Lentil Underground

by Liz Carlisle

  Once again, Timeless dug deep into its underground network to support its growth. Russ Salisbury found a bagging machine lying around in his equipment boneyard, fixed it up, and modified it to measure one-pound increments. A friend of Dave’s from Conrad thought he could find some people to run the remodeled machine. A key member of the local AERO chapter, Dave’s friend was also on the board of Northern Gateway Enterprises, which was looking for steady employment for their developmentally disabled clients. Northern Gateway had a building, and they fronted the money for a sealing machine to go along with Russ’s bagger.

  The first pound of lentils that Timeless sent to Trader Joe’s split open in the mail. So did the second. But Timeless kept trying, and after four months, they’d fine-tuned a package that could withstand the trip to California.

  Of course, by now, the little company’s back was up against the wall, as they tried to fulfill Trader Joe’s gargantuan order. Dave worked fourteen-hour days, supervising three hired hands from six to nine A.M., moving over to Northern Gateway from nine thirty to three thirty, and then pulling two more shifts at night. But even at that unrelenting pace, Dave knew he and his staff couldn’t finish the job alone. So he called on everyone he could think of to help out: the families of Northern Gateway employees, the Timeless Seeds board (who came in and put together a few packages after a meeting), even Tom Hastings’s sister. All told, nearly thirty people were involved in the effort in some form or another, and before they knew it, the Timeless crew had ramped up production to 2,400 bags a day. In October of 1994, they loaded up a commercial truck with 30,000 packages of lentils—twice the volume they’d sold thus far to Fair Exchange—as a test run for Trader Joe’s. By June of 1995, Timeless had sent 395,000 pounds to the California-based grocery chain.

  THE RELUCTANT ENTREPRENEUR

  It was not easy to keep Timeless true to its mission while cranking out so many bags of lentils, but Dave embraced the opportunity to bring economic development to Conrad. If you wanted to give back, he decided, it helped to have something to give. Now that Timeless had a legitimate processing operation, they could offer jobs to this economically challenged community, even if it was just one or two to start. They could support the nonprofit that provided vocational rehabilitation for north-central Montanans with developmental needs. Dave even bought an ad for the high school yearbook in Dutton, which felt particularly apt. Half an hour out of Conrad, the neighboring town was just a few miles south of Dave’s grandparents’ first homestead.

  “I’ve lived in Conrad almost all my life,” Dave told a bright-eyed intern at AERO, who’d come out to the plant to write an article for the nonprofit’s newsletter. “But I didn’t become a real part of the community until I started contributing to it economically.” Twenty years after moving home, the Timeless CEO’s perspective on change had itself changed. He still didn’t believe in business as usual. But he was pretty excited about business as unusual. If they could make this legume thing really pencil out, Dave realized, he and his friends could have a much bigger impact.

  Even consummate activist Jim Barngrover—who had spent countless hours lobbying the legislature—embraced the possibilities of making a difference through the market. Jim had started a small distribution business, Barnstormer’s, to supplement his largely volunteer work for Timeless Seeds. He researched his organic and fair trade products carefully, well aware that economic incentives could easily lead such businesses astray from their lofty goals. Selling product without selling out was no mean feat. But now that they had nitrogen fixation down, this was Timeless Seeds’ next big challenge.

  CASH COW

  The Trader Joe’s deal was particularly tricky, because unlike Fair Exchange, the California-based chain wouldn’t pay a premium for organic. They didn’t care if the lentils Timeless supplied had been sprayed or not. All the farmers in the lentil pool had certified their acreage—in fact, most of them were members of the same Organic Crop Improvement Association chapter. But 300,000 pounds was more lentils than Timeless could scrounge up from their fellow organic growers, or even from conventional growers in Montana. To fill the Trader Joe’s order, they’d had to start buying conventional product from across the border in Saskatchewan.

  Back when Dave had first planted them in the eighties, lentils had essentially been organic by definition. Herbicide manufacturers in the grain belt had developed their products for use in wheat and barley fields, and the most common formulations killed all broadleaf plants. As every young farmer converting a family place had to patiently explain to their parents, lentils were a broadleaf. If they used chemicals to kill their weeds, they’d kill their crop too. Moreover, broadleaf herbicides could persist in the soil for up to seven years, so there was no question of spot treating a little patch of thistles during a fallow year. In the early 1980s, planting lentils meant parking the sprayer for good.

