Lentil Underground

by Liz Carlisle

  Conventional political boundaries seemed to dissolve and realign in the presence of lentils and their farmers, which actually made sense once I thought about it. It wasn’t that hard to understand why lentil farming might lead to a sort of third politics—a nuanced perspective on what needed to be shared at what scale in order to survive. I’d been focused on all the ways lentils behaved like good cooperative lefties. But you could also see the tiny legume as the ultimate libertarian—conservative and resourceful.

  TROUBLE IN THE RHIZOSPHERE

  Except that, at the time of Dave Oien’s 2012 field visit, Jody’s second field of lentils didn’t appear to be very resourceful at all. Dave had dug up several plants, and he couldn’t find any of the telltale white growths he was looking for on the tips of their roots. There were plenty of lentil sprouts poking up, but since the plants didn’t have these nitrogen-fixing nodules on their roots, that meant none of them were making fertilizer. “I don’t see a single nodule there,” Dave told Jody, his hands clutching a rooty bouquet of bum lentils. “It seems like it would be an inoculant issue.”

  Jody sucked in a heavy breath. “Inoculant” was a key part of the support system that allowed his Black Belugas to thrive. As the greenhorn pulse farmer already knew, it wasn’t actually his lentil plants that fixed nitrogen, but the symbiotic rhizobia bacteria that typically set up shop in the Black Belugas’ root nodules. Some soils had rhizobia hanging around from previous legume liaisons. But that was an outside chance on ground like Jody’s that had either come out of long-term fallow or recently exited an exclusive relationship with wheat and chemicals. So, like all the Timeless growers, Jody applied peat moss filled with specialized bacteria to his lentil seeds before planting them. These carefully chosen strains, selected for their affinity with peas and lentils, ensured that nitrogen-boosting microorganisms would be available to the tiny Black Belugas when they germinated. The bacteria-spiked peat moss was called inoculant. And it was what Dave was worried about.

  “Did you get that inoculant from us?” the Timeless CEO asked Jody, who nodded. “Do you still have a bagful of it? I’d like to see.” Having personally taught several of his growers about inoculant and how to use it, Dave hated the idea that he might have inadvertently doomed somebody’s crop with a dud bag. Two of the sacks of inoculant used on these lentils were actually leftovers from Doug, Jody reported, remaining calm. Since the Belugas at Vilicus Farms were clearly nodulating their hearts out, that would seem to eliminate inoculant as the source of Jody’s problem. The levelheaded rancher asked resignedly if no nodules meant no lentils, ready to hear the worst. Not exactly, Dave said, but this wasn’t good news. Starved of nitrogen, the crop would be short and probably not that productive. Jody nodded. Like cover crops and cash crops, inoculant and lentils went hand in hand. You couldn’t get something for nothing. He walked back to his truck, in search of a better tool for digging up roots.

  This was the Manuels’ second season growing Black Belugas, Dave told me, and it was a crucible of sorts. Jody’s Beluga crop had been a near-total loss last year, but he’d realized what went wrong and had agreed to try again. Once. Dave finished his sentence wordlessly, with a sober glance at the ground. He knew Jody had set aside his cleanest, most fertile field for the little black legumes, since they could be sold at a hefty premium and he liked working with Timeless. But Dave also knew that Jody’s spelt crop was doing quite well, and if the lentils failed again this year, the Manuels would probably have to replace their Belugas with the robust heritage grain. Dave hated to lose such a promising new grower, and he felt no small sense of responsibility for encouraging Jody to take a risk on a tricky crop.

  Plus, Timeless was fresh out of Black Belugas. Difficult to grow but increasingly popular, they were among the products Dave was most likely to run short on. If he had to say no to buyers too many times, they might stop calling. Given the delicate dilemma of supply, the business counted on symbiosis as much as their lentils did. While the plants relied on inoculant, cover crops, and rotations, Timeless counted on relationships, financing, and marketing—which was why Dave had to spend so much time on the phone, when he’d just as soon be building upcycled seeders and funky solar gadgets.

