Lentil Underground

by Liz Carlisle

  Dave mulled the grocery chain’s offer. He didn’t want a repeat of the Trader Joe’s fiasco. He wasn’t going to count on this contract, and he didn’t expect it to last. But the old processing plant he had purchased more than a decade ago was literally falling down. Had Jerry Habets walked into Timeless for the first time today, Dave admitted, his enthusiastic convert probably would have walked right back out. In order to keep inspiring farm transitions, the business needed a new facility, probably sooner rather than later. Timeless Seeds’ ticket into this plant had been Trader Joe’s. Perhaps the Whole Foods deal could finance the next one.

  Dave decided to accept the national distribution opportunity, but on a few key conditions. The product he sold Whole Foods would be the same thing he sold to Blu Funk and the Good Food Store—organic crops raised by Montana growers like Jerry Habets. The four featured varieties would represent the diversity of these growers’ rotations: Black Beluga and French Green lentils from the legume phase, Purple Prairie barley from the grain phase, and golden flax as the representative oilseed. (Oilseeds, as the name implies, are broadleaf plants grown primarily for the oil in their seeds, like sunflowers, canola, or flax.) Timeless would fulfill the new order, but they would continue selling to their other customers too, including the ones who ordered Petite Crimsons or split peas. The character and scope of the business were nonnegotiable.

  With a heterogeneous network of collaborators—up and down the food chain—Dave was finally getting a handle on how to run a business like a lentil farm: When in doubt, diversify. Meanwhile, Timeless Seeds’ most unexpected grower had taken biodiversity to a whole new level. Back when Dave first seeded black medic, it had been radical to plant two crops at the same time. That’s why Jerry Habets had raised his eyebrows at Dave’s “messy” fields. But now that Jerry had gotten religion, he’d gone one step messier. Having had good luck with a two-crop companion planting, he was ready for something even Dave hadn’t experimented with: three.

  MONTANA MILPA

  When I came back to finish my field tour with Jerry Habets, at the height of 2012’s scorching summer, the drought was making national news. Like the persistent headlines, the shriveled barley at Jerry’s neighbor’s suggested that climate change might seriously threaten the future of the American food supply. Jerry actually had a pretty good stand of barley: not too tall yet, but nice and green. He threaded the grain through the calluses of his enormous hands, large even for a man of his six-foot-two stature. Not bad for a dry year, Jerry decided. But it was the buckwheat, whose white blossoms had hummed with bees throughout a scorching June, that he was really excited about.

  Much like the medic Dave Oien had raised, Jerry’s buckwheat had “volunteered” from the fallen seeds of last year’s stand to join his mixed crop of lentils and chickpeas. “It’s the best buckwheat I’ve had in three years and Mother Nature did it,” Jerry exclaimed, turning off his truck so I could hear the bees buzzing in the white blossoms. Detecting sufficient excitement in my furious note taking, Jerry took his hands off the steering wheel. “We can get out if you like,” he offered.

  Only once I crouched down below the canopy of buckwheat did I realize this was probably the only field of its kind in the world. I was completely disoriented amid the tangle of green flourishing beneath the white blossoms, but I immediately noticed two things: It was unbelievably cool down here, and I couldn’t see the dirt.

  Without speaking, Jerry separated a single individual from the inchoate web of plant matter to help my eyes adjust to the subtleties of the understory. About a third as tall as the buckwheat, this creature seemed far more focused on the bulbous green protrusions at the base of its fernlike leaves than on the pink flowers that appeared, like an afterthought, on only a few of its stems. This, Jerry told me, was a Black Kabuli chickpea, a specialty dry bean available only from Timeless and a handful of other suppliers.

  Aside from the novelty factor of its ebony seeds (which made a stunning hummus), the chickpea had other attributes that recommended it to Jerry. First of all, it was drought resilient. Second, it was a legume, so it made its own fertilizer and donated the surplus to the plants that followed it. The problem with the wondrous black bean, however, was that it also appealed to Jerry’s neighbors. Not the two-legged ones (who probably had no more idea than I did that it was even out here), but the deer. Last time Jerry’d planted Black Kabulis, the deer had munched his whole crop a week before harvest.

