Lentil Underground
Page 12
The colossal steel spider sitting in Casey’s spelt may have been more in line with nature, but it was a glaring about-face from local culture. Like most kids taking up their parents’ profession, Casey wanted nothing more than to lie low as he experimented with his own way of doing things. But the highly visible process of organic conversion had forced him to explain himself. “My neighbors were like, what are you doing over there?” Casey recalled, laughing. The bright-red tined weeder had blown his cover.
FOOTLOOSE IN FORT BENTON
Cultivation—weeding mechanically rather than chemically—is the single practice that most starkly distances organic farmers like Casey from the familiar rhythms that characterize their central Montana communities. Casey and his fellow tillage farmers run on a different schedule, with different machinery, different inputs, and an entirely different philosophy. These organic growers not only face an ever-adapting cast of wily weeds (which have evolved into impressively resilient beings in the face of the neighbors’ herbicides). They also have to contend with the farm industry that has congealed around grain monocultures and chemically driven “zero tillage” farming, which is rapidly becoming the mainstream management strategy on these erosion-prone Great Plains. This double whammy of social and ecological challenges means that those on the diversified, organic path have had to cultivate their friendships and their problem-solving capacities as carefully as they till their fields.
“What we need, you know, is a good pest management app,” Casey said to me, whipping out his smartphone to take note of what appeared to be poor germination in his safflower. Casey had been talking about the app idea with other Timeless growers, but in the meantime, he was busy putting the “social” in social media—synching his phone and his laptop, updating his Facebook page, and nonchalantly moving millions of bits of information around the world in his search for the proper cultivator or the secret to eradicating field bindweed. Just four years after Bob Bailey let his son experiment with organics on a fifty-acre plot, the ambitious youngster had already joined the board of the Montana Organic Association and become one of Timeless Seeds’ key growers. Casey’s fledgling venture was a veritable Kevin Bacon of Montana’s sustainable farming community, except that you didn’t have to trace anywhere near six degrees of separation.
In the course of diversifying his farm, Casey seemed to have met everyone. Amaltheia Dairy’s Nate Brown had sold Casey four pigs, which had permanently altered the olfactory character of Casey’s Volkswagen Jetta on the trip home from Bozeman. A quirky independent breeder from Big Timber, Dave Christensen, had supplied Casey with the seed for his first planting of open-pollinated corn. When I asked about the robust grass across from his lentils, Casey had to say the name twice, to make sure I caught the pronunciation. This Kamut (Kuh-MOOT) was contracted to Bob Quinn, a Big Sandy farmer who had become famous for developing and trademarking the popular ancient grain.
Though Casey’s connections appeared far-flung, I noted a common thread. I’d seen that open-pollinated corn before, I realized—on a visit to the Timeless plant in Ulm. Another farmer—Ole Norgaard—had launched a small business to package the corn into corn bread and pancake mixes, and since he didn’t have sufficient electrical power on his farm to operate his milling machinery, he’d parked his mill at Dave’s facility. Big Sandy farmer Bob Quinn didn’t need any help from Timeless, having made millions on Kamut. But Quinn’s most recent venture hinted that he might have been talking with Dave too. The safflower Casey and I were standing in was bound for Quinn’s Oil Barn, an on-farm fuel venture uncannily reminiscent of the integrated energy scheme that had long ago transformed the Oien homestead into the talk of Conrad. Sure enough, I found out, when Bob had begun considering a transition to organics back in the eighties, he’d spoken at length with Dave, who had helped recruit the now famous Big Sandy entrepreneur into the Farm Improvement Club program.
The latest in a long line of organic farmers whom Dave had inspired, Casey planned to sell about a third of his harvest to his mentor. I wasn’t surprised that Casey’s French Green lentils were headed for Timeless at the end of the season, but I was interested to learn that Dave had also tapped Casey to experiment with emmer, one of three heritage wheats gaining popularity in high-end restaurants under their collective Italian common name “farro” (along with spelt and einkorn). Since he had a committed buyer for these two premium crops, Casey had the freedom to experiment with other things too: millet, mustard, and grass-fed cattle.
