by Liz Carlisle
Unfortunately, this focus on no-till had driven a wedge between the NRCS and the sector of the agricultural community that should have been its staunchest ally: organics. By drawing a hard line on tillage but taking a relatively laissez-faire attitude toward herbicides and genetically engineered crops, the agency punished organic producers for the one industrial practice they relied on, without rewarding them for phasing out so many others. There were exceptions, the Timeless growers told me, but by and large the agency’s incentive structure effectively discouraged organic farming.
Casey Bailey understood the NRCS’s attraction to no-till systems because, at first, he’d felt the same way. After learning about the method in a college class, the fourth-generation farmer had been so excited about it that he’d gone right out and leased some land so he could experiment with tillage-free agriculture himself. The budding ecologist liked the idea of softening his touch on the underground world, so that earthworms and microorganisms could build his soil undisturbed. But since he wasn’t plowing, Casey had to use a lot more herbicide to kill the weeds, and he couldn’t help but wonder what that glyphosate bath was doing to all the other life in his soil. “I think the chemical companies capitalized on academic soil science when they said that we should be saving our organic matter and not tilling our soils,” Casey concluded. Sure, there were environmental arguments for plowing less. But there were downsides to chemical no-till too: Applying more herbicides increased the risk of groundwater pollution and encouraged the evolution of herbicide-resistant superweeds. Farming wasn’t an equation you could solve for one variable.
By the time I met him in 2012, Casey was still trying to minimize tillage, and he was excited about emergent research on organic no-till (some of it based on Timeless Seeds’ original model, the Australian ley system). But he’d come to weigh that objective against several other indicators that he considered equally important to the health of his farm. That was why he had brought his dad to this Xerces Society workshop—so they could learn together about supporting the native bees that pollinated several of their crops. “It’s amazing what these little critters can do,” Bob Bailey said in awe. “It almost makes you think there’s a God.”
While his dad scouted for bees in the conference center’s native plant garden, Casey queried one of the workshop leaders. Which was the best flowering legume to have in the rotation, from a pollinator standpoint? Was early tillage or late tillage better? And how about all that herbicide associated with the no-till strategy? Balancing these numerous considerations was a tricky matter, and it wasn’t easy to reform agency programs so that they truly accounted for the complexity of diversified farming systems. But Casey and his fellow growers were determined to try.
“WHAT ABOUT THE TRADE-OFFS?”
“As an organic producer, we’ve found it challenging to fit the square peg of what we do into the round hole of NRCS practices,” Doug Crabtree diplomatically explained. “We need to get to understand each other better.”
Anna put the matter more bluntly. “I don’t know what is up with the no-till water you guys are drinking,” she said, taking issue with a study cited by one of the agency representatives. “What about the trade-offs? What about the chemicals and their impact on soil microbiology?”
Anna was frustrated because she and Doug had been inveigled into alternating no-till with their rye crop in order to qualify for support from the NRCS Conservation Stewardship Program, a program that pays farmers for conservation performance by contracting with them to implement environmentally friendly “enhancements.” One of these enhancements, “Use of Non-Chemical Methods to Kill Cover Crops,” seemed like a great fit for certified organic farmers like the Crabtrees, who were already committed to plowing down their cover crop (so as to control their use of resources like soil water), rather than spraying it out. But the way the NRCS rules were written, producers could qualify for this enhancement only if they followed the tillage of their cover crop with a no-till cash crop. And therein, for the Crabtrees, lay the rub.
“The reason we grow rye in the first place,” Doug explained to his district conservationist, Talana Klungland, “is because it’s competitive and cleans things up for the next four years. But with this no-till thing, we got a poor stand, and the field’s not as clean.” Since the Crabtrees didn’t use herbicides at all, Doug emphasized, they needed to do at least some mechanical weeding, or their crops would get choked out. Given all the ways their diverse, chemical-free system enhanced the soil, Doug tried to convince Talana, some modest tillage was a small price to pay.
The Crabtrees had invited Talana and two other NRCS staffers to visit their farm the day after the pollinator workshop, to demonstrate what they were talking about. Hill County’s most determined organic advocates seemed to be making some headway. Talana was impressed with the lack of erosion at Vilicus Farms, noting that such tenaciously adherent soil was tough to achieve in this windy area, even with no-till. NRCS state biologist Pete Husby, who was making his first-ever visit to an organic farm, gave the Crabtrees an even more surprising vote of confidence. Thumbing through the Pollinator Habitat Assessment Form and Guide he’d been working on with Xerces, Pete suggested adding harvestable species as well as conservation plantings, since Doug and Anna had several crops that were clearly “great for pollinators.” By the end of the half-day tour, it sure sounded like the Crabtrees had convinced at least two NRCS folks that an organic system with appropriate tillage could actually benefit the land.
As satisfying as it had been, however, the conservation show-and-tell session had also exhausted most of the daylight and nearly all of the Crabtrees’ abundant energy. Reforming NRCS was even tougher than scouting for nodules or pulling up thistles, I remarked, wondering aloud if Doug and Anna ever tired of engaging with public programs that had been designed to support a completely different style of land management. They couldn’t afford not to, Doug told me. Although he and his wife managed their business as carefully as they managed their soils, they couldn’t control the weather—or the fluctuations of global markets, which were even more volatile these days, tied as they were to the machinations of Wall Street. Initiatives like the NRCS Conservation Stewardship Program helped buffer the Crabtrees’ income and provided some semblance of the much larger government safety net (commodity crop subsidies and insurance) that their conventional neighbors relied on. Without better aligning those initiatives with their practices, Doug and Anna would have a difficult time weathering the start-up phase of establishing a new kind of farm and farm business—let alone convincing other farmers to follow suit. Doug didn’t put it this bluntly, but I understood what he was getting at. The Crabtrees weren’t just farming for themselves. They’d invested a lot of time and money in resources that benefited everybody: clean water, carbon sequestration, nutrient management, and yes, pollinators. If Vilicus Farms was providing public services for the common good, shouldn’t it get some public support?
Truthfully, even passionate sustainability evangelists like Doug and Anna couldn’t sponsor the soil health of an entire region. As the first generation of Timeless farmers had learned the hard way, their effort to revolutionize agriculture in the grain belt could only go so far without some policy changes. Reaching out to local civil servants and state agencies was a good start, but Timeless growers were already thinking ahead to the big prize: the federal Farm Bill. A month after the pollinator workshop, Doug, Anna, and Casey met up again for Timeless Seeds’ summer field tour and barbecue. As it had since that first year at Bud Barta’s place, the growers gathering offered farmers a rare opportunity to get together and troubleshoot problems. But these days, the strategy session moved swiftly from weeds to white papers. Casey Bailey was hosting this year’s tour at his place in Fort Benton, and although he knew his fellow growers could give him several helpful pointers on his field operation, what he really wanted to fix was a lot bigger than his farm.
14
FROM THE WEEDS TO THE WHITE HOUSE
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sp; On Friday, July 13, 2012, Casey Bailey hosted Timeless Seeds’ annual field day and barbecue, his first major farm tour. Sweating his way through the scorching, humid affair, the thirty