  Ten years on, when Timeless Seeds landed the Trader Joe’s contract, there still weren’t many nonorganic lentil fields in Montana. But Saskatchewan was a different story. Since the university at Saskatoon had a dedicated pulse-crop breeder, manufacturers north of the border had invested in the development of more targeted chemicals that lentils could withstand. These weren’t as toxic as the generalist broadleaf herbicides being used in Montana’s wheat fields. But they were a far cry from the “solar farm” Dave had in mind.

  Conrad’s staunchest organic farmer hadn’t intended to get into the business of sourcing and selling chemically fertilized products. But convincing central Montanans to grow organic specialty lentils was slow going, and it occurred to Dave that conventional specialty lentils might be the perfect gateway crop. This pitch was simple—here’s a niche product that offers a higher return per acre than wheat and doesn’t require as much fertilizer. Once Dave had farmers sold on the economic potential of lentils, then he could inform them that their new crop could be grown without any chemicals—for an even higher premium.

  Of course, the immediate reason Dave needed to buy conventional lentils was to fulfill the Trader Joe’s order. Even if that contract wasn’t Timeless Seeds’ ultimate goal, Dave reasoned, it was a powerful means to that end—probably his best bet of getting more of Montana’s farmers out of the commodity trap. That one big deal had made so many things possible. The Conrad processing plant. The first private stock offering. All that equipment from Russ. Had it not been for the lucrative grocery chain opportunity, it was doubtful whether Timeless would have grown their lentil pool to encompass a broader circle of farmers. And without that jump in scale, they wouldn’t have been able to offer employment to twelve developmentally disabled baggers.

  Dave knew that each piece of his business-cum-movement had to mature apace, in order to keep the whole synergistic system humming along. His heart was on the farm, but he tried to keep his head squarely focused on marketing and infrastructure—to make sure all those lentils would have someplace to go. And yet, adept as he was at inspiring folks to pitch in to help grow his company, Dave was wary of mobilizing the underground on behalf of the market. In truth, he had some nostalgia for the renewable-energy era of AERO, when everything was so much simpler. Back then, his weekends were spent gathering with like-minded people who shared knowledge and labor for free. Like so many of his fellow do-it-yourselfers, Dave had found it fulfilling to come home from a weekend workshop with the tools to immediately make a difference in his own life. It had been easy then: Make your own heat. Collect your own energy. But now that Dave and his friends had made their solar farms into their living and not just their hobby, they were constantly reminded that the economy around them didn’t play by the same rules they did. In the murky, somewhat oxymoronic compromise zone known as “green business,” the line between selling your product and selling your soul could be hard to draw.

  HOLDING THE BAG

  In June of 1995 Timeless sent their largest shipment yet to Trader Joe’s. As soon as the delivery truck left the Conrad plant, the company’s army of packaging staf
f got right back to work. They never knew when they might get the next call from California, and they wanted to be ready when the truck showed up. But the phone didn’t ring. The truck never arrived. Months passed before anyone bothered to tell Dave, but Trader Joe’s had dropped the product. Timeless was literally left holding the bag. Thousands of them. Just a few months after what had appeared to be its big break, the company found itself on the verge of bankruptcy.

  When the shock abated, Dave began to piece together what had gone wrong. Trader Joe’s had asked for ramped-up production in the winter, when their marketing gurus told them people were making lentil soup. Not being farmers, the store’s buyers assumed they could instantaneously source some legumes to fill that demand. Once the weather started warming, Trader Joe’s customers gave up their soup habit, and the lentils languished on the shelf. So the grocery chain stopped stocking them, figuring they could always pick them up again whenever demand returned. Never mind that this year’s crop was already in the ground.

