by Liz Carlisle
“He spent ungodly amounts of time being gone to meetings,” Sharon continued, her voice dropping its pitch with an almost palpable fatigue. “All the other Timeless farmers did the same thing. I guess they needed to be somewhere where they could discuss their ideas with people who would listen—because your fourteen neighbors around here that farm, they’re not interested. But the upshot was that he was gone a lot.”
“That’s true,” Dave said, not laughing this time.
“I think I have all the calendars and I could prove it,” Sharon pounced, erasing any shadow of doubt.
Dave cracked a smile again. “She keeps records,” he teased his exacting chief financial officer, who spent half of each week at her private CPA office and the other half keeping Timeless Seeds’ books in order. “It really sucks.”
“A lot of the farmers probably wouldn’t have gotten to farm, except that they had a wife that had another income,” Sharon proceeded, unfazed by her husband’s subtle pleas for humor. “That’s the toughest part—the toughest part is there was no money in it and the other toughest part is he was gone all the time.”
Black medic may have fixed a lot of nitrogen, but it hadn’t fixed the problem with agriculture in America—or even Conrad. When AERO published a list of them in 1989, the full tally of Montana’s organic farms fit on one page of the Sun Times. Little old ladies were still yelling at Jim Sims to stop growing the weed they were trying so hard to keep out of their lawns, while their sons kept right on growing wheat and cursing rising fertilizer prices. Realizing that his sociology had been miles behind his agronomy, Dave changed tactics. Biological wealth was not going to pay the bills. He needed a crop that farmers could use to build their soils—but also sell. As food.
6
HAVE YOUR SEEDS AND EAT THEM TOO
In 1991, Dave Oien and Tom Hastings drove down to the ag trade show in Great Falls, hoping to sell some of their green manure seeds. The Aggie, as the annual event was affectionately known to locals, was a good marketing opportunity for Timeless. But it was also a chance for Dave to scout out new crops for his experiments. Since Great Falls was the hub of Montana’s famed Golden Triangle region, the show drew folks from hundreds of miles away, at least a few of whom were bound to be trying something Dave hadn’t heard of yet. One of his favorite people to talk to at these shows was a Canadian farmer named Richard Behnke, who shared Dave’s enthusiasm for the alternative agricultural vanguard.
This year, Richard was excited about a legume he had just started growing for the food market: French Green lentils. Like the green manures Timeless was selling, these legumes sponsored their own nitrogen and left some in the soil for next year. But since their seeds were edible, they doubled as a cash crop. You could have your seeds and eat them too.
The market for French Green lentils was significant, Richard reported, and American farmers weren’t onto it yet. It might be a great niche for Timeless. Why not expand the business to include “pulse” crops—annual legumes, with seeds you could eat.
Dave hadn’t thought of selling an edible seed—to consumers. But since the pool of farmers willing to buy green manures didn’t seem to be large enough to provide an income, selling food appeared to be a better strategy for staying in business. Lentils could provide a solid bottom line for Timeless Seeds—without sacrificing all the important soil building and movement organizing that was still going on underneath.
It made sense to Dave’s cousin Tom Hastings, who went straight back to Conrad and planted French Greens on his place in the spring of 1992. These things are great, Tom reported to Dave. We should plant more. Fantastic, Dave said. Now, how in the heck are we going to sell them? Timeless Seeds was just beginning to get the hang of marketing seed to farmers, who, after all, were mostly their friends. They had no real experience in the food business. When Tom asked where to send his bumper crop, all Dave could think of was the woman who supplied organic produce to Sharon’s local buying club, Missoula distributor Sally Brown. Sally’s account wasn’t nearly big enough to absorb all those lentils, Dave admitted. And then he had an idea.
Back in the early eighties, Sally had told Dave about a trade show in Anaheim, California. She and one of her Montana suppliers had signed up for the natural foods expo, and they’d invited Dave to tag along. The budding organic beef entrepreneur had piled into his friends’ station wagon for the twenty-four-hour journey, hoping to learn a thing or two about the natural food business and maybe even drum up some interest in his new product. Although Dave had made some encouraging connections in Anaheim, he’d come home to discover that his organic beef labels wouldn’t pass muster with the USDA, so he’d forgotten all about it. But now Dave had a more thoroughly vetted business proposition and a product he knew he could sell. He called Sally, and she told him the show was still happening. What do you think? Dave asked Jim Barngrover. Are you up for a trip to California?
