Lentil Underground

by Liz Carlisle

  Come back next season, Bud encouraged his visitors, as he and his new business partners wrapped up the tour. The inquisitive tinkerer was just as curious as anyone else to see what would happen next.

  TRIAL AND ERROR

  Bud Barta’s place wasn’t just a farm anymore. It was also a research site, lined out in split-block comparisons just like the Oien place. Since nobody but Jim Sims would plant medic on MSU’s study plots—which were too small and too well watered to approximate real-world conditions anyway—green manure farmers had to serve as their own scientists and extension agents.

  Each year, the Timeless farmers trialed new practices. What happened if they planted their seeds farther apart? Closer together? Deeper? Shallower? Was it better to seed early or late? Alongside their black medic, they added test plots of other legume varieties—Australian medics, Sirius peas, yellow blossom sweet clover. Dave Oien religiously followed research out of Canada, where the university in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, had hired a legume breeder. Dave drove north across the border to get buckwheat seed, west across the Rocky Mountains to get Austrian winter peas, and up to the little town of Sunburst, Montana, in search of another pea variety called Trapper.

  With the help of Jim Sims, the Timeless farmers took notes on the results of their experiments, some of which had now been running for more than five years. But even more important, they invited their neighbors to see for themselves. After that field tour at Bud’s place, not a summer went by without at least one Timeless-sponsored demonstration day. The little group’s big outreach efforts appeared to be making an impact.

  “Organic farming isn’t just leaving off chemicals, it’s a good management program,” one farmer wrote in answer to an AERO survey about the Barta farm tour. “I got to thinking, here I am raising food and spreading poisons on it,” another survey read. “It just didn’t make sense.” A third farmer was even willing to speak to a reporter. “It was just the thing I needed,” he told her. “After that conference, I parked my sprayer for the last time.” The conferences and field tours were a good start for the new crop, the new company, and the new movement. But if they were going to speed up Jim Sims’s twenty-year timetable for changing agriculture on the northern plains, it would take more than one show-and-tell session a year.

  LEGUMES ANONYMOUS

  Jim Barngrover, now chair of the AERO board, was already thinking one step ahead. Even before he scheduled the field tour at Bud Barta’s place, he had applied for a grant to hire a dedicated staffer who could survey the status of sustainable agricultural practices not just on one farm, but across the entire northern Great Plains and Intermountain West. Since no one was officially collecting statistics on organic farmers, nobody could say for sure how many of them there were, what they were doing, or whether it was working. For the most part, organic farmers felt more or less like Dave Oien had when he’d started—alone. So it was quite the shocker when the survey results came back, comprehensively describing a whopping 188 sustainable farms across the region. These farmers were doing all sorts of things—planting green manures, integrating crops and livestock, leaving mulch on their fields at the end of the season—most of which, survey respondents reported, were working pretty well. But the farmers also had research questions—research questions that weren’t being addressed by their local universities and extension agents. Frustrated, a lot of them had given up on getting good information from the experts. But the survey hinted that these renegades might be willing to listen to someone else: one another. Although fewer than half of respondents reported working with their county agent, three-fourths cited other farmers as an information source. It was this crucial piece of data that stood out when all the surveys made it back through the mail to their author, Nancy Matheson.

  Nancy Matheson had grown up just twenty miles from Dave Oien on a grain farm east of Conrad, and like her neighbor, she was as proud of her roots as she was horrified by their most prominent branches. Although Nancy had gone away to UC Berkeley for college, she’d also come home during the summers to drive a combine, and she’d taken the AERO job partly because it meant she could live in Montana full-time. Although most people tended to look to the countercultural youth of liberal urban enclaves as the most likely leaders for social movements, Nancy found equal potential in the communitarian ethos of her parents and grandparents. In 1990, equipped with the data from her survey, she launched a new AERO program, carefully designed to advance a sweeping vision for sustainable agriculture within a familiar agrarian context.