  “I WANT OUR NEIGHBORS TO BE ABLE TO AFFORD IT”

  Jody and Crystal, meanwhile, were working hard to create another series of relationships—with local consumers. The busy parents were bending over backward to sell meat directly to their hometown IGA supermarket, even though it would have been much easier to just send the whole herd to the natural beef company in Minnesota that was more than happy to buy from them.

  “When I first went into the IGA to talk to the guy that’s in charge of their meat department,” Jody recounted, “it was almost like he already had his mind made up. He said, ‘I just don’t think people are going to be willing to pay those kind of prices’—and we hadn’t even talked price yet. He was just assuming that since it was ‘natural’ …”*

  Jody had almost given up on marketing locally, but instead he had asked the meat department manager what the IGA was paying for the conventional beef they were retailing. The manager had taken Jody back to his office and shown him his wholesale price list, which was broken down into various cuts: chuck roast, T-bone, sirloin. Jody had done some quick math, attempting to mentally reassemble the spreadsheet of cellophane-wrapped packages into a living, breathing bovine. He had told the manager he thought he could sell his natural beef for a pretty comparable price. “In that case,” the manager had said, “yeah, we could sure try it.”

  Now that he’d managed to talk them into it, Jody was committed to selling what he could to the local grocery store, even though it was more of a hassle. Jody explained that when he sent his cattle to Minnesota, not only did he receive a higher price, but also he could deliver a whole semi load at once. Retailing at the local IGA, on the other hand, meant processing one animal at a time. So even though the Manuels’ ranch was just seven miles from the final point of sale in downtown Havre, Jody had to put in some serious driving time before his beef made it to his neighbors’ shopping carts.

  “IGA has a requirement that it has to be slaughtered at a USDA-inspected plant, and there’s one in Shelby and one in Malta,” Jody reported, estimating that it was about 100 miles to either of these “local” processors. “I can’t even get the one in Shelby to return a phone call, they’re so swamped. On their answering machine it essentially says that ‘We might call you back or we might not.’” Since neither of his local packing plants would return his calls, Jody had researched a third option: the Little Rockies Meat Packing Company, owned by the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes. Every two weeks, Jody made the ninety-minute trip to the tribes’ facility on the far side of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, hauling exactly one cow.

  “I tried to talk IGA into taking two animals at a time instead of just one,” Jody continued. “You take these heifers, they’re in a group, you know, just out in the pasture. By the time you bring two or three of them up to the corral, you sort off the one you want to take, load it in the horse trailer by itself, haul it a hundred miles … By the time you get down there, she’s just going ballistic a lot of times, even if it’s a nice, docile, gentle heifer. For no other reason than that, it’d be nice if they took two.” Notwithstanding such difficulties, Jody had recently added another wrinkle to the Manuels’ diversified crop and animal operation: direct-market pork. That had been a learning experience too, he confessed. At first, Jody had advertised his local pork in the classified section of the Havre Daily News, but after several weeks with no phone calls, he asked Casey Bailey for marketing advice. Casey told Jody to put the hogs on Facebook, and he quickly sold them all.

  While Jody worked the phone and the Web, Crystal went straight for her neighbors’ stomachs. I got a taste for the persuasiveness of Crystal’s approach from the four-course lunch she’d made during my visit, which had included not just a hearty Black Beluga soup and green salad, but also rolls m
ade from the Manuels’ Kamut, and raspberry rhubarb crisp with millet topping. The rhubarb had come from the family garden, while the store-bought raspberries tantalizingly anticipated harvests to come—Crystal had just planted some bramble bushes. Offering up such mouth-watering fare, Crystal had started leading an annual nutrition workshop for the women at her church, beginning with relatively innocuous themes like raw food and healthy hydration.