Natural Products Expo West was an eye-opener for the two hayseeds, who had never been to such a big trade show before. When Dave made his first visit to the expo a decade earlier, organics had still been a fringe industry—if, indeed, you could even call it an industry. So Dave was amazed to see what had become of the little health-food event. On the heels of the national panic over Alar (a chemical sprayed on apples to regulate their growth), mainstream consumers were demanding poison-free food like never before. Booth after booth of slick retail products gave notice that organics had arrived—in breakfast cereal, TV dinners, even pet food. And yet, Richard Behnke was right. Nobody had French Green lentils.
Dave and Jim were still poor as church mice. But they resolved to return to Anaheim the following year with a crop to sell. All they had to do was find farmers willing to grow it for them—on an IOU.
THE LENTIL POOL
Dave pulled out his AERO Rolodex and reached deep into his agrarian heritage. Back in the early days of the Farmers Union, he remembered his grandfather telling him, farmers had formed wheat pools as a means of combining their resources and increasing their bargaining power in the marketplace. A form of community capital, the pools allowed cash-poor growers to build a business. Dave didn’t see why the same strategy couldn’t work for him. How about a lentil pool?
“Here’s a crop that’s not being grown yet in the United States,” Dave explained to his Ag Task Force buddies. “There’s no guarantee of a crop or a market. But if you plant, we’ll help you out. And no matter who else grows for us, we’ll always use your crops.” Since he didn’t have any infrastructure, Dave told the growers they would need to provide their own storage. There would be no legal contract. The pool would collectively determine a fair price for the lentils, and each member would get paid quarterly based on how much they grew.
Dave found seven farmers willing to take the plunge with him: Bud Barta, Tom Hastings, and five other intrepid souls. (Jim Barngrover didn’t have his own place, so his stake in the deal was sweat equity.) In the spring of 1993, each pool member planted 40 acres, making 200 in total. Dave figured that would be enough to guarantee a good-size inventory to peddle the following year in Anaheim.
There was a new face in on this lentil pool venture: a third-generation grain farmer from Big Sandy, Montana, named Jon Tester. Tester had joined AERO after reading the proceedings of the 1988 Lewistown conference, which had prompted the young schoolteacher to experiment with longer rotations and new crops. “Fifty acres of lentils built this house,” Jon told every visitor to the modest bungalow he had constructed on his great uncle’s homestead, explaining that it was a bumper crop of little red legumes that had financed the place. At the time, Timeless was still experimenting with lentils and hadn’t started marketing them commercially, so Jon had located an out-of-state buyer, which had since gone under. Eager to find a new market for his prolific legumes, he was glad to hear Timeless was getting into the lentil business, and he took Dave up on the offer to join the pool.
Jon was just two hours east of the Timeless plant, and he liked the idea of
good old-fashioned neighborhood organizing. He was thinking of running for the AERO board, and maybe even for the state legislature. With a flattop haircut, a booming voice, and three fingers missing from a boyhood run-in with the meat grinder at his family’s custom butcher shop, Jon had prairie populist bona fides. He was just the sort of salt-of-the-earth collaborator Timeless needed to get their new edible seed venture going. “We couldn’t do it without the pool,” Dave told a reporter. “To build the product, we needed guaranteed production. If one of us got hailed out, we’d still have lentils from the others.”
But no one did get hailed out, and ironically, the farmers’ good fortune was Dave’s biggest problem. When harvesttime rolled around in the fall of 1993, he had tons of French Green lentils on his hands and only so many outbuildings on his 280-acre farm. Where was he going to clean and package all those legumes in time for Natural Products Expo West in the spring?