  The deer were one reason Jerry’d added a second layer of green under the chickpeas, a lowlying mass I simply could not distinguish into discrete individuals. These Petite Crimson lentils were another of Timeless Seeds’ specialty pulse crops, also champion nitrogen fixers that did well without much moisture. Jerry’d tried this crop before too, but a hot spell had burned them up, so he figured the shade of the chickpeas might give them a better shot at survival. When Jerry told me how the Petite Crimsons returned the favor, I chuckled at the thought of a guard lentil. But apparently that was the case: Lentil plants were so unappetizing to deer and ground squirrels that they provided some protection for the Black Kabulis.

  Jerry hadn’t planned on doing all these things at once. His plan had been to raise just the chickpeas and lentils this year, then plow their nitrogen-rich stalks under after harvest. The lentil/chickpea “stubble” would feed his soil with nitrogen and organic matter, which would in turn support next year’s grain crop. This sequential approach to nutrient management—rotation—is how most newly organic farms recover from what Jerry described as not just one, but two traumas. The first trauma had been gradual but devastating: decades of industrial management had slowly depleted the land’s organic matter and biological fertility. The second trauma had been more sudden. When Jerry converted to non-chemical management, he had abruptly cut off the source of fertility on which his industrialized farm had come to rely, leaving it somewhat nutrient poor. As tempting as it might be to return to the “band-aid” of fertilizers, Jerry explained, the only real solution to these double traumas was to patiently rebuild the natural fertility of the soil. In general, this meant taking a break from nitrogen-using plants like wheat and barley for one or two seasons during the legume phase of his rotation, which Jerry was more than happy to do. But when the seeds of the previous year’s buckwheat spontaneously germinated in the midst of his lentil/chickpea intercrop, Jerry realized his uninvited guest might be on to something.

  A solid stand of buckwheat would partially shade the heat-sensitive Petite Crimsons and Black Kabulis, Jerry realized, envisioning a tripartite canopy structure taking shape in his field. The buckwheat would also acidify the soil, which might help convert chemically “locked” forms of soil phosphorous into plant-available versions, much as lentils and chickpeas fix atmospheric nitrogen. Plus, the combination of all three crops would help crowd out the weeds that had dogged Jerry since his conversion.

  He didn’t know it, but Jerry had stumbled onto an ancient agroecological principle. For centuries, farmers in the Americas had grown three or more plants together to provide complementary nutrients, control pests, and apportion the summer’s abundant sunlight to suit each plant’s needs. In fact, Miguel Altieri had discussed this system at AERO’s 1984 Sustainable Agriculture Conference, using its Mexican name, milpa. Jerry’s accidental intercrop was a northern cousin to this classic three-sisters combination of corn, beans, and squash. A Montana milpa.

  From the looks of the bees humming along in the buckwheat’s flowers and the lentil tendrils hooking themselves to its stalks, everybody seemed to be happy with the arrangement. This triple intercrop was an experiment, Jerry admitted to me. He’d never raised two other species underneath his canopy crop. He had no idea if they’d all mature at the same time and wasn’t sure how he’d separate them from one another if they did. He’d be happy if he just got a buckwheat harvest out of the deal, since the other plants would make a good soil-building plowdown. “But if I time it just right … maybe …”

  Jerry did
n’t want to jinx himself, but we both knew that yielding three specialty crops off one field would incontrovertibly validate his transition. Now that Jerry had successfully transformed his thinking, he needed to accomplish the same thing for his farm. “I’ve had to be pretty cautious about it, sort of one field at a time,” he told me, “since I started all of this when I was literally bankrupt.”

  When Timeless Seeds began to take their movement mainstream, their first crop of new growers were people like Jerry, who were worried about losing their land. These distressed farmers were ripe for the first step of conversion—changing their philosophy. But since most of them were buried knee-deep in debt, putting that philosophy into practice was a slow process.

  So as Timeless grew, Dave began to court farmers with more secure access to land and capital, who could afford the risk associated with overhauling their field operations. He knew there were several folks in central Montana who had the means to experiment a bit. But since things were working out for them, these more secure growers were also more reluctant to change. To convince his newest recruits to join the lentil underground, Dave had to answer questions he’d never gotten before, very specific questions about net and gross and yield.

