Lentil Underground

by Liz Carlisle

  Blu’s unique presentation sold ShowThyme’s customers on his curious side dish, which brought Dave’s lentils out of the soup and onto center stage. ShowThyme’s little lentil order steadily increased in volume, and Blu became a loyal Timeless supporter. When he called Dave in 1999 to buy more Belugas, the Timeless CEO could fill out the shipping label from memory. “No, don’t ship them,” Blu said. “We’ll come pick them up.”

  “Are you sure?” Dave asked. It was a three-hour drive over the Rocky Mountains, one that people typically made in the other direction. Yep, Blu said, he and his wife, Rose, wanted to see the operation.

  Playing show-and-tell with the owners of one of Montana’s finest restaurants, Dave registered an unfamiliar feeling: pride. The Conrad plant was still a pretty humble place—more than a little dilapidated. But Blu and Rose were completely taken with it. “I’m going to put Black Belugas on every plate,” Blu promised. And he did. Dave’s former cattle feed became a star at ShowThyme, where it was served as an accompaniment to every entrée, and Blu’s customers started asking him where they could get some lentils of their own.

  At the dawn of a new millennium, Timeless Seeds had hit a major turning point. After a decade of valiantly paddling against the prevailing currents of American agriculture, Dave could feel a gathering wind at his back. It was partly that the world had changed since 1986, when Dave and his three buddies started their little black medic business in his Quonset hut. Organic food was now a multibillion-dollar sector of the American economy, and environmentalism wasn’t quite the dirty word it had been a generation ago. But if Timeless had benefited from these changes, it had also helped catalyze them. Ten years after everybody told Dave his idea was impossible, he had convincingly proven them wrong, and the evidence was plainly visible in the thousands of acres of lentil fields spread across central Montana. As a result, people who still thought Dave was a little kooky were showing up at his door in increasing numbers, interested in planting some lentils of their own. These weren’t the AERO members and solar energy enthusiasts who’d been struggling upriver with Dave all along. This was the mainstream.

  Helping his conventional neighbors convert was exciting for Dave, whose vision had always been to transform agriculture on a regional scale, if not a global one. But it was also a departure from Timeless Seeds’ kumbaya coalition-building. Conventional growers had different expectations than Dave’s buddies did, and most of them had no idea what they were getting themselves into. Dave knew firsthand that farm conversion was an intense process, which unfolded as a series of sweeping changes. First you had to change your mind. Then you had to change your farm. Then you had to change your business and the institutions that served it. And now that you were a weirdo, you either had to change your community or form a new one.

  Joining the lentil underground wasn’t an easy road, and Dave didn’t expect anyone to make the sacrifices he had. So now his challenge was to shorten the learning curve for those who wanted to follow in his footsteps. This was where things stood in 1998, when the last person he would’ve ever expected showed up at the door of the Timeless plant.

  9

  THE CONVERT

  Three dry years at the turn of the millennium had left barley farmer Jerry Habets desperately searching for answers. Bankrupt, divorced, and about to lose his family’s eighty-seven-year-old homestead, Jerry tried the Bible. Then he went to a psychic. And then he went organic.

  It wasn’t like Jerry had never heard of organic farming. In fact, he had known about David Oien all his life. The Timeless CEO’s famously unkempt homestead was just thirteen miles down the road from the Habets place. And since Dave and his cousin Tom were the only farmers in this town of 2,600 people who were intentionally planting weeds in their fields, word got around. Nineteen-year-old Jerry had raised his eyebrows when he’d seen Dave take the Oiens’ land out of malt barley. He thought his neighbor was nuts.