Casey’s catholic appetite for projects matched his similarly ecumenical enthusiasm for information and people. A former music major at the University of Montana, Casey had also taken courses in religion (at Westmont College in Santa Barbara), urban studies (in San Francisco), and liberation theology (in Guatemala). The sole Timeless farmer who had been to both a major Occupy protest and countercultural mecca Esalen, Casey had started an intentional community in Missoula while he was in college there. When he’d come home to farm, Casey had brought all these experiences with him, to the bewilderment of Fort Benton. One of his musical buddies from college visited every summer to help with harvest, Casey told me, grinning mischievously. “One year, we were playing ‘Confirmation,’ you know, the Charlie Parker tune. We got so we had it down, and then a rancher came by because he thought it was a dying cow.”
Singing arias in the tractor cab and practicing yoga in the field, Casey upended nearly every stereotype about men in rural America. He was more than happy to cook while his girlfriend, Kelsey, took care of outdoor chores. In fact, Casey liked baking his own bread from the Kamut and spelt he raised. He also stocked organic soap in his tidy bathroom and enjoyed the aesthetic pleasures of watching his diverse fields bloom: “farming for colors.” Among those colors were purple—the hue of his specialty barley—and pink, the shade Casey had semi-accidentally painted his barn. Although he swore the color had looked different on the paint can, Casey liked seeing the look on people’s faces when he playfully nicknamed his business Pink Barn Organics. The athletic farmer was already notorious as the only man in town sporting Red Ants Pants—designer workwear made by a Montana company with a flair for the burlesque and a mission to flatter its (mostly female) customers’ curves.
Unabashedly himself, Casey clearly relished the opportunity to introduce little bits of difference to this traditional farm country. And yet, his posture toward his neighbors was fundamentally respectful and humble. Casey felt his fellow farmers—from Fort Benton to Guatemala, organic community gardens to conventional family farms—were all fighting the same problem, and that they needed to work together to solve it. At the heart of that problem, Casey believed, was disconnection from the earth. Even if they hadn’t been physically removed from their land, he observed, farmers around the world were experiencing a spiritual separation, as their jobs and landscapes became just as industrial as any city. “Monoculture, monoculture, monoculture,” Casey lamented. “It’s kind of like the rural person’s concrete—mind-numbing.”
Casey wasn’t convinced that organic advocates or political progressives had all the antidotes for this oppressive monotony, nor did he think his conventional neighbors on the east side of the Missouri had it all wrong. Western Montanans might think things were all flat and predictable out here, he teased me, but there were plenty of colorful twists and turns around these labyrinthine gullies and craggy river breaks. “Life isn’t black-and-white,” Casey told me adamantly, “and neither are any of our particular situations.”
“IT’S HARD TO GO COLD TURKEY”
For example, what we were about to do next was the very thing Casey’d been trying to avoid by using the tined weeder and all those synergistic crops. We were gonna spray.
“Can you follow me in the Ford?” Casey asked, handing me the keys to a beat-up brown truck with a container of 2,4-D in the bed. “I need to take this stuff out to my dad.” I nodded, and Casey hopped into the cab of a small tractor-trailer, which appeared to have been a furniture van in a previo
us lifetime. His own load included a mammoth tank of water, a medley of herbicides, and the hookup for refilling the sprayer that Bob Bailey was currently running on the family’s conventional acreage.
“It’s hard to go cold turkey with this organic stuff,” Casey explained. “I’m in both worlds. Timeless and Dave’s vision, that’s where my heart is, but today I’m doing the very opposite of organic. I’m out here with these bandages of spray and fertilizer until I can figure out how to make this organic thing work.”
Making it work, I gathered, meant confronting the dilemma that had vexed Montana’s organic farmers from the beginning: weed control. Montana actually lost organic acreage in 2012, and when the statewide organic association asked the dropout farmers why they gave up, they fielded a litany of one-word responses: bindweed, knapweed, cheatgrass, kochia. Insects and disease aren’t much of a problem in this neck of the treeless plains, because Montana is so cold and dry that even the bugs and the fungal pathogens have packed their bags for California or the Pacific Northwest. Given the short seasons and long dry spells, the creatures that survive out here are the hardiest people and the hardiest plants: stubborn farmers and stubborn weeds.
