Lentil Underground

by Liz Carlisle

  Timeless Seeds’ diverse customer base was part of what made the company resilient, but it was also a source of uncertainty in its own right. Dave couldn’t predict when he might get a big order for Belugas, or when the hot crop might be French Greens. So he managed his inventory much the way he’d always run his farm—adaptively. Sometimes farmers made the drive to the Timeless plant on short notice to help Dave fill an order—and more often, they stored crops for a year or two in their own bins while waiting for space to open up at the plant. The whole thing, Dave admitted, was “a big juggling act.”

  To be sure, Dave’s flexible, somewhat freewheeling approach was baked into his character—this element of his personality was, after all, what had allowed him to go against the grain, succeed as an organic lentil farmer, and develop an unorthodox business. But it was also a survival strategy, born of the constant need to make do with less. Until Timeless had the resources to beef up its operating budget and double or even triple its warehouse space, its CEO had to take things one day at a time.

  “FARMING IS A PROHIBITED BUSINESS”

  Meanwhile, Doug and Anna had their own challenges, not the least of which concerned their struggles with lenders. On the list of institutions they wanted to reinvent—equipment manufacturers, trade associations, universities—banks were at the top of their agenda.

  “Farm Credit Services, you think they’d provide credit and service to farmers, right?” Anna rhetorically queried Dave, frustration dripping from each word as she recalled the ordeal of buying her farm. “We did this whole six-month process. We were totally clear. We had budgets, we had all the cash flow lined out. Then right before we were supposed to close, they said we can’t do this deal. So we went with another local bank to do the guarantee. We went up there thinking we were going to have this great conversation about what we’re doing. The loan officer took us into the office, and he says, ‘Why do you guys want to do this? Why do you want to farm?’ This is the ag lender.”

  Once they’d convinced the agricultural lender that farming was a good idea, Anna went on, she and Doug had faced another hurdle. Having purchased a place to farm, they needed at least a little bit of operating credit before they could start seeding. Anna couldn’t wait to launch into that story.

  “We go to our bank here in Helena, where we have banked since 1999, and we apply for a line of credit for our business,” Anna began. “They say yeah, sure. We get a credit card with a five-thousand-dollar limit and we’re thinking that’s great, that’s all we need, just a little overdraft protection. They never asked us what the business was. So I get home, and I’m doing all the reconciling of the expenses, and I realize, what the heck, they attached it to our personal checking. No.”

  Doug interjected. “That was the whole point of getting a business account—to have it separate.”

  “So I go down to the bank,” Anna continued, “and I ask what’s going on. They say, ‘Oh man, we really messed up.’ I’m thinking, yeah, you messed up. So they canceled it and we had to reapply. This time, they asked us what our business was and we said a farm. The application comes back, and the underwriter says, “You’re denied.” What? The same exact information, the same people, the same credit—the only thing that changed is it said that it’s a farm. They said, ‘Sorry, farming is a prohibited business.’”

  “Seriously—I want a T-shirt that says ‘Farming Is a Prohibited Business,’” howled Anna, amused but fuming. “So I looked at the loan officer, and I go, ‘You ask your underwriter who grew the wheat for his toast this morning.’”

  Dave readily empathized with Doug and Anna’s exasperation, because financial institutions had been a headache for him too. That’s what had gotten him in the racket of sourcing “creative capital”: leaning on AERO friends for labor, equipment, in-kind donations, and whatever other help they could offer. The community resource pool had kept the plant’s doors open, but Dave had grown increasingly frustrated with the limitations of running a business like a bake sale, his hat perpetually in his hand. “Without money, it takes much more time to get something done,” Dave admitted. “We’re in three or four hundred stores, when we could be in three or four thousand, but that requires having a larger inventory to go out and sell those stores on the product. If we run out and can’t deliver it, they won’t come asking twice.”