  And yet, by the turn of the millennium, the mysterious lentil entrepreneur was looking a little less crazy, having managed to get Timeless Seeds products on the shelves at several retailers and in the hands of a rising Montana chef recently featured in Bon Appétit. Dave’s bumper-sticker odes to sustainable agriculture—“I (heart) Cover Crops” and “Real Farmers Have Green Manure”—no longer seemed quite so countercultural as they had in the late seventies. Back then, organics had been, as Jerry put it, “pretty far out there.” But now, “Got Organic?” bumper stickers were commonplace, and Montana even had a statewide trade organization to support the booming industry: the Montana Organic Association. Jerry went to one of the group’s conferences and came back convinced that he should convert. That’s how he found himself walking in the door of Timeless Seeds, to talk to David Oien about crops.

  “FEEDING THE SOIL”

  “Jerry Habets is a real success story for Timeless Seeds,” Dave told me, as we began to wrap up a late-afternoon interview. My first trip to the Oien place—in 2011—had convinced me that I needed to come back for a longer stint, so I’d returned to Conrad the following summer, packing a voice recorder and a digital camera. Having covered the history of Dave’s business, we were now chatting about its current roster of growers, whom Dave was encouraging me to visit. Many of these people were former conventional farmers, Dave told me, and their stories would teach me a thing or two about how difficult it was to change agriculture on just one farm, let alone across an entire region. In order to understand what Timeless had become as the movement went mainstream, Dave told me, I’d need to get in my Subaru and see for myself.

  I was reluctant to part company with Dave and Sharon, but I didn’t have to drive far. I kicked off my grand tour of lentil farms with a visit to their Conrad neighbor, whose experience epitomized the initial phase of transition. When Jerry Habets had joined the lentil underground, the first change he’d had to make was both the most critical and the most difficult. He’d had to change his mind.

  I met up with Jerry on an early May afternoon, just as central Montana’s unforgiving sun was reaching its hottest burn of the day. Drought had struck Conrad again—the worst to hit the Great Plains since the Dust Bowl. But this time Jerry was ready. Outfitted with a ball cap to shade his face and a zip-up sweatshirt in case the wind whipped up, he took me on a pickup tour of his farm, pointing out all the things he’d been doing differently since his conversion to “feeding the soil.”

  “I’d gone bankrupt farming conventionally,” Jerry told me, recalling the desperate day when he’d first walked into the Timeless plant. “I didn’t have money for chemicals or fertilizers, so that became my transition to organic. I was forced into it financially, but it turned out to be the best thing I ever did. I learned to take care of my soil first, and everything followed from that.”

  Jerry’s relationship to the soil wasn’t an abstract philosophy. The dirt his grandfather first plowed up in 1913 made itself at home on the fifty-six-year-old’s red, white, and blue plaid work shirt as though it had been woven right into the design. I knew without asking that Jerry had farmed all his life. And that he hadn’t majored in philosophy or religious studies, like Dave. In fact, Jerry had spent just one quarter at Montana State before deciding college wasn’t for him.

  It wasn’t hard to see why Jerry had identified himself, for most of his life, as a conventional farmer. Convention was everywhere I looked. We drove by his grandfather’s hundred-year-old barn, its roof finally subdued by last year’s fiercest storm. Then we passed the hundred-year-old church Jerry had walked to as a boy, which his grandfather and thirteen other families had constructed the first year they’d arrived, even before building their own houses. There were several advantages to being a third-generation farmer, Jerry emphasized, citing his deep connection to this place. Jerry admired his forebears for their hard work and cooperative spirit, and he was proud to carry those traditions forward.

  And yet, in recent years, Jerry had also become more cognizant of his ancestors’ mistakes. From the day they first bust
ed sod with a moldboard plow, the Habets family and their fellow homesteaders had taken too much from the land, without adequately giving back. When Jerry took on that regenerative work as his own responsibility, he’d run smack into the downside of being a third-generation farmer: It was hard to change course.

  Change had certainly left its mark on the Habets place—but it was a particular kind of change. His grandfather’s church had closed in 1962, Jerry remarked, pointing to the fields all around it to demonstrate what that church had been replaced with. The Habets family had continued going to Sunday services, in another sanctuary, but in many ways this prairie had converted to the modern religion of the heartland: wheat, barley, and 2,4-D. Prayers for rain were replaced with center-pivot irrigation, and the guarantee of a good crop became a function of chemistry rather than divine providence.

