powered farm?

  Orville had been afraid it might come to that.

  It wasn’t a good time to experiment with risky new ways of farming, the scrupulous accountant told his son. Margins on a small farm were razor-thin these days, and the Oiens were barely making it as it was. What had kept the operation afloat (and paid for college, Orville gently reminded Dave) was the security of the federal farm program. Uncle Sam paid the Oiens to raise improved barley varieties that required chemical fertilizers and herbicides, like synthetic nitrogen and 2,4-D. The size of that government check was based on the number of acres Orville enrolled and planted as barley ground—his “base acres.” If he ripped out the malt barley and seeded something else, Orville explained, he would sacrifice those precious base acres, gambling his livelihood on the whims of both nature and markets. What would the family fall back on if the “solar farm” got hailed out or couldn’t sell its crop?

  For Dave’s dad, sticking with neat rows of high-yielding cereals was about more than just economics. Orville’s reputation for tidy fields and sound decisions had been hard-won, earned with decades of stoic labor. The prospect of losing that community respect was almost as distressing to Dave’s father as losing the farm. In a small community like Conrad, it didn’t make sense to step too far out of line.

  Dave didn’t care what the neighbors thought. But the philosophy and religious studies major couldn’t support himself—let alone his parents—with the modest wages from his summer construction job. So he made a compromise with his dad. The base acres would stay in wheat and barley. But the remaining 15 percent of the property would be reserved for Dave’s “oddball” crops. Starting with those two fields, Dave vowed to reorient the farm from oil to sunshine. Slowly but surely, he was determined to cut against the grain.

  BROWN GOLD

  Dave’s idea was to convert the Oiens’ fossil fuel–based grain monoculture into a self-supporting diversified farm that ran on manure. Cow manure was a “solar” energy source, because it was the sun that grew the forage crops that fed the cattle. In principle, at least, this solar-powered manure was free, and it could replace the chemical inputs that not only offended Dave’s environmental sensibilities, but also got more expensive every time OPEC called an embargo. Manure could replace synthetic fertilizer. Manure—with the help of a methane digester and alcohol fuel still—could replace synthetic fuel. And the combination of cattle and crop diversity could eliminate the need for chemical herbicides. The animals would happily eat most weeds, but unwanted vegetation would have a tough time finding a niche anyway, given the lively mix of plants Dave envisioned.

  Dave started by seeding something his dad was familiar with—alfalfa. That was the crop Orville had raised to feed to his own cattle, back when Dave was a kid. In addition to supplying hay, alfalfa also happened to be a good plant to rotate with barley, since it replenished the soil with the very nutrient cereal grains depleted: nitrogen. Maybe they wouldn’t need to use so much nitrogen fertilizer if they brought alfalfa back into the rotation, Dave wondered aloud. We’ll see, said his straight-faced Norwegian father.

  Meanwhile, Orville helped his son construct an “integrated energy system” to convert cow dung into heat and fuel. Supported by a grant from the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, the Oiens built an 80,000-gallon methane digester, to turn manure into biogas. The idea was that this biogas would heat an alcohol fuel still, which would convert the farm’s grain waste into fuel for their trucks and tractors. To capture the heat and carbon dioxide from the alcohol process, the Oiens built a passive solar greenhouse, where they figured they could grow tomatoes and cucumbers for themselves and a few local customers. To further close the loop of the farm’s energy system, Dave planned to fertilize his produce with the methane digester’s by-product: a crude f
orm of compost.

  What Dave was trying to create with all these intersecting projects was central Montana’s version of something he had been reading about in the pages of Mother Jones and the Whole Earth Catalog: an organic farm. In places like California and Oregon, hippies had started planting vegetables on rural communes and in urban community gardens. Some of them had started marketing their produce to kindred spirits, dubbing their products “organic.” The principles of this agricultural approach were simple. Organic farms worked with natural processes to grow their food, rather than relying on the off-the-shelf inputs that had become synonymous with modern industrial farming. Organic growers focused less on the size of their crop and more on the health of their soil. They farmed down, rather than up. For children of the sixties like Dave, it was an intuitive concept: ask not what your soil can do for you, but what you can do for your soil.