  AERO’s new initiative—a network of Farm Improvement Clubs—was based on a series of 1940s-era groups that had been sponsored by extension offices in the Midwest: Corn and beef improvement clubs. Nancy Matheson had become intrigued by these midcentury clubs after hearing about them from a retired soil conservationist who attended an AERO outreach session. She came to believe that it was these homespun farmers’ associations—as much as the showy postwar demonstrations put on by various colleges—that had so effectively spread the technology of industrial agriculture throughout rural America. If improvement clubs had ushered in the chemical revolution, Nancy reasoned, maybe they could be repurposed to disseminate the principles and practices of sustainable agriculture. And with the Farm Improvement Club program, AERO’s Ag Task Force could make good on the resolution they’d made in the heat of battle with the deans at Montana State University. Farmers could do research themselves.

  But Nancy knew such clubs weren’t just about the particulars of weed management and drought-tolerant varieties. Like Russ Salisbury, she had grown up in a Farmers Union family, and she’d attended chapter meetings at her country school. Nancy remembered meeting up with her classmates at those meetings, where they’d gathered around the piano and belted out camp songs. Akin to those Farmers Union meetings, Nancy envisioned, Farm Improvement Clubs could provide something their members required more than anything else: community.

  Central Montana’s sparsely populated plains were lonely enough as it was, and for unconventional farmers, skipping the annual trip to the fertilizer dealer meant losing a friend. Facing the double isolation of rural life and their unorthodox approach, sustainable agriculturalists could find the moral support they really needed at club meetings without ever having to be explicit about it. It was just a bunch of guys talking about drill spacing and seeding schedules.

  Nancy’s Farm Improvement Club model was simple: AERO offered small grants to groups of four or more producers, up to 800 dollars per club. Each group proposed a project to investigate a common interest or problem related to resource conservation and sustainable production. The Farm Improvement Clubs had to be farmer directed, but they also had to include a technical adviser from either the university or a government agency. This stipulation ostensibly provided farmers with access to expertise and resources, but also served to educate the clubs’ technical “advisers” about agroecological practices. At the end of the year, all the clubs gathered to share what they’d learned—and participating farmers frequently offered midseason demonstrations as well. The Timeless farm tours were the prototype for the clubs’ field days, which were intentionally not structured as how-to sessions like the experiment stations offered. “These are just farmers who are trying some things and who are willing to let their neighbors come take a closer look,” Nancy emphasized.

  Beginning in 1990 with six clubs and thirty-three farms and ranches, the program grew to function as a veritable parallel extension service—with the added bonus of slowly bringing along members of the official extension service at the same time. Over the next decade, AERO grants would support more than 120 clubs and 500 participating producers, nearly all of whom were enthusiastically educating their neighbors at field days. By 1994, the USDA was funding AERO to teach its extension agents and soil conservationists about sustainable agriculture. The agency awarded the organization a 91,000-dollar grant to develop and implement training programs across five states.

  Not surprisingly, legume rot
ation and black medic husbandry were the focus of several Farm Improvement Clubs, and Jim Sims appeared repeatedly as a technical adviser. But the roster of AERO-funded farmer science ran the gamut from community gardens to organic marketing to irrigation. Some groups, like the Friends of the Bitterroot Weed Team and the Horse Manure Compost Club, worked on agronomic challenges. Others—like the Echinacea Project and the Fort Belknap Peas and Oats Club—explored experimental crops. The Gumbo Group turned out not to be a foray into southern cuisine but a Choteau-based alliance of legume-alternative trials. They were using plants to improve their local soils, which were so clayey that locals called them gumbo. “If it rains half an inch,” Dave Oien wryly remarked, “the roads over there get so muddy you can’t drive on them.”