  The year before my visit, Crystal’s workshop had tackled a much thornier issue—GMOs—and she’d been recommending the movie Food, Inc. to curious members of her church group. “They’re starting to care about where their meat comes from,” Crystal said, smiling broadly. “So this year, we’re going to do a farm-to-fork tasting out in the cover crop cocktail once the pigs are in there grazing it down. I’ve invited all the women and their kids, and we have a church van lined up.” I tried to imagine Havre’s decent Christian women eating hors d’oeuvres in the cover crop. Leave it to Crystal to pull off white-tablecloth dining among pigs.

  Although she’d been steeped in the constitutive irony of modern rural America—the bizarre industrial arrangement that leaves professional food producers among the least likely people to have access to fresh produce—Crystal was determined to bridge the gap between production and consumption, starting with her own family. In a place where it might snow on Memorial Day, however, this was no mean feat. The summertime window of reliably frost-free nights was brief in northern Montana, which meant vegetables started from seed might never mature. In order to have a successful garden, Crystal realized, she’d need to give her veggies a head start in a greenhouse. Since she didn’t have one of her own yet, she decided to purchase some young plants in town for her first season.

  So in the spring of 2010, Crystal Manuel had gotten in her minivan and headed off to downtown Havre to buy some heirloom, organic starts. The trouble was, nobody was selling them. Undaunted, Crystal not only got online and found a place to order them—she had five phone conversations with the Arizona-based supplier and brought him to town the following fall to chat with all her neighbors. “We had the organic gardening workshop in November and it was like twelve below zero that day,” Crystal told me, “but we just invited people, and so many of them came.” Crystal’s greatest triumph had been convincing an elderly local greenhouse manager to show up. Now he, too, was a proponent of organic fertilizer. “He sells fish emulsion and seaweed now!” Crystal told me, delighted.

  In a small town like Havre, you didn’t have to be a person of faith to recognize that farm-to-table aspirations were pretty hollow unless you could a find a way to share the bounty with your whole community. Unless you organized your neighbors, you literally couldn’t even get a start. And although Jody and Crystal had gotten their start—and their organic starts—they still felt as if they had a long way to go. Per capita income in Havre averaged just under 23,000 dollars a year, and 17 percent of residents lived in poverty. How many of those folks were going to buy fish emulsion and seaweed?

  “One thing that bothers me about this whole industry is the cost,” Jody said, when I bumped into the Manuel family a few months later at an organic conference. “It’s tough for the average person, living paycheck to paycheck.” Jody related the story of a missionary friend in the Philippines, who had lamented that local people there didn’t have access to the fishery anymore, because all the crab and lobster was being shipped out on big commercial boats. “I can see how it’s sort of like that here too,” Jody reflected. “I mean, we’re sending our meat to Whole Foods.”

  When I’d visited the Manuel place in May, Jody hadn’t yet sold any beef to the natural-food chain because he was still transitioning his herd to organics. But since this season’s newborn calves would be his first certified animals, he’d started exploring the option. A broker had already been out to the ranch to see if the Manuels’ cattle looked like Whole Foods material, and the verdict was promising: The man thought Jody’s animals would fetch a healthy premium. The business opportunity was a relief to the budget-conscious father of six. But the good news was bittersweet, since the Manuels’ newly certified beef might never again grace the kitchen tables of Havre. “I think I am going to raise prices at IGA now that we have our first organic calves—to get a comparable price—but I don’t want to,” Jody told me. “I want our neighbors to be able to afford it.” Three decades after Dave Oien had been forced to give up on his own organic beef business, he and the lentil underground had built enough of a support structure to allow Jody Manuel to make a go of it. But it still wasn’t quite the closed-loop food system they were all shooting for.

  As the movement went mainstream, ruggedly individual farmers found themselves sharing in ways they never had before. People like Jerry Habets were sharing knowledge, changing one another’s minds. Having revamped their philosophy, people like Casey Bailey had started changing their farms, designing systems in which different elements complemented one another, rather than trying to maximize the yield of a single crop. Once they’d changed their farms, the lentil underground had realized that they couldn’t make a living unless they drastically altered their business model. So people like Doug and Anna Jones-Crabtree had begun developing collective infrastructure and devising new financing models to spread risk. Jody and Crystal Manuel had taken this cooperative spirit beyond the farm community, determined to get the rest of their neighbors on board, even if it meant driving their cattle 100 miles, one at a time, and selling their products a little more cheaply at the local IGA.