  That was one of the main reasons why Dave had taken the Whole Foods contract: credibility. With a major national distribution opportunity in hand, Timeless Seeds successfully landed a grant from the state of Montana to conduct a comprehensive feasibility study, in 2005. This helped the company drum up its first commercial financing, from a socially responsible investor west of Missoula called Stranie Ventures (now Good Works Ventures, LLC). The influx of capital allowed Timeless to purchase a much larger, more professional facility just north of Great Falls in Ulm, Montana.

  Since he’d already won and lost one major distribution deal, Dave wasn’t surprised by the way things unfolded. Business picked up sharply when Timeless products first appeared on the shelves at Whole Foods. The company moved into their expanded facility in October 2006, to great fanfare. Dave started calling around to recruit new growers. And then Whole Foods dropped the Authentic Food Artisan program.

  As before, nobody called Dave to tell him the deal was off. But this time, he wasn’t caught off guard. Timeless had other customers to sell to, and these days, they were always ready with a plan B in case restaurants went under or distributors declared bankruptcy. Dave had been adamant that all Timeless lentils sold at Whole Foods would bear the company’s own label, so disappointed shoppers knew where to find them when they disappeared from the shelves. Dave asked his fans where they’d like Timeless to retail, and they helped him place his lentils and heritage grains in their local grocery stores. Back in 1994, Timeless had needed Trader Joe’s. But they’d been more careful this time around, so they didn’t need Whole Foods. They had their processing plant, they had their loan, and they had all their numbers crunched into a neat and tidy feasibility study. Thus equipped, Dave was ready to recruit a new breed of Timeless grower.

  Not long after Whole Foods lost interest in “authentic food artisans,” Dave started talking to a young guy who had just come home to his family’s conventional wheat operation, 78 miles east of Conrad in Fort Benton. Having traveled extensively and managed a community garden, Casey Bailey had already changed his mind. Now he was ready to change his farm.

  10

  THE KEVIN BACON OF CENTRAL MONTANA

  Two hours out of Conrad and just across the Missouri River, I arrived at the second stop on my tour of Timeless growers. This was my first visit to Casey Bailey’s place, which for four generations had been admired as one of the most carefully managed grain farms in the region. Casey could have made a good living by following in his dad’s footsteps. But instead, the thirty-two-year-old had done something audacious. He’d gone organic.

  When I arrived at the Baileys’ on that sunny May morning, the first thing I saw was an enormous angular spider crawling slowly but precisely behind Casey’s tractor. Hundreds of skinny black legs were gliding just below the surface of the soil, synchronized by a fire-engine-red body. As Casey approached the end of the row, the steel spider’s exotic brand name became visible from the dirt road. The Baileys’ neighbors slowed down as they passed my Subaru, peering across the tidy buffer strip and twisting their tongues on the machine’s unpronounceable script lettering: “Einböck.”

  “This is the tined weeder,” Casey explained, whisking me into a don’t-blink tour of his operation. “I bought it from Austria. It can weed in between the spelt, right in between the rows.” What was spelt? I wondered. The bubbly long-distance runner was talking so fast that I worried even my digital recorder wouldn’t keep up. Apparently, this was the pace of learning on this farm: as you go. Rather than try to stop Casey’s high-speed train of thought, I made a note and figured we’d get around to the spelt sooner or later.

  “I think it’s a real art to do it well,” Casey continued, bringing me back to the in-crop weeder. “It beats the plants up, scores the heck out of them with fourteen-inch-long tines, but as scary as that seems, it doesn’t kill the crop. You just have to go like heck and not look back.” Casey was going like heck all right, but I couldn’t understand why he was in such a hurry. The Baileys weren’t rich, but unlike Jerry Habets, Casey hadn’t made the leap to organics under financial duress. So who was Casey trying to keep up with? “I’m racing the weeds,” Casey explained, groaning. After a decade of chemical management, the Bailey farm was habituated, and Casey’s organic transition had sent his soil into an agricultural version of withdrawal.

