by Liz Carlisle
Since Jim no longer had a place of his own, he signed on as a partner in a fledgling biodynamic vegetable and dairy operation in western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, Lifeline Farm. An intellectual center of gravity for Montana’s nascent organic movement, Lifeline was a bustling laboratory of new ideas, the bolder the better. So when David Oien started casting about for farmers to grow medic, Jim was game. Now that he had two sons of his own, he was even more passionate about holding Montana to its constitutional promise of a green society.
The third black medic grower for the spring season of 1985 was a second cousin of Dave’s, Tom Hastings. Tom and Dave hung out a fair amount anyway, so Tom was up for trying some of this new seed crop that his buddy was so high on. If nothing else, it would get Dave to shut up.
GROWING FARMERS
Nineteen eighty-five was a disastrous drought year. The barley dried up at the Oiens’. Bud Barta’s dad had to rely on insurance money. The biodynamic farm where Jim Barngrover was working failed to turn a profit, so Jim went to the state prison in Deer Lodge (to become the garden program director). But the medic that Dave, Bud, Jim, and Tom had planted grew surprisingly well. This was something they should market to their fellow farmers, they decided.
The four men’s incipient black medic venture was a new model for an organic farm business in Montana, very different from Dave’s original idea of selling pastured beef. Rather than fertilizing the farm with cow manure, Dave and his friends would rely on green manures: soil-fertilizing plants. That meant developing a long-term rotation, rather than just annually applying an on-farm input.
If the agronomy of black medic organics differed from that of pastured beef, then Dave’s new business model signaled an even more dramatic shift in his thinking. Rather than marketing food to conscientious consumers—with a labeled retail product like his short-lived organic beef—Dave was now proposing to sell soil-building seed. Given all the barriers to reaching organic shoppers—who were concentrated in faraway places like California—why not start with a supply-side strategy: growing organic farmers? Who wouldn’t want to ditch chemical fertilizers once they discovered how cheap it was to undersow a fertilizer plant into their crop instead?
Dave called Jim Sims in 1986 to make the pitch. He and his three friends would license the scientist’s George black medic variety and sell the seed to other growers. The four partners had even come up with a clever name for the company, which would highlight the perennial character of the product. Unlike annual soil-building crops, which had to be replanted every year, black medic was self-seeding. The new company’s name would remind farmers what a miracle this was.
But Dave had told Jim Sims a little bit of a fib. The new venture’s name did highlight the perennial character of George black medic. But the origin story of the business and its moniker had another dimension, beyond the straightforward aim to sell farmers on a long view approach to their field operations. When the four founders had gotten together to talk about starting a company, the conversation had stretched long into the evening. Realizing that it was probably getting late, one of the men had asked what time it was. But no one had a watch. Finding their own temporal sensibilities just as nontraditional as their perennial crop, the four friends had stumbled on a name for their enterprise that captured their feeling of both personal and agronomic revolution. At least in the middle of the night, it had seemed that growing black medic constituted a fundamental challenge to the status quo, so deep as to unsettle prevailing Western notions of space and time. “And that,” Jim Barngrover says with Aesopian gravitas, “is how we got the name Timeless Seeds.”
4
DEEPLY ROOTED
When Dave Oien, Tom Hastings, Bud Barta, and Jim Barngrover officially launched Timeless Seeds in the spring of 1987, they were audacity rich but capital poor. Dave was barely hanging on to his family’s farm, where his three-generation household got by on commodity payments, Orville’s Social Security check, and local sales of the fresh cucumbers and tomatoes Dave raised in the greenhouse. He and his second cousin Tom had started what sounded like a revenue-generating enterprise: T & D Cleaning. But the “business” was really just a small machine in the Oiens’ Quonset hut, a ten-horsepower separator that sorted debris out of their harvest so they could legally sell it direct-to-consumer as seed or grain (if, indeed, they could find any consumers to sell it to). Meanwhile, Bud was still working on an organic transition at his family’s homestead in Lewistown, which seemed to be a magnet for hailstorms. And Jim—pleased as he was with his new gig managing organic crop production for a lush 45,000-acre ranch in the foothills of central Montana’s Snowy Mountains—still didn’t have a place of his own. All in all, it made for a funny elevator speech: four thirtysomethings with unstable income and little business experience, offering weed seeds for sale as organic fertilizer? What farmer was going to take them up on that? The Timeless boys needed to find someone whose notion of value was as unconventional as theirs, someone who was smart enough to get rich but didn’t want to. Dave thought he knew a guy who fit that bill: a homesteading college dropout named Russell Salisbury.