  Of course, Conrad was a world away from those hippie communes, in more ways than one. Dave was 700 miles from the nearest major population center, farming dryland soils in a harsh climate. He couldn’t very well start a vegetable truck farm. So instead of copying the systems he’d read about in the magazines, Dave started with the same basic principles and tried to figure out what a Montana organic operation might look like. Working with nature to build his closed-loop solar farm, Dave was finally getting to the question his dad kept pushing him to answer. What would he sell?

  THE LAST HURRAH

  In 1982, Dave delivered his first package of organic beef to the food cooperative in Bozeman, a college town located half a day’s drive south of Conrad in Montana’s Gallatin Valley. Officially, there wasn’t any such thing as organic beef. The few certifying organizations that had sprouted up—California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), Oregon Tilth, Farm Verified Organic—were focused on plants, given that many of their hippie customers were vegetarians anyway. Nobody had bothered to define what organic meant in the context of animals.

  But Dave was delighted to explain to his customers how his agricultural system fit the model of organics, and it seemed that in Montana, even hippies ate meat. The Bozeman Community Food Co-op agreed to stock Dave’s beef, under his curious brand name, the Last Hurrah. Perhaps Dave was secretly hoping this venture would herald the last hurrah for his dad’s malt barley, which he was itching to tear out completely. Or the last hurrah for conventional agriculture and the military-industrial complex. But as it turned out, it was the last hurrah for Dave’s organic beef.

  In order to slaughter his cattle, Dave had to take them to the USDA-inspected plant in Choteau, Montana, an hour southwest of his farm. When Dave notified the inspector how he wanted to label the package, he was told it was illegal. The USDA approved only certain language, Dave was informed, and “organic” wasn’t allowed. Dave couldn’t sell the beef unless he had the USDA stamp. And if he had the USDA stamp, he couldn’t have the organic label.

  Within a couple of years, the USDA rule was a moot point. The packing plant burned down and was never rebuilt, given that the meat industry was rapidly consolidating. “I guess it turned out to be more like the first hurrah,” Dave joked, mocking the naïveté of his initial stab at a Montana organic farm. Building his soil and his agricultural system had been a good start, he realized, but he had been mistaken to think he could be entirely self-sustaining. The closed loop of the “solar farm” would have to be a lot bigger than Dave had originally imagined. If he was serious about creating an alternative to fossil fuel agribusiness, he needed to build a supportive community.

  WE’LL HAVE TO DO IT OURSELVES

  Dave had stayed in touch with the people who’d been involved in the alternative energy workshops he’d taken in Missoula back in the midseventies, when he’d been flirting with grad school. Many of them—including the workshop’s teacher, Scott Sproull—were now members of a nonprofit citizens’ group called the Alternative Energy Resources Organization. Dave had joined the AERO Board in 1979, and he’d been more active since the early 1980s, when the group’s headquarters had relocated to an old brick building just 150 miles south of Conrad in the state capital of Helena. By that time, Dave wasn’t the only AERO member who’d branched out from solar energy to solar farming. A number of the folks he saw at meetings had made the same leap, and they found themselves commiserating about similar frustrations. As it became apparent that AERO was now the meeting ground for Montana’s nascent organic farming movement, the group hatched the idea of forming an agriculture-focused task force. The ragtag ensemble of organic farmers held their first get-together in November 1983, midway between Conrad and Helena in the blue-collar town of Great Falls.

  AERO’s Ag Task Force was a scruffy bunch. These rugged individualists weren’t used to serving on committees. But in the course of their valiant struggles to buck the system and become self-sufficient, they had each run up against obstacles they couldn’t get around on their own. For Dave it had been the labeling fiasco. For his buddy Jim Barngrover, it was the challenge of finding land, since nobody wanted to lease to a “weed farmer.” Several other task force members had another gripe. Their extension agents couldn’t give them any advice on biological pest control, so they just kept telling them which chemicals they should spray. It was difficult to get seed, difficult to find markets, difficult to do just about everything.