  Leo Habets had recognized his son’s knack for this clean and controlled way of farming, and he had encouraged Jerry to start leasing some of his own acreage when he was just nineteen. Jerry couldn’t resist the pull of the land, but he was a little ashamed to be coming home so quickly from Bozeman, where he’d quit college after just a few months. He wondered if he shouldn’t be making something of himself in the wider world rather than staying home to farm. Although he was already bringing in a good crop by his second season, Jerry felt like a yokel compared to his older neighbor David Oien, who lived closer to town and had a college degree. So when Jerry drove by one day and saw a mess of medic in one of the Timeless farmers’ plots, he secretly felt a surge of pride. He may have been just a simple farm boy, but he had clean fields.

  “THE FARM JUST FEELS BETTER”

  “I needed to be humbled,” Jerry reflected as we drove past his own weeds, expressing gratitude for the bankruptcy that had forced him to change his ways. Encouraging me to take pictures, he explained just how beneficial wild mustard is for pollinators. In fact, Jerry said, chuckling, the beekeeper he hosted in exchange for honey had been pressing him for his secret. “The bee guy asked me, ‘What is that yellow stuff—the bees are all over it,’ and I said, ‘That’s a weed!’ The old way of doing things is that when you saw a few weeds out there, you went out and you killed them. But weeds are just as good for the soil or better than what you plant out there.”

  Now that he, too, was a “weed farmer,” his neighbors had started to look at him like he used to look at Dave Oien, Jerry admitted, grinning. “They think I’m crazy; they’re wondering what I’m doing. They have no concept that we’re actually feeding organisms in the soil with these weeds we’re plowing under. Their idea is if there’s anything green out there, you’re not a very good farmer. But my intention has changed from making money to growing good-quality, healthy food. I think the soil’s happier; I really do. The farm just feels better. It’s like it knows I’m not going to pillage.”

  Jerry sighed, pointing out the parched, yellowing barley on the place across the road. Yellow leaves mean nitrogen deficiency and disease, he explained. The adjoining farmer had planted too many barley crops in a row, and his yields had been steadily decreasing as a result. Jerry knew it was no use trying to tell his hapless neighbor to change his ways. He’d have to do what Dave Oien had done—patiently build his own organic system and wait for conventional growers to come to him, when they eventually had to find out why his crops looked so good in a drought year. To learn this humble way of farming, Jerry explained, you needed to be in the right frame of mind. It was a spiritual process, he told me. “It’s almost like you have a shift in your faith and then you understand that the other way wasn’t the right way to do it. That’s not the way Mother Nature wants things to be done.”

  A truck approached from the other direction, and Jerry stopped and opened his window to say hello. It was the neighbor, probably the only person Jerry would have seen today if I hadn’t been visiting. The affable farmer inquired about Jerry’s father’s health and told Jerry to congratulate his parents on their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. These two men knew nearly every detail of each other’s lives, a no-nonsense form of intimacy that had been more common around here when there was a farm family for each 280 acres.

  “Look, it’s not like my neighbors are stupid,” Jerry said as we pulled away, as if to explain how he could show so much respect to someone with such yellow barley. “The one over by Dad’s told me, ‘You know, these chemicals are going to kill us,’ but yet he won’t go organic. He can’t make that leap.”

  That leap, as Jerry’s crop tour underscored, was called organic conversion for a reason: Becoming an organic farmer was a radical transformation, as much philosophical as agronomic. For Leo Habets, as for Orville Oien, farming had meant taking decisive action. Success had been measured in quantitative achievements: bushels per acre, percent protein. But Jerry’s approach was completely different. Instead of telling me about things he’d done, he’d been telling me about things he’d noticed. Rather than ticking off the usual litany of statistics about northern Montana’s ubiquitous annuals (my notebooks were full of “WW” and “SW”—winter wheat and spring wheat), Jerry was sharing some decidedly nonquantitative observations about the perennial drama of life on this increasingly wild farm. I’d been hearing a lot about trees.