Orville Oien’s “this farm is too small” admonitions echoed in Dave’s memory as he drove by the feed mill where he and his dad used to haul barley every week. Pausing the doubting voice in his head, Dave noticed that the mill was not being used. Now, that place would hold all these lentils, Dave thought. But given that the other financially oriented folks in this community were just as skeptical about his project as Dave’s accountant father had been, who would loan him the money to lease it?
There was no way Timeless Seeds was going to qualify for a conventional bank loan. “They had two questions for me at the bank,” Dave recalls. “What is organic? And what is a lentil?” What Dave needed was a renegade financier as different from those buttoned-down loan officers as Jim Sims was from his fellow researchers at MSU. He thought he knew the guy.
Dave went back to the prospectus he’d written up for his meetings with lenders. His goal was ambitious, but simple: Timeless Seeds needed to raise 40,000 dollars in order to move into its first proper facility. There was no use calling anyone who self-identified as an “investor,” since bankers had already written this business off as a risky proposition. Luckily for Dave, there was at least one person who thought it was the bankers who were the risky proposition. One person who might see the loan officers’ thumbs-down as a good sign.
For Russ Salisbury, avoiding bankers had paid off. By refusing to practice any form of agriculture that required him to sign on the dotted line, the junkyard philosopher had managed to avoid the farm debt that had piled up all around him. Thanks to his frugal lifestyle, Russ found himself—at the height of the eighties farm crisis—with some resources to spare. It wasn’t a lot, but he knew he could make a difference for Timeless. Instead of outright cash, Russ pledged 20,000 dollars’ worth of equipment, plus a week’s worth of labor to help Dave set it up. Buoyed by Russ’s gift, Dave leased the building, sold his 40,000 dollars’ worth of shares, and went back to Anaheim in the spring of 1994 ready to hawk some legumes.
Dave and Jim’s first trip to California had educated them in some of the niceties of marketing, and they were determined to put their best foot forward this time. In place of the drab bulk bags they’d showed up with the previous year, the Timeless partners carefully arranged a retail-ready display, custom-built by Bud Barta. It was a nifty little exhibit, but Dave didn’t expect his lentils to sell themselves. Feeling the weight of his friends’ 60,000-dollar vote of confidence, Dave made sure nobody passed the Timeless booth without receiving a great big Montana smile.
Of the 14,000 people who walked by at Expo West 1994, Dave estimated, about 400 actually stopped to look at Timeless Seeds’ basket of lentils. The optimistic farmer thought at least a dozen seemed genuinely interested. But after shaking hands and pocketing Dave’s card, the prospective buyers disappeared back into the crowd, where the tantalizing propositions of hundreds of other suitors awaited them. Exotic jams, organic face cream, therapeutic tea blends. Taking in the dazzling array of products at the massive trade show, Dave began to wonder if he belonged in this industry. But then, out of the blue, a friend he’d met years earlier called him up with a business proposition.
FAIR EXCHANGE
Ann Sinclair was a seasoned marketer. She had built her career working for Eden Foods, one of the top organic brands on supermarket shelves. But now she was starting her own company, Fair Exchange. She wanted to lead with a soup line called Shari’s Bistro. And she wanted to source the lentils from Timeless. Unlike Eden, this wasn’t a million-dollar venture. Ann had borrowed the start-up capital from her dad.
Well versed in growing big things from small seeds, Dave and Jim decided they liked Sinclair’s vision. Compared to some of the hustles going down in Anaheim, Fair Exchange appeared to offer a much friendlier entrée into the organic industry. In fact, the deal Timeless struck with Ann Sinclair wasn’t too far removed from the modus operandi of AERO work parties. “We put up the lentils,” Dave later recalled. “Everyone contributed what they had in talent and commodities, and four soups with the new ‘Shari’s Bistro’ label went on the shelves August thirty-first.” Just a few months after Expo West 1994, Timeless Seeds had scored its first major customer.
Much like Timeless Seeds’ lentil pool, Fair Exchange was based on a cooperative model. Sinclair returned a portion of her proceeds directly to the growers, in “exchange” for everything they contributed. “The growers provide us with their expertise in organic production, consistent quality, and assistance in several key areas of our business,” Sinclair professed. “The reality is, the raw ingredient embodies the true wealth of the whole system. In our case, the soil is our fundamental resource base. Without it, we have no business. And without the knowledge of growers who manage the soil, we have no way of tapping that resource wisely and supporting its continued fertility.”