  What brought these people together, however, wasn’t their immediate experience of hardship. If all the struggling Montana farmers of the mideighties had been coming to meetings, the task force would have needed to hold them in a football stadium. What set the Ag Task Force apart was their hunch that their problems weren’t just about weeds or drought or grain prices. The 1980s weren’t a temporary crisis, as the agricultural press had labeled them. Rather, the problems popping up in Montana’s farm fields were endemic to Earl Butz’s “get big or get out” agriculture. Dave and his comrades saw an opportunity—and an imperative—to change the paradigm.

  The task force started a small newsletter, the Ag Rag, and began planning the state’s first major conference on “sustainable” agriculture. If they could show their extension agents and university researchers that this was a legitimate field of study, that it was of interest to more than just a handful of farmers, maybe they could get some traction. Dave and his buddies purposely scheduled their conference at the state’s ag university in Bozeman. Now the experts would have to listen.

  By all accounts, the 1984 AERO Sustainable Agriculture Conference was a remarkable success. Two hundred and forty people showed up, from Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, the Dakotas, and several provinces in Canada. The dean of Montana State University’s College of Agriculture accepted AERO’s invitation to offer some remarks, and he stuck around to observe the proceedings, bringing several professors and extension agents with him. What they heard was a bracing challenge to traditional research and development.

  The keynote speaker for the conference was none other than the leading scholar of agroecology, entomologist Miguel Altieri of the University of California, Berkeley. Altieri had worked with inventive smallholders from up and down the Americas, whose low-input farms mimicked natural systems. The key to such farms, Altieri explained, was to plant a diverse mix of crops that had complementary ecological benefits. In Latin America, for example, farmers used an intercrop of corn, beans, and squash. The beans supplied nitrogen to the soil to feed the corn, so there was no need for chemical fertilizer. In some cases, Altieri went on, people seeded nitrogen-fixing plants and didn’t harvest them at all, but tilled them into the soil. This way, he explained, they could fertilize next year’s grain crop without using either chemicals or animal waste. Planting a fertilizer crop even had a name. Altieri called it a green manure.

  Eager to see such an approach applied at their own state university, the farmer-organizers of the 1984 conference began bimonthly meetings with Montana State University officials to explore the potential for science and extension relevant to agroecological farming. The answer they got was frustrating. At
the beginning of every meeting, the college officials would give the farmers a list of the programs MSU offered that they considered sustainable. But they wouldn’t budge on the idea of nitrogen-fixing green manure crops. That was all well and good for Latin America, the academics said, but it wouldn’t work in Montana. The seasons were too short and the rain was too scarce. Farmers here should save their limited soil moisture and growing days for their cash crop.

  The Ag Task Force members kept going to meetings, but after getting the same answers over and over, they began to lose patience. They planned another conference in early 1987, again drawing more than 200 people. If they could self-organize so effectively, the increasingly brazen farmers started to reckon, they might not need MSU’s help after all. When the university representatives presented their standard list of “sustainable” programs one too many times, Dave’s buddy Gene May finally laid down the gauntlet. “You know, if you’re not going to do what we need you to do,” the defiant farmer said, “then we’re going to do it ourselves.”

  GREEN MANURE

  Dave Oien was no agronomist, but he had farmed all his life and pored over all the ecological theory he could get his hands on. MSU’s flat denials didn’t make sense to him. Of course Montana’s organic farmers weren’t going to use the same plants that Altieri was working with in Berkeley or Mexico. They weren’t that simpleminded. But if agroecologists had seen the green manure strategy successfully repeated in ecosystem after ecosystem, there had to be some creature capable of playing that ecological role here in Montana, a biological fertilizer that could survive the harsh, semiarid climate.

  To be a candidate for a green manure crop, a plant had to be able to fix nitrogen. That is, it needed to be able to pull nitrogen out of the air (where it makes up 78 percent of the atmosphere) and pump it into the soil through its roots. Altieri had explained how that worked. Green manure crops hosted symbiotic bacteria in their root systems, and these bacteria could convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form that was usable by plants. This was a similar form of nitrogen, in fact, to the one that farmers were paying for when they bought a bag of fertilizer from their chemical dealer. How about getting it from a plant instead?