  At this point, the lentil underground hit the limit of what they could do by themselves. They had taken their movement mainstream, but they still hadn’t diverted the prevailing current of the food system nearly as much as they wanted to. Most farmers still had to sell into markets warped by monopoly power, and most consumers still had to buy from those markets. So many bizarre incentives were lodged between food and reality that people couldn’t afford to do what was truly economical—and sometimes they didn’t even have the choice. Industrial food and farming remained artificially cheap. And in most little towns, the burger chain and the big grain elevator were still the only game in town. Dave and his accomplices had converted a little pocket of farm country, but what they really wanted to overhaul was the American way of eating, and that was a big job. They’d need a larger crew, since the obstacles they were running up against now—like the massive federal Farm Bill and its entrenched system of subsidies—were codified in law. Dave had found people to grow lentils, distribute lentils, and, in this meat-loving part of Montana, even eat lentils. But would they vote for lentils?

  13

  THE BIRDS, THE BEES, AND THE BUREAUCRACY

  POLITICS AT THE POLLINATOR WORKSHOP

  On Thursday, June 14, 2012, a steady stream of state and federal employees paraded into the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls to learn about bees and butterflies. But when the projector hummed awake at nine fifteen A.M., the first ten eyes on the screen looked suspiciously alert for this hour of the morning. Lurking amid the nine-to-five crowd were five people clearly accustomed to beginning their day before dawn. From the looks of their focused gaze, they were here on a mission.

  Doug Crabtree and Anna Jones-Crabtree had spent weeks enthusiastically spreading the word about this pollinator workshop, which was facilitated by a nonprofit conservation group called the Xerces Society. The training was geared toward Natural Resources Conservation Service staff but open to the public, and since Doug and Anna thought the discussion was important, they had worked hard to convince fellow farmers that it was worth leaving their farms behind for half a day in the middle of the growing season. Casey Bailey, Bob Bailey, and another Timeless Seeds grower—Jacob Cowgill—had signed up right away.

  “Why aren’t there more farmers here?” Jacob wondered aloud.

  “They’re probably out spraying,” Doug answered wryly.

  The sole producers in a room full of civil servants, the five Timeless growers nonetheless ma
de their presence felt. Greatly outnumbered by staff from NRCS, the Montana Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Forest Service, the sharp-witted quintet still managed to ask about half the questions. “Does tillage in the fall hurt ground-nesting bees?” Casey wanted to know. He and his buddies were here in good faith to learn about the sophisticated critters that pollinated their buckwheat and safflower. But they also had a thing or two to share with the NRCS.

  When I first heard that an agency called the Natural Resources Conservation Service wasn’t already tight with the Timeless crew, I was astonished. The legume strategy was all about natural resource conservation, right? Well, yes, the Timeless farmers explained to me, but the NRCS didn’t always see it that way. Founded in 1935 as the Soil Conservation Service, the agency sometimes had a one-track mind about exactly which resource it was obliged to conserve. Intensely focused on combating soil erosion, the NRCS had become enamored of an agricultural method known as “no-till.”

  Zero-tillage farming, the lentil growers explained, was a farming approach that had become popular in the eighties. Rather than mechanically ripping out their weeds before seeding, no-till farmers left their plows in the shed and used chemicals to clear their fields instead. This way of farming had become even easier when plants like corn and soybeans were genetically engineered to resist herbicides, allowing farmers to spray all year round, right into their cropland. Not everybody thought the environmental downsides of this chemically based, GMO approach were worth the payoff, but since the NRCS had originally been established to prevent another Dust Bowl, the agency had a hard time resisting any approach that kept land in place—even chemically treated land. As no-till farming spread, the NRCS had taken to it like a sweat bee to a sunflower.