  Since Timeless didn’t have a line of credit, Dave explained, he couldn’t build the grower base that would allow him to pursue markets strategically. That would be sticking his neck out too far. So instead, he’d had to play it conservative and stick with the opportunistic strategy that made it impossible to establish a regular schedule like Anna wanted. “The good news is that we’ve grown step by step, organically,” Dave told me. “The bad news is that it’s taken ten years to get where we could’ve gotten in three years with adequate funding.”

  THE RUMPELSTILTSKIN PROBLEM

  At the crux of Dave’s problem was the fact that the biological time of his plants and the financial time of his markets were not in step. Dave was forever attempting to reconcile these two types of time, to make Timeless a successful business without undermining everything it stood for. With everyone around them barreling along faster than their slow-release nutrients and long-term cropping cycles, both Dave and his growers were always feeling behind.

  “It takes a long time to get there,” Doug Crabtree told me. “I had twenty years to drive around and certify and look at what everybody else was doing and conceptualize what we wanted to do, but even at that, it’s still going to be ten years before ours is any kind of a mature system.”

  “The frustrating part of that to me,” Anna added, explaining how long it had taken to build up enough of a nest egg to even get to the point of tussling with bankers, “is that we had to wait until we were forty to start, so we’re going to be fifty before we’ve actually seen two cycles of our rotation.”

  Thinking aloud, Doug estimated that it would take twice that amount of time—twenty years—before the Crabtrees could actually observe the impact of that rotation. “Oh shit,” said Anna’s face. “By that point, I’ll be in my sixties.” Two weeks earlier, I’d seen Anna nearly blow her top when a friend mentioned how taken she was with the patient approach of crop breeder Wes Jackson. Jackson had spent more than thirty years working to develop a perennial wheat variety and had recently proposed that Congress scrap its every-five-year agriculture legislation and lay out a strategic plan for the next half century instead. “We have things we can do right now,” Anna had butted in, impatiently. “We don’t have time to wait for another fifteen years of research or a fifty-year farm bill.” Anna admired Jackson, but her trouble was that she had a foot in both worlds—the perennial one underground and the annual one above it. As her mounting frustration approached full-on folkloric tragedy, I worried Anna might pull a Rumpelstiltskin and tear herself right in half.

  Doug was stretched to the limit too, and he’d been counting the days until July 9, when he was set to scale back from full-time organic program manager to three-quarter-time inspector. One of the reasons Doug was changing job descriptions was that he’d used all his vacation farming and couldn’t see a way to keep the operation going without taking more. This was something I’d heard over and over again from Timeless farmers. They needed more time.

  In the interim, resolute land stewards like Doug and Anna jam-packed their days like airplane passengers determined to fit everything in their carry-ons—and this morning was no exception. Having come to enough of an understanding about their 2012 contract to get their hands back in the dirt, the Crabtrees piled into an old farm truck and escorted Dave out to their crop. Fifteen minutes before their colleagues in Helena started their workdays, we were already on to the field tour.

  LENTIL DETECTIVE

  The first strip we passed was seeded to chickling vetch, a leguminous green manure that was starting to bloom with white and pink flowers. Dave waved Doug on. He’d love to nerd out on nitrogen fixation, but these day
s, the Timeless CEO’s focus was on the soil builders his customers could eat.

  Those edible legumes were to be found in strip 11, which the Crabtrees had sown with Black Belugas. We got out of the pickup and walked into the early-season lentil crop, an ankle-high confusion of green. Dave asked Doug and Anna a series of questions, recording the strip number, acreage, seeding rate, drill spacing, and date the Belugas had gone in the ground. Once he’d logged these details on a clipboard, Dave threw his hat out to randomly select a transect, then counted the number of plants per square foot. Realizing that my wrist was cramping, I set my pen down for a moment and took a deep breath. Vilicus Farms was a lot to take in. Technically speaking, Dave was surveying just three of Doug and Anna’s sixteen crops—lentils, emmer, and flax—since the rest were headed to other buyers in the Crabtrees’ diversified network. But there were several strips of each. Plus, each strip had a history.