Central Montana’s two most intransigent communities engage in a constant tussle with each other, and it’s a delicate dance. When organic farmers cultivate to control their weeds, they also expose and disturb their soils, so they need to be careful not to sacrifice too much moisture, organic matter, or underground biodiversity. Excessive tillage has beat up the farm ground around here, so extension agents and conservation bureaucrats often encourage farmers to stop plowing and just use chemicals instead. But even in the face of state-of-the-art herbicides, the weeds here never really go away. In fact, a number of Timeless growers have noticed that their families’ weed problems actually multiplied during the previous generation, when their parents started using chemicals.
Rather than attacking his weeds with shock-and-awe poisons, Casey approached weed control as an attempt to win a lasting peace, or at least a détente. I came to appreciate why a lentil farmer might benefit from a background in community organizing and religious studies, as Casey described his approach to fostering coexistence among his human and nonhuman neighbors. Since neither the neighbors nor the weeds were going away anytime soon, Casey explained, he did his best to get to know them better. He was particularly keen to enroll the wisdom of the old-timers around him, aware that their detailed knowledge of this place and its history would help him establish a successful organic system.
It hadn’t taken Casey very long to figure out that property lines mean nothing to plants. Thanks to the constant movement of wind, water, and soil, both his crops and his weeds were engaged in an incessant biological conversation with all other botanical life in the vicinity. Sooner or later, Casey would have to deal with his neighbors’ chemically adapted weeds, because their seeds would blow over to his place. And if they planted GMO alfalfa, Casey would be vulnerable to pollen drift—when the breeze decided to send that new genetic material to establish itself in Casey’s fields, whether he liked it or not. Given that organics couldn’t realistically get anywhere going it alone, Casey made a point to reach out. Starting with his dad.
DOING THE MATH
Bob Bailey warmed the crisp air with an ear-to-ear smile, still toiling cheerfully away at age sixty-eight. While Bob loaded his spray rig with the three herbicides in the tractor-trailer, his son laid out the logic of the chemical approach. “We just put in seven thousand dollars,” Casey computed in awe. “Seven two-and-a-half-gallon jugs at a thousand dollars each. It pencils out to spend that kind of money fighting weeds—isn’t that crazy?” I nodded in agreement. It was a lot of money, all right, but Casey did the math for me.
“Compare this sprayer—with a hundred-and-twenty-foot boom, going twelve miles an hour—to organic plowing—a fifty-foot plow, going six miles an hour. With the organic method, you cover three hundred acres a day; with this outfit, fourteen hundred and forty acres day. Killing weeds this way costs less per acre, because glyphosate and fuel cost less than pulling a plow running diesel.”
Casey shuttled the 2,4-D over to his dad, then turned back to me. “So if we could start oilseed pressing and running that for fuel instead of diesel, that would feel so good. It would feel like freedom.” Aha. Now I knew why Casey was so excited about the safflower he was growing for Bob Quinn’s Oil Barn. Thirty years after the methane digester and alcohol fuel still had gone up at the Oien place, Quinn had developed another concept for a solar farm. Farmers like Casey would grow safflower, press it into oil at the Oil Barn, rent it to local restaurants as frying oil, and then pick it up and use it to fuel their tractors. A maverick experiment station breeder from Sidney, Montana—a modern-day Jim Sims—had spent thirty-eight years developing the high-oleic safflower that would burn clean in both human bodies and diesel engines. Casey had been one of the first to sign on for the pilot project.
Bob Bailey squinted in the blinding sun to read the time on his cell phone, admitting to me that he’d been learning—slowly—how to text. The elder Bailey was open to his son’s new ideas, and he had been listening to Casey’s proposals as intently as I had. “I’ve never done it this other way,” Bob told me, “but Casey’s helping me learn. You can get an equilibrium going and things take care of each other. With conventional farming, you might spray something out, and it would make something else worse.” Although Bob could see the biological wisdom of Casey’s approach to farming, however, he was painfully aware of the math his son had just rattled off. Spraying herbicide did indeed pencil out, and so long as Bob Bailey stuck with this prevailing calculus, there would be a chemical company and an equipment dealer behind him.