  FARM REHAB

  Casey himself had already been enthusiastic about the idea of organic agriculture when he grew his first lentil field for Timeless in 2009. But he knew his farm would probably take a little longer to kick its reliance on chemicals, so he’d tried to wean it off fertilizers and herbicides one field at a time. Still, the Baileys’ strung-out soil continued to battle thistles, and Casey’s neighbors were starting to drop hints. He needed to figure out new ways to kill the unwanted plants popping up in his crop—and quickly.

  The tined weeder’s spidery legs removed shallow-rooted weeds without ripping out his crop, Casey told me, and he could also use the machine to fine-tune soil moisture levels. As long as he didn’t drive too fast, it seemed to work. “It actually looks like it stimulates the plants,” Casey reported hopefully. “I noticed that the places where I used it, the crop was two or three inches taller.”

  But as Casey dug into these surface-level questions about weeds, he discovered that they cut deeper than he originally imagined. Unwanted plants, he learned, were a sign of unbalanced soils. In order to control them, he needed to develop carefully planned rotations, so that nutrient users like grain alternated with nutrient producers like lentils. If he could fill the ecological niches on his farm with harvestable plants, he wouldn’t attract so many uninvited ones. This was a completely new take on agriculture for the born-and-raised conventional farmer, who had always lined out his field operation one crop at a time and kept everything fastidiously separate. Now he had to think hard about how his plants could work together.

  After considering several crops that might complement his nitrogen-fixing lentils, Casey had decided to plant nitrogen-feeding spelt, a heritage grain that had recently become popular with gluten-sensitive consumers. Finding markets for his new crops was key for Casey, who had to prove his ecological approach could support a secure livelihood, the way his dad’s conventional grain operation always had. As the fourth-generation manager of a respected family farm, Casey had to explain to his family and neighbors why he was doing things differently. Because driving a funny-looking, foreign-sounding weeding machine straight through your crop was really, really different.

  The typical technique in Fort Benton—or anywhere else in rural America, for that matter—is to cultivate before you sow. Tilling the ground in advance of planting is an age-old strategy. Temporarily clearing the weeds out of the way gives the crop a head start, and if you
r seedlings grow fast enough, they can monopolize the sunlight and shade out any unwanted growth below. Or, I should say, preseason tillage used to be the typical technique. Far from chasing arcane weeding machines across the Atlantic, Casey’s neighbors have long since parked their John Deere plows and Massey Ferguson cultivators in the shed. These days, American grain growers abolish their weeds with one expeditious pass on the sprayer—and then they go to the lake. Just a day’s drive east of here, in fact, commences the geographic signature of the Midwest: mile upon mile of identical corn and soy plants, genetically altered to resist herbicides. Since their crops are impervious to their chemicals, farmers in Nebraska and Indiana can apply weed killers as liberally as the law allows. It’s a simple, one-shot solution.

  Fort Benton’s primary agricultural product—wheat—hasn’t yet followed the genetically modified path of the heartland’s corn and soy, but it seems only a matter of time. For everyone in this neighborhood but Casey, tillage is fast fading into a mere metaphor, a quaint children’s-book notion of what Old MacDonald does on the farm. It felt “revolutionary” and “crazy” when he dusted the cobwebs off his dad’s old plow for the first time in decades, Casey admitted. But if he was going to farm the Bailey place organically, he’d need to embrace the challenge of weed management—and the extra effort and continual troubleshooting that came with it. The holy grail, Casey told me, getting back to the discussion about rotations, was to establish such a perfectly balanced plant community on his farm that he could prevent weed problems rather than treat them. He was convinced that the best weed-management strategies were subtle and biological: choosing the right plants to rotate (alfalfa was key), timing his seeding just right, spacing his rows a little closer together. By paying attention to little things that helped his crops thrive, Casey hoped to minimize the amount of time and fossil fuel he spent making passes on the tractor. But as he tweaked and tinkered his way toward that long-term vision, Casey had to do something about the weeds that were growing on his farm now. He took a “lesser evil” approach to this dilemma, balancing the pros and cons of tillage and chemicals. In this case, Casey felt, careful tillage was more in line with “how nature works.”