  “I’ve got this tree in the backyard that’s just greening up now, and that means it’s time to plant,” Jerry told me as we turned back toward his house. “Most everyone else here’s done seeding—their crops are up and starting to suffer for lack of moisture. But the year I converted, I learned to go by what the tree was doing.”

  The first spring he farmed without chemicals, Jerry explained, he’d gone out to seed at the same time as everyone else. But it had been miserable. His tree—which hadn’t quite budded out yet—had been blowing all over the place in the whipping wind. It still felt like winter. So Jerry’d put his seeder back in the shed and waited. His neighbors had dropped subtle and not-so-subtle hints that he should be out working, Jerry recalled, but he’d stuck to his guns and held off for a few weeks. Come August, his patience had been rewarded: While his neighbors’ barley had clearly suffered in the hot weather, his had come through okay. Later seeding was better in an organic system, Jerry explained. The crops grew more slowly, and they could hang on, even if there wasn’t much moisture. Long stretches without rain were inevitable in this part of the country, and the weather was only getting more forbidding and unpredictable. “We’re definitely seeing climate change,” Jerry told me. “It used to be you could count on a three-day soaking rain in June; Dad used to call them the June rains. But up until last year we haven’t had that, and then it came too early. We haven’t had the usual fall frosts.”

  A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM

  A modest shower finally showed up for Jerry in 2012—on May 24—but there was a downside to the moisture. While the sun was shining, Jerry’d had an excuse to focus on seeding and put off his rainy-day project. But there was no escaping it now. When I pulled into Jerry’s driveway for a follow-up interview, I spied him through the window, hunched over his dining room table. “This isn’t a very exciting day to visit,” he apologized. “I’m doing my organic paperwork.”

  The pile of certification forms crystallized the challenge of converting. When Jerry took his soil out of chemical management, it had been a shock to his system—and not just in the philosophical sense. After decades of relying on fertilizers and herbicides to kill the weeds, the farm had been ill prepared to do these things for itself—and it showed. Canada thistle had roared back so ferociously that a neighbor had reported the Habets farm as a noxious weed hazard, so Jerry’d been forced to spot treat a number of patches and revoke their organic status.

  Those few passes on a spray rig had ushered Jerry into the unenviable purgatory of “split production.” Consequently, he now had to separate out nearly sixty individual fields on the maps he prepared for his annual organic inspection. The sprayed sections were classified “T1”—in their first year of a three-year transition back to organic. Next to t
hem were required “buffer” fields that separated “T1” parcels from “organic” ones. Every new crop meant a new field, and Jerry had to meticulously document the cleaning of all his equipment and storage facilities to prove there was no cross-contamination.

  On days like this, Jerry was glad to have some like-minded company to help him sort through it all. “Sometimes I forget that there are other organic growers out there,” he sighed, staring at a series of figures on his legal pad that refused to add up. “It’s like I’m the one guy representing organic farming in this neighborhood. People are watching. It’s always on my mind.”

  DISTRIBUTION DÉJÀ VU

  As Timeless Seeds entered the mainstream and the new millennium, its growers weren’t the only ones learning their way into the delicate balance between fitting in and standing out. CEO Dave Oien was also evolving his philosophy, as he tried to juggle both ends of the food chain. It wasn’t just mainstream growers Dave needed to woo, but also mainstream consumers. Organics was now a multibillion-dollar industry, and the big dreams Dave and Jim had taken with them to their first food show finally appeared to be within reach. But Dave was torn. Did he really want to play with the big boys?

  Before Dave could decide whether to reach out to mainstream retailers, they found him. In 2005, he picked up the phone at the Timeless plant, wondering who could be calling from Texas. It was Whole Foods. The Austin-based chain—165 stores and growing—was launching a new Authentic Food Artisan program, and they wanted to include four of Timeless Seeds’ specialty crops as featured products. For the second time, Timeless had a shot at a major distribution deal.