  But there had been another problem too, one for which Dave took some responsibility: dental claims. When he’d started calling around Saskatchewan in search of product to fill the Trader Joe’s order, Dave had asked for “precleaned” Canadian grade-one lentils, assuming that meant the processor had sorted out all the rocks. Given what a rush he’d been in, Dave hadn’t double-checked, and the result was that someone eventually chomped down on Trader Joe’s house-brand lentils and broke a tooth on a rock. It turned out that “grade one” meant less than 0.1 percent stones—so theoretically, a pound of French Greens could have ten stones in it and still make the grade! None of the Saskatchewan lentils Timeless sourced were that dirty, but even a single stone in 100,000 pounds was one too many. An embarrassment for Dave (who vowed that Timeless would never again sell lentils they hadn’t cleaned themselves), the errant stone had been a liability for his buyer. Since the product didn’t seem to be a big hit anyway, Trader Joe’s decided not to risk any more phone calls from personal injury lawyers.

  The loss of the Trader Joe’s contract was devastating. Timeless was committed to purchasing the massive inventory they had asked their farmers to seed, but they had nowhere to sell it. For the past nine months, the company had poured all their time and energy into one customer. They had tailor-made their operation to fulfill one contract, which was now history. “When the product quit working for them, the lights could’ve gone out,” Dave admitted. “But we were totally stubborn.”

  8

  CAVIAR IN THE CATTLE RATION

  THE CURIOUS RISE OF THE BLACK BELUGA

  Although Timeless Seeds was focused on French Greens, Dave hadn’t sacrificed the small part of his own acreage that he reserved for test plots. In between the rows of medics and forage peas was the first lentil Dave ever planted: a tiny black seed developed by the University of Saskatchewan’s Indian Head experiment station for use as a green manure, which Jim Sims had started promoting in Montana. Since Dave followed Sims’s research so closely, he’d been one of the first American farmers to plant the new variety when it was registered in 1986.

  Breeder Al Slinkard hadn’t even considered licensing “Indianhead lentil” as a food crop, since the hard seed took so long to cook and its soup “turned an icky grey color.” (Slinkard—aka Dr. Lentil—was already semifamous for revitalizing Saskatchewan’s agricultural reputation with a gargantuan, bright-green variety called Laird.) But Dave figured a lentil was a lentil, no matter what its official purpose. Indianheads were cheap. They were great for his soil. And since they’d been bred to make nitrogen, they were 24 percent protein. Why not add them to the cattle ration? And for that matter, why not try some himself?

  SOMETHING DIFFERENT

  In the midst of the Trader Joe’s hullaballoo in 1994, Dave had gotten a call from an heirloom bean buyer in Idaho. Lola Weyman had ordered French Green lentils from Timeless, but she wondered if Dave had anything new. She was looking for something different, Lola said. Something nobody else had.

  Dave hadn’t admitted to any of his neighbors that he was eating his soil-building crop. But Lola seemed like a kindred spirit, so he spilled the beans. “I’ve got this totally beautiful and unusual black lentil,” Dave told her. “It’s not released as a food, but it’s killed neither me nor the cows nor the pigs nor the sheep.” Dave sent a small package of Indianheads off to Lola, then got back to bagging and sealing French Greens.

  The following week, Lola called back. “We should call them Black Beluga lentils!” she exclaimed, noting the inky legumes’ resemblance to high-end caviar. Dave had never eaten caviar before, but the idea of selling his illicit cattle feed to elite chefs captured his fancy. He knew it was perfectly safe—the Czech peasants who developed the variety had been eating it for centuries before a Russian plant collector showed up to catalog it. But as the lentil cultivar made its way through the international research establishment—from Nikolai Vavilov’s seed bank in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) to a USDA Plant Introduction Station in Pullman, Washington, to Al Slinkard’s lab in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan—it had failed to impress cash-crop breeders, who were looking for big, industrial workhorses like wheat and corn. So for years, the modest lentil had languished in a seed vault, and when Slinkard finally saw fit to release it to commercial farmers, it was as a soil builder. Of course, nobody told the Czech farmers their lentils weren’t, officially speaking, food. They’d kept right on raising and eating the little black seeds, especially on New Year’s Day, when they were believed to confer good luck. Dave wasn’t particularly superstitious, but he fully appreciated another advantage of these lentils, which he suspected wasn’t lost on the Czechs either. The standout quality of this variety was that it fixed a lot of nitrogen. That’s how it had gotten Al Slinkard’s attention—the Canadian breeder had seen all that nitrogen as potential fertilizer for tired wheat fields. But nitrogen could be fuel for human bodies too, which metabolized the key nutrient as protein. When Dave sent his black lentils to the lab for nutrient analysis, he discovered that they contained a whopping 9 grams of protein per half-cup serving, along with copious amounts of fiber, iron, folate, and potassium. No wonder his cattle were so healthy, Dave thought. These lentils were a nutritional powerhouse!