  The lentils in strip 11 were choked with weeds, and Doug chalked it up to the flax he’d planted there the previous year. Like lentils, Doug explained to me, flax was noncompetitive. That meant it had gotten weedy, giving Vilicus Farms’ robust Russian thistles a head start on this year’s Black Belugas—which the thistles needed like Jack Nicklaus needed a handicap. Instead of flax, Doug mused, he could have planted an aggressive grain like buckwheat in the year before the lentils. But then there would likely have been some buckwheat in the Black Beluga crop, which would have been a pain to sort out during harvest and processing. Much like Dave’s juggling act at the processing plant, the rotation at Vilicus Farms was an educated guess, based on a long list of trade-offs.

  After a disappointing first stop, Doug and Anna were pleased to discover that their second field of lentils—strip 16—was less weedy. “This might be your best one,” Dave complimented them, equally relieved. Again, Doug cycled back through the rotation in his head. This field had also hosted flax before lentils, but—Doug racked his brain—what had come before that? Maybe it was the rye he and Anna had planted in the fall before the flax, he surmised. Since rye tended to outcompete pretty much every other plant on the farm, maybe it had knocked down the weeds enough to give the flax, and now the lentils, a better head start. It was sort of like the old woman who swallowed the fly, I suggested, chuckling. You had to trace a lot of steps backward to get to the bottom of things out here.

  “HOW DO YOU FIGURE IN THE COVER CROP?”

  Still wrestling with her Rumpelstiltskin problem, Anna couldn’t decide whether to celebrate her farm’s complexity or try to simplify it. “Going back to our Timeless board meeting and Dawn’s idea that Timeless Seeds needs to focus on three to four things,” she started in, citing money manager Dawn McGee’s suggestion before stopping herself and considering the opposite position. “I have mixed feelings about that from a diversity/stability standpoint, but what do you think are our three to four key crops?”

  Dave opted for the Socratic strategy he’d used the night before, inviting Anna to share the burden of answering her unrelenting inquiries. “Have you done the enterprise analysis I sent out?” he asked, turning the question back on her. Montana State had released the analysis tool to help farmers determine which plants to seed, based on the net benefit of each crop. Dave had forwarded it to Anna, figuring it would be right up her alley.

  Doug pitched in. “We did some,” he told Dave. “But it doesn’t capture the integration of our system.” The enterprise analysis, Doug explained, assumed that the costs and benefits of each crop could be assessed individually. But at Vilicus Farms, costs and benefits were realized across the whole farm system, in ways that were difficult to tease apart. “We have crops we harvest and crops we don’t harvest,” Doug said, playing right into Dave’s Socratic method, “but they all serve a function, ecologically or agronomically.”

  “Right. How do you figure in the cover crop?” Anna added, using the more mainstream term for green manure, which highlighted its erosion-combating properties. Souring on the idea of paring down to three or four “key crops,” Anna reminded herself that Dawn McGee’s recommendations came from a business perspective, not an ecological one, and were certainly not directed at farming. Not everything that made sense for a business made sense on the ground—or, as Doug pointed out, under the ground.

  How would he and Anna decide which of their crops were the highest value? Doug wondered aloud. The ones they harvested for a profit? Or the ones they plowed under to feed the soil? With a BS in agricultural economics from Purdue and an MS in plant science from South Dakota State, Doug was admittedly a somewhat black-and-white thinker, sympathetic to Dawn McGee–style logic. But every time he tried to calculate his way through Vilicus Farms, he stumbled into a morass of slippery variables that ensured he’d never emerge with a definitive equation. “On one hand, the ag economist in me would really like to have that nailed down, hung on the wall: It costs us thirty cents a pound to grow emmer, so anything we sell above that there’s some profit,” Doug continued. “But then I get stuck, because how much of the fuel that puts out the peas do you charge to the emmer because the peas provide the fertilizer to the emmer? Each crop is interdependent.”