  The Farm Improvement Club program not only helped Timeless develop their cropping systems, but also dramatically expanded the pool of farmers who were pursuing sustainable agriculture. Skeptics were transformed into advocates, ready to share equipment, swap seed, compare notes, “come out” to their neighbors, and even lobby the legislature if need be. Anybody who still thought this stuff was just for hippies had to face some pretty unlikely looking flower children—like the leader of the Pondera County Alternative Weed Management Club, rancher Tuna McAlpine.

  THE LONE RANGER MEETS DR. DOLITTLE

  Tuna McAlpine was a former high school wrestler who lived thirty miles northwest of the Oien place, down Bullhead Road in Valier. In the early 1990s, Dave started hearing about this guy who famously “loved knapweed,” and he figured he’d found a kindred spirit. But as it turned out, Tuna’s reasons for pursuing low-input agriculture were a little different from Dave’s. A rock-ribbed libertarian who thought the Republican Party had gotten too soft on guns, Tuna didn’t want anybody infringing on his constitutional rights. Not the government, and not Monsanto. Tuna had taken a college degree in modern livestock management and had come home to his family’s ranch in 1984 with a suite of chemicals to apply. But the corporate approach to agriculture didn’t sit well with him, so he’d converted to the low-input philosophy of Holistic Resource Management and rebelled against everything his professors had taught him. “I’m a stubborn Scotchman,” Tuna explained. “I didn’t want to suck up to them chemical boys.”

  Fiercely independent, Tuna made no secret of the fact that he “wasn’t much for meetings.” Born fighting, as he was fond of saying, the guy wasn’t exactly the most likely candidate to facilitate one of Nancy Matheson’s moral support groups. But Dave thought the Farm Improvement Club program needed this headstrong rancher, so he submitted an application for a Pondera County Alternative Weed Management Club, with himself as a member and Tuna as the group leader. In the “contact person” field, Dave wrote down his own address, but next to it he wrote a note. “Clay McAlpine will be the contact person … he just doesn’t know it yet.”

  Dave knew his long hair and habit of signing documents with a peace sign probably wouldn’t appeal to Clay (whose high school buddies had dubbed him Tuna because the five-foot-six-inch wrestler ate so much tuna fish to maintain weight). But the canny founder of Timeless Seeds had another card to play with his neighbor, and it centered on a mutual problem: Pondera County’s weed control program. In the form of unsolicited herbicide at the edge of their fields, Dave and Tuna’s political grievances collided, with enough force, perhaps, to forge some kind of bond. For Dave, the chemicals at the edge of his organic fields heralded the long arm of the military-industrial complex. Tuna just wanted the freedom to do his own thing on his own land. So when the Farm Improvement Club proposal got funded, and Tuna McAlpine suddenly found himself designated leader of an organization he never knew existed, Dave pitched the group to Tuna as a way to convince the weed crew to leave his property alone. The purpose of the club’s meetings, Dave told its somewhat reluctant leader, would be to establish “no-spray zones” for the Pondera County Weed District. In that case, Tuna said, he would be happy to participate. In fact, he’d host. So in June of 1992, ten local farmers showed up at the McAlpine ranch to an astonishingly, almost violently warm welcome.

  Two years on from his “epiphany” at a Holistic Resource Management seminar, Tuna was shaping up to become one of Montana’s most outspoken organic proselytizers. It was hard to argue with the man’s devastating critique of “chemically dependent farming” and “outhouse pork.” Everything about Tuna—from the way he stood (legs wide, belly protruding) to the fearlessness with which he rode his four-wheeler around his five-buffalo-jump spread of Rocky Mountain Front—suggested that he was a rough-and-ready man who asked neither help nor permission when pursuing his convictions.

  But when Tuna approached his cattle, he revealed another side of himself. Sitting in silence, he would wait and watch for several minutes while his yearlings encircled him. “They’re not like humans for social interaction, but they are company,” he’d say, almost lovingly. Was this the Lone Ranger or Dr. Dolittle?