JUNKYARD PHILOSOPHER
At the core of every underground is the person whose acquaintance serves as an informal badge of the initiated. Familiar to virtually no one outside the circle, they are known to nearly everyone within it. By now, the legend of Russ Salisbury and his staggering equipment boneyard is almost like the secret handshake of Montana’s agricultural resistance. Russ is, you might say, the godfather of the northern plains’ organic farming mafia.
If you hang around the right farm tours, it’s easy to pick up secondhand tall tales about Russ and his DIY shenanigans. There’s the story about the old bale-raising truck he hunted down “way the hell over in Nashua” for 15 dollars, which he spent two days driving home at fifteen miles an hour, only to park it and never use it. That yarn might lead to the revelation that Russ actually is using that rusted-out truck: as fencing. He’s lined up dozens, probably hundreds (maybe thousands?) of old trailers and vehicles to corral his cattle, because he doesn’t like digging postholes. People love to recount the day Russ was banned from the Carter Ferry because he’d sunk it trying to float his herd across the Missouri River. After that, Russ had to drive his cows the long way around in an old yellow school bus he acquired at an auction sale. When the bus tipped over one night, a Good Samaritan pulled over and offered to help, thinking it was full of children. “She gets up right close to those windows and one of them cows bellers out a loud moo,” the story goes. “Golly, you shoulda seen that lady jump.” Routinely invoked to put people in a good mood, the mythology of Russ Salisbury celebrates a folk hero who is less bulldog and more golden retriever. This folk hero is unfailingly cheerful. Steadfastly loyal. And no matter how persistently the adult humans in his life offer him shiny new toys, he takes the most pleasure in the conspicuously used ones that others find slightly repulsive and inappropriate for polite company.
Secondhand tall tales, however, were not what Dave Oien was after when he first drove out to Russ Salisbury’s homestead, a couple of years after a fleeting introduction to its proprietor at AERO’s 1984 Sustainable Agriculture Conference. Dave had heard enough stories. Now he wanted to see this place for himself. As a pretext for his visit to Russ’s, Dave had ordered a small load of feed barley for the handful of cattle he was fattening at his home farm. But he’d brought along a surprise for his host, too.
From Conrad, Dave figured he could get to the Salisbury place in about an hour and a half. He started out southeast toward Great Falls on I-15, then hung a hard left north on State Highway 87. After twenty miles, Dave saw the sign for Floweree and turned off to the right. Immediately dodging a pothole, he found himself on a sinuous road that wound over and around a series of gentle hills, through the sleepy town of Floweree, then past a few grain bins. From here, things started to look less promising, as signs of civilization gave way to clusters of old, seemingly abandoned farm equipment. Just as D
ave started to worry that he might have missed a turn somewhere, he crested a rise and sharply caught his breath. Several hundred feet below, at the base of a steep slope, lay what appeared to be a small village. Hugging a stunning section of the Missouri River, the quaint hamlet sparkled in the midmorning sun. The intense early summer daylight tugged at the contours of the rugged buttes across the riverbank, which were streaked with white rock.
As if it were just as eager to get to Russ’s as Dave was, the road rapidly switchbacked its way toward this waterfront Brigadoon, which was flanked with trees. Once Dave was halfway down, he could just make out a large collection of haystacks, carefully piled at the settlement’s near edge. As he got closer, he realized that the structures he’d observed from above weren’t houses. In fact, he didn’t see a single house on the place. Instead, he counted row upon row of old vehicles: trailers, combines, tractors, trucks. There were thousands of them, and most appeared to have been parked there for some time. Dave couldn’t begin to guess which of these structures he was meant to pull up to, so he slowed to a crawl and waited for some sort of sign. At that moment, the screen door to one of the trailers opened, and Dave found himself looking up at a bearded, bespectacled man who appeared to share the essential qualities of his yard full of machines: durable, weathered, practical.