  “NATURE’S STILL A LOT MORE IN CHARGE”

  Although the complexity of Doug and Anna’s system challenged their respective inner ag economist and inner engineer, on a fundamental level their approach made sound economic sense—in a way even some of their neighbors could appreciate. For one thing, the Crabtrees had been able to save a lot of seed, which cut down on the expense of buying it each spring. And of course, they also skipped another major spring expense: fertilizer and herbicides. Keeping costs down was particularly important in a place like Hill County, Doug explained to me, because the “benefit” side of the balance sheet was largely out of the grower’s control.

  “Nature is still a lot more in charge in this ecosystem than it is in the Midwest,” the Ohio native observed. “If you’re in an input-dependent system, you’re going to put on the fertilizer and you’re going to apply the herbicides and the fungicides whether or not you end up getting a crop, whether or not it rains—so you’ve got that one-hundred- to two-hundred-dollars-an-acre investment whether you get fifty bushels or zero. In our case, we might still get zero some years, but at least we’ve only got thirty or forty dollars an acre invested in it. And yeah, we’re probably not going to get the top-end yield ever, but we don’t need to.”

  Anna agreed. Given that she spent her weekdays finding ways to trim environmental footprints, she loved the net-gain approach of lentils. “They take less from the soil than a wheat crop does every year,” she told me, “and they give something back too, because they are a leguminous nitrogen fixer.”

  As if on cue, strip 19 presented Anna with a convincing visual aid. Two years earlier, this field had been split between lentils and oats, and the former crop line was now visible in the color of this year’s seedlings. On the lentil side, the young emmer was a deeper green, indicating higher nitrogen content.

  “Yeah, we’re really not into yield,” Doug continued. “If we can make equal revenue from a ten-bushel crop of flax instead of a thirty-bushel crop of wheat, I’ll take the ten-bushel crop every time. It takes less out of the soil, it takes less moisture, it takes less trucking, it takes less storage, it takes less everything. It was an epiphany for me to start to think about that, that I would much rather grow a low-yielding, high-value crop than a high-yielding, low-value crop. I suppose at some level everybody couldn’t do that or there wouldn’t be enough food in the world, but most of the high-yielding crops aren’t food in the first place.” I could see Doug’s mind’s eye traveling back to his hometown in Ohio, where row after row of genetically modified corn stood ready to become ethanol.

  Doug’s rationale sounded good, and in many ways, recalled the philosophy Dave Oien had doled out in the AERO Sun Times back in the early eighties. But there was the Rumpelstiltskin issue. “We’re trying to live in two different systems right now,” Anna said, putting
her finger on it. “We’re trying to live in this system we’re creating, but do it within the existing system that doesn’t support it.”

  It’s true that Doug and Anna live in their own universe, complete with its own language. Like Tuna McAlpine, the Crabtrees eschew the term “conventional” farming, preferring “chemically dependent.” Doug can tell you exactly why. “We’ve been practicing agriculture for approximately twelve thousand years and using poisons in great quantities for just sixty of them,” he reasons, “so to label that ‘convention’ is a huge insult to eleven thousand nine hundred and forty years of agriculture.” Doug and Anna call sprayers “Orsons” (after Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds), and time is marked as “BF” and “AF” (before and after the complete reorientation of their lives they refer to simply as “the farm”).

  The vision the Crabtrees were trying to articulate, Doug told Dave, was one in which their whole life would function like their “high-value, low-input” flax. By pursuing synergies—with compatible fellow growers as well as compatible crops—he and Anna hoped to live and farm less expensively. They imagined belonging to a network of a dozen farmers, trading labor and equipment. But that wasn’t happening yet, because the Crabtrees’ community was spread all over Montana. If he and his wife didn’t spend so much time and money driving all over the place, Doug lamented, their style of farming could be tremendously cheap. “But how do you get from here to there, and how do you survive while you’re doing the getting?” Exactly, Dave Oien was thinking. So how about that Chinese pea buyer?

  Not ready to give up, Doug and Anna were determined to put their values at the center of their agriculture and compel everything else into some semblance of alignment. Given the considerable size and power of the conventional farm industry, this effort sometimes felt about as futile as trying to convince the earth to orbit the moon. But the Crabtrees kept on pushing. Each time a conventional institution presented a barrier, they set about inventing a workaround.