  At first, Tuna’s farm transition had been powered by sheer guts and determination. On the heels of that Holistic Resource Management seminar, he’d lined out a three-part goal for his operation and single-mindedly pursued it, from intensive grazing to direct marketing to organic transition. The classic self-made Montana cowboy, Tuna had of course taken on all these things himself. But attempting to go it alone had humbled him in some surprising ways. For one thing, Tuna wished he’d involved his wife more, rather than assuming he always had to be the macho man. “I guess I’ve always said, just like my dad did, ‘Oh, I’ll get it,’” Tuna reflected. “But a guy can’t just do everything alone.”

  Tuna’s independent spirit may have been the fire that got him started, but he couldn’t sustain the flame by himself. Railing against the establishment had proven exhausting, and, well, lonely. Going organic had alienated him from his own community, Tuna acknowledged, and that was hard: “You don’t have common ground with people if you don’t farm the same way.”

  Like dozens of other participants in AERO’s farmer science initiative, Tuna found that common ground with his fellow Farm Improvement Club members. The program’s winter meetings—when all the clubs got together to share their findings—started to feel like family reunions. No matter what the weather, Tuna got in his pickup and drove to his friends’ field tours. Even though he was mainly a livestock man, he planted seed for Dave. People looked forward to the new highlight of Timeless Seeds’ annual field tour and barbecue—Tuna’s pig roast. The red-blooded rancher also roped a number of new folks into the sustainable agricultural fold, greatly expanding the capacity and appeal of AERO’s modern mutual-aid network.

  The public face of the Farm Improvement Clubs’ camaraderie was just the tip of the iceberg. These people officiated one another’s weddings, hunted on one another’s land, loaned one another money and equipment, and coalesced into near-telepathic teams at harvesttime. In all these little ways, the improvement clubs turned the peer pressure of small-town life on its head. The same strong social institutions that had stymied change when one person tried to go it alone were effectively recruited to give the emerging movement staying power. The sharp tongues in these little towns cut both ways.

  But there was another sense in which rural community made for a double-edged sword. Many people referred to Timeless as a family, and it was an apt metaphor. Belonging to such a strong alliance was supportive but also demanding. Practicing a different form of economy than the one that determined your car payment and your kids’ college tuition meant filling the gap with your own sweat, time, and sacrifice. That was hardly ever enough, so these farmers’ mutual aid tended to require extra effort from other members of their households too. It wasn’t always easy. After all, the undersowers couldn’t just feed the soil. Somehow they had to feed their families too—and black medic wasn’t cutting it.

  While Dave was driving all over the state and experimenting with new crops, his wife, Sharon Eisenberg, was supporting their household of six with her accounting business. Timele
ss Seeds’ black medic sales weren’t even enough to put food on the table, let alone pay off the farm note, so Dave was still patching together other ventures. There were bedding plants in the greenhouse, sheep on the pasture, and at one point, Dave got the idea that fenugreek might be a good way to make a little extra money.

  WHO’S FEEDING THE FARMER?

  Looking back on the precarious beginnings of Timeless Seeds, Sharon recently asked Dave to enumerate the full list of microenterprises they’d experimented with, just to keep from losing the farm. “Start at 1980 and go forward,” she said tersely. “I’ll let the dog out.” After three decades of marriage, Dave and Sharon knew a little something about the difficulty of raising a family while trying to change the world, and they didn’t sugarcoat their experience.

  “Dave used to have this idea that you can’t sell hay off the farm,” Sharon said. “Something about how your most precious resource was your organic matter.”

  “Soil fertility,” Dave said, in between bites of pancake. Sunday breakfast was a favorite ritual of Dave’s, and this week, he’d tried throwing something new on the griddle: pancakes made from Timeless Seeds’ newest crop, a heritage grain called emmer.

  “Yes, exactly, you were worried about losing soil fertility,” Sharon picked up. “Well, how about some revenue?”

  “Yeah, how about losing your money,” Dave agreed, chuckling a bit at his naïvely idealistic former self. He and his wife were still in safe territory, but their tone got more serious as they kept talking.