  Focused on volume, the industrial breeders of the past half century hadn’t stopped to consider that farmers might have intentionally selected crop varieties for characteristics other than yield—that, in truth, there might be some wisdom in the old adage “Less is more.” But by the mid-1990s, interest in nutrient-dense foods like these forgotten lentils was beginning to resurge among nutritionists and health-conscious eaters. Perhaps, Dave concluded, their time had come. Timeless had stretched its capacity to the max cranking out green lentils for Trader Joe’s, but Dave bagged up some black ones himself to send to Lola. Quietly, Black Belugas made their debut in the fall of 1994.

  Unlike the Trader Joe’s deal, the new variety didn’t take off. Lola sold a few packages here and there—to eccentric chefs and specialty food stores—but most people were as skeptical as the breeder had been. A black lentil? Who wanted to eat that? If Trader Joe’s had continued to order truckloads of French Greens, Dave probably would have forgotten about his odd little Belugas, which were a tough sell. But when the grocery chain discontinued its order, Dave gave his black lentils another look. With Timeless Seeds on the brink, he and his friends knew they needed to realign the business with its original values. What could be more fitting than returning to green manure crops—and getting people to eat them!

  This time, they decided, they wouldn’t look for a big contract from a national distributor. They would develop their own brand, their own packaging, and their own relationships with stores and restaurants. The Timeless boys had long since learned the importance of diversification on the farm. When the Trader Joe’s deal collapsed, they realized that diversity was key to the resilience of their business too. Slowly but surely, Timeless built a fan base for Black Belugas, beginning in Montana. They em
phasized the added value and unique nutritional benefits of the variety, which, to their knowledge, was higher in protein than any other lentil on the market. Each package bore a Timeless Seeds label and was certified organic. The company cleaned every batch themselves to make sure there were no rocks in the bags.

  Dave met personally with as many buyers as he could: Missoula’s Good Food Store, Helena’s Real Food Market, even the cooperative in Bozeman that had originally sold his organic beef. He asked store managers which regional distributors they liked to work with and started placing Timeless products in independent stores across the Northwest. Although he highlighted Black Belugas, Dave offered his customers other choices too: French Greens, Petite Crimsons, Harvest Golds, Pardinas. Timeless Seeds also supplied non-lentil options from other phases of the crop rotation: split peas, flax, and eventually even barley (albeit an heirloom purple variety). This way, stores could figure out which products their customers liked best—and Timeless had a fallback plan if a particular crop had a bad year. It took six years to build the company back after the Trader Joe’s debacle, but by the turn of the millennium, it had emerged stronger than ever. Dave started inviting customers to visit the Conrad headquarters of his growing company, which no longer seemed like such a foolhardy experiment.

  LIGHTS, CAMERA, LENTILS

  The second person to take Dave up on his offer to visit was Blu Funk, a chef from Bigfork, Montana. A hundred and seventy-three miles and a world away from Conrad, Bigfork drew a mix of tourists headed for nearby Glacier National Park, wealthy summer residents, and local vacationers whose families had maintained waterfront cabins for generations. This little town at the northeast end of Flathead Lake was the apotheosis of big sky chic, and its prime attraction, nestled between upscale art galleries and the Bigfork Summer Playhouse, was Blu Funk’s gourmet dining establishment: ShowThyme. Blu knew his customers were buying cowboy paintings by the dozens, and he thought they ought to get a real taste of Montana when they ate at his restaurant. So he started purchasing Black Belugas from Timeless in 1998.