“One of the criteria of our product development process is the impact our finished products have on crop rotation on the farm,” Sinclair continued. “If we rely heavily on small grains and ignore legumes, which are important to small grain rotation, we undermine our own business growth by ignoring the long-term requirements of the organic farm. The factor of crop rotation can seem limiting at first, but if you build relationships with people in diverse growing regions, and network with the ecological needs of the farm in mind, then this diversity becomes a business strength.”
Dave couldn’t have found a better champion. Sinclair didn’t just want to sell soup—she also wanted to help Timeless rejuvenate Montana soils. And this time, they would actually make money. Five months after the inaugural cans of Shari’s Bistro soup hit retail shelves, Timeless received its first dividend check. It was a surprise to the members of the lentil pool, who hadn’t expected any compensation for at least a year. Perhaps this was a viable business after all.
One of those happily surprised farmers was Timeless Seeds’ own Bud Barta, who had hit his stride after twelve years as an organic grower. Having built up the fertility on his now fully transitioned farm, Bud had seen his yields steadily climb, and he was starting to get a handle on the weeds too. Bud slotted Fair Exchange–bound French Green lentils into the second year of his four-year rotation, following black medic and before two years of small grains. Bud’s preference was to plow down all the black medic—or perhaps another green manure like buckwheat or sweet clover—so as to start off the cycle with a nitrogen-gorged bang. But he reserved the option of harvesting it if seed prices were high, or cutting it for hay if his cattle needed the feed.
The truth was, Bud had to be flexible, because, as exciting as it was to get that first check from Fair Exchange, lentils still weren’t paying the bills. In order to support his family, the jack-of-all-trades supplemented his farm work with another gig, Barta Built. The multitalented tradesman enjoyed the challenge of constructing energy-efficient homes for his unsuspecting neighbors. Instead of trying to sell green homes to Republicans, Bud described his handiwork as rustic, affordable, and high quality. No one objected. But Bud wasn’t the only Timeless collaborator supporting himself with a side job while he hoped for growth.
Fair Exchange had good intentions, but the math just didn’t add up.
By the spring of 1995, Timeless Seeds had supplied just 15,000 pounds of lentils for Shari’s Bistro soup. The premium they received for their French Greens was tremendous, but the volume wasn’t nearly sufficient to support eight families. Without some additional revenue—or at least an evidence-based projection—Timeless and company couldn’t stay in business. Unfortunately, health problems were slowing down their champion, Ann Sinclair. The founder of Fair Exchange had to sell her company to deeper-pocketed executives, who changed the brand name, gutted the mission, and eventually shuttered the whole enterprise. Meanwhile, team Timeless had realized they couldn’t get by supplying just 15,000 pounds of lentils, so they had entered the belly of the corporate beast as well. With one massive contract.
7
300,000 POUNDS OF LENTILS
Back at the Anaheim trade show in 1994, a woman had stopped by the Timeless booth and picked up a handful of French Green lentils from the bowl on display. “These are beautiful, just like silk,” the woman gushed, introducing herself as the buyer for “Trader Joe’s.” Sounds like a family business out of some little town, Dave thought. So when the buyer told him she wanted at least 300,000 pounds of lentils for her sixty-store chain—for starters—Dave was amazed. And a little dejected. “Sorry, we don’t do that,” he told the woman, realizing that he was likely passing up the best deal he’d ever been offered. But what could he do? The buyer wanted cute one-pound bags of lentils with her company’s label on them—not the dowdy twenty-five-pound sacks that Timeless was supplying for natural-food store bulk bins. Timeless wasn’t set up to do that. At least not yet.
Dave, who was used to begging people to give his lentils a chance, was surprised again when the woman persisted, calling him back six weeks later. She asked the astounded farmer to draw up a proposal for an enterprise expansion. Can’t you just price out bags, labels, and transportation costs? she asked, as though she were talking about so many widgets. Dave wasn’t honestly sure if he could do all those things. But he couldn’t say no twice.