Although Dave recognized Russell Salisbury’s face, the man standing before him now barely resembled the fidgety farmer who’d politely shaken his hand a couple of years ago, before slinking out of Bozeman’s windowless, morbidly fluorescent student union. Here in his element, Russ looked not only a good deal more lively, but also, somehow, larger. The man’s bearish arms emerged robustly from his sleeveless T-shirt, more like verbs than nouns. The same was true of Russ’s impish eyes, which peeked out from under a well-worn baseball cap. A small, round button just above the left side of the brim declared, “I Love Wind Power.”
Russ had grown up on a farm not far from here, he told Dave, inviting his guest inside his home trailer. At age six, he had decided he wanted to be a farmer. And in 1957, as a high school junior tasked with a vo-ag project, he had managed to lease this river bottom, which had been his great-grandfather’s homestead. Russ had taken some mechanics courses in college, but he didn’t like “paying to learn stuff,” so he’d come home and purchased a gas station on IOU. Fixing other people’s equipment at the gas station had helped Russ build his skills and his bank account, and he’d rented various pieces of local farm ground while he waited for the opportunity to buy the family place. When the land had come up for sale in 1964, Russ had jumped on it. He’d been raising food here—without chemicals—ever since.
“Up at the college, they said you can’t grow wheat unless you treat seed, but I knew better than that,” Russ told Dave. “When I ran out of treatment, I’d just keep on seeding, and I couldn’t tell where I’d run out.” Unconvinced that he needed to use seed treatment, Russ had a similarly skeptical position on herbicides. “I didn’t have the money to buy the chemicals, for one thing,” Russ explained. “I mean, I could have done it, I could have borrowed it or something, but I didn’t want to, and I didn’t like putting it on. So if the weeds weren’t too bad, I just didn’t see them.”
Unlike Dave and Bud, Russ hadn’t had to transition his place, because it had never been “conventional.” Russ followed a different set of conventions. Live simply and live off the land. Don’t borrow money, and don’t use any inputs. Let the farm limit production, and for God’s sake, don’t pollute this splendid five miles of Missouri River stream bank with chemicals.
“The land’s got its limits on what it can make,” Russ told Dave, “so if I have a bad crop, it doesn’t really bother me any. We paid the land off and we’re not borrowing money on it. When you borrow money maybe you worry about whether the banker’s going to come banging on your door. Everybody in the system wants big numbers. It’s the biggest numbers, the highest yields—pounds per acre or something. I quit pushing for that a long time ago.”
Russ had flatly refused Earl Butz’s brand of agribusiness. He didn’t trade in the same currency that the new farm economists did, and he was far more oriented to what he sowed than to what he reaped. But as his neighbors expanded, gambled bigger, and planted more grain, Russ had come to believe he must be the only one who was so stubbornly backward. Until, that is, he’d overcome his distaste for college classrooms to attend AERO’s 1984 Sustainable Agriculture Conference.
As out of place as he’d felt sitting in a folding chair and staring at a slide show, Russ had been amused to learn from the conference luminaries that his weedy fields were part of a cutting-edge movement, something called “agroecology.” And when a farmer from Conrad got up and started talking about growing weeds on purpose? Well, Russ figured he might have finally hit on a form of agricultural development he could believe in. “That’s why I invited you out here,” Russ said to Dave. “I want to hear more about this black medic.” Dave looked at Russ like a poker player who’d had his bluff called for the first time. He’d carefully orchestrated this barley deal to surprise Russ with a casual offer of medic seed. But apparently, this had been Russ’s plan all along.
In 1986, Russ became the fifth farmer to plant black medic. Both the crop and the business model made sense to the self-taught homesteader, who was accustomed to investing in the long term. He took the lesson of the Australian ley system to heart, integrating livestock so he could plant more of his ground to perennials. Russ’s land was, quite literally, a place with deep roots.
But to really appreciate the depth of the burgeoning agricultural underground being cultivated by Dave, Russ, and Timeless, you had to understand its equally deep foundation in its social substrate: a long-standing local tradition of agrarian organizing. To unearth that history, the place to start digging was the shoestring nonprofit that first told Russ he was “organic”: the Alternative Energy Resources Organization.
PEOPLE POWER
A “citizens’ renewable energy organization” founded in 1974, AERO was the ever-present subtext lurking beneath the story of Timeless Seeds. The New Western Energy Show, for which Bud Barta had served as a technician, had been the nonprofit’s flagship project. A few years later, AERO members Dave Oien, Russ Salisbury, and Jim Barngrover had helped launch the organization’s Ag Task Force—the same task force that had put on Montana’s first major sustainable agriculture conference in 1984. It was AERO’s bimonthly Sun Times that had published Dave’s sustainable agriculture column, “Down on the Farm,” in which the legume advocate first touted black medic to his fellow farmers in 1983 under the heading “This Weed Is Good News.” Even Scott Sproull—the teacher of the 1976 alternative energy workshop in which Dave had schemed the solar retrofit of his parents’ farmhouse—was now an enthusiastic AERO member.
By the time Timeless Seeds opened for business in 1986, the renewable energy nonprofit was well on its way to becoming one of the preeminent voices for alternative farming in the West—and indeed the entire country. AERO was, as the Timeless founders put it, “a clearinghouse of information on sustainable agriculture.” While the land grant universities, formal agricultural organizations, and government agencies of the northern Great Plains remained reluctant to embrace ecological approaches to growing food, members of the grassroots group had taken it upon themselves to develop the region’s agroecological knowledge base.
Newcomers to the effort—who began showing up to AERO conferences in significant numbers—didn’t immediately understand the connection between the organization’s agricultural activities and its mission. Why was a renewable energy group so involved in farming? Dave Oien found himself fielding this question so frequently that he’d published a response in his Sun Times column:
Why agriculture? Because it is Montana’s primary industry, certainly. Because it is a primary energy and resource user. That, too. But the reasoning goes deeper. Agriculture is concerned with ultimate wealth—the ability to provide food and fiber—and it depends in a
direct way on natural energy sources—on sun and water and wind, on photosynthesis, on the biology of the soil. Agriculture can be the model for a sane and a safe lifestyle, for an economy that depends on local resources and appropriate technologies, for a close and proper relationship with Nature. Agriculture can be a paradigm for sustainability.
Or, as things stood in Montana in 1986, agriculture could be a paradigm for death and destruction. Aware that statutorily supported economic incentives were working against them, both Dave Oien and Jim Barngrover spent a fair amount of time at the state capitol building in Helena, two hours south of Conrad and a fifty-five-mile drive from Jim’s job at the Deer Lodge prison. Determined to knock down the barriers that stood in the way of organic farming, they put on their nicest clothes and scoured the halls of the legislature for like minds.
POLITICAL ROOTS
“I was a slick, highly paid political operative,” Jim Barngrover recalls, jokingly reflecting on his history as AERO’s official lobbyist. Sporting an unruly Afro and speaking from what appeared to be, quite literally, a soapbox, the gangly young man looked more like a student protester than a power broker. But although Jim didn’t look like a VIP, he was nonetheless effective. Aided by Dave and the strength of the AERO membership, the volunteer lobbyist made surprising headway with state representatives in Helena.
Thanks to Jim’s behind-the-scenes organizing, the Montana legislature passed a joint resolution in 1985, calling on the state university system to establish a program in sustainable agriculture. The nonbinding resolution could have amounted to nothing more than lip service, but AERO made sure the lawmakers put their money where their mouths were. Six years later, Jim and company would successfully carry a bill to fund the first weed ecologist position at the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station. In an earthshaking move, the state university would hire forest ecology PhD Bruce Maxwell—a Peace Corps alum whose first peer-reviewed publication concerned a floral description of native forests in Micronesia—to join the ranks of the “better living through chemistry” good old boys who were typically tasked with advising farmers. That was all yet to come, of course. But in the meantime, AERO celebrated another major political victory.