Stumped by a seemingly insoluble math problem, Casey had begun to conclude that his weeds were the least of his difficulties. He was eager to change his farm, but there was only so much he could do from the seat of his tractor, or even his elegant Austrian cultivator. Like most folks in Fort Benton, Casey had always observed the unspoken rule of “Live and let live,” focusing on his own operation and staying out of his neighbors’ affairs. But as he talked to his dad, Casey came to understand that the actions of everybody around him—from his loan officer to his fellow farmers to his insurance agent—were shaping his choices. If he wanted to do things differently, Casey needed to think beyond his own enterprise to the ones that were connected to it. In order to change his farm, he’d have to stick his nose in other people’s business.
This was the third stage of conversion, both for Timeless growers and for the company itself: becoming increasingly sophisticated about the rest of the food system, beyond the farm gate. Where could they get financing? Proper equipment? Could they find a seed-cleaning facility that saw organics as an opportunity rather than just a risk of weed contamination? Right about the time Casey began growing for Timeless, Dave started talking business with two other farmers who were eager to work out some answers to these questions. Doug Crabtree and Anna Jones-Crabtree needed to figure these things out quickly, because they were starting the most ambitiously diverse farm in Montana—from scratch. Dave was surprised that two midcareer professionals in Helena had bought farmland 250 miles northeast of their house, just shy of the Canadian border. But the Timeless CEO had to admire the Crabtrees’ dedication. Back in the eighties, Dave recalled, his AERO buddy’s fateful stand against Montana State University had initiated a DIY fervor on dozens of Montana farms. But Doug and Anna were taking that same attitude to their equipment dealer and their banker. Unwilling to let such institutions constrain their vision, the Crabtrees took a three-step approach to every enterprise necessary to their field operation. Infiltrate. Innovate. And if need be, duplicate. If the farm industry wouldn’t do what they needed, Doug and Anna resolved, farmers would have to team up and do it themselves.
A fair indication of the lengths to which the Crabtrees were willing to go in order to responsibly steward a patch of land was the sheer duration of the
drive required to get there. From the couple’s home in Helena, it was a three-hour trip to Havre, the town referenced in their farm’s formal address. From there, the journey continued another forty-five minutes north, passing perpetual fields of conventional grain that seemed to stretch forever.
This was the point at which, on my first visit to the Crabtrees’ farm, I instinctively pulled out my phone to make sure I was still on the right track. And then I had to laugh at myself. Where exactly did I think I was going to get a cell signal from? Heaven? More out of inertia than faith, I kept going, hoping for some sort of landmark. And then, just before the Canadian border, the uniform landscape erupted into a succession of distinct, multicolored strips. Here it was, the only organic farm for miles around, home to a good portion of Timeless Seeds’ Black Beluga lentils. Looking for all the world like a garden that had somehow fallen into a magnifying glass and emerged as a 1,280-acre farmstead, the Crabtrees’ operation was the most labor-intensive I’d seen yet. So I was astonished to learn that Doug and Anna both had full-time office jobs. They were raising more than a dozen crops—on the weekend.
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A PHD WITH A DIRTY SECRET
It was the fifth official day of summer in Hill County, and Doug Crabtree and Anna Jones-Crabtree’s crops were beginning to reach ankle height. Doug and Anna were pleased to see that all sixteen of them appeared to have established reasonably well, including the Black Beluga lentils, which had started sporting nitrogen-fixing nodules a couple of weeks ago. Four seasons into farming this 1,280-acre spread, the Crabtrees were still working hard to improve the soil. They weren’t there yet, but the nutrient base they’d built up was beginning to bear fruit. Or rather, it was giving forth a cornucopia of grains, legumes, and oilseeds. “Nodules, little baby nodules!” Anna crowed excitedly, as the Crabtrees scouted their lentil crop. “That is the most magical thing in the world,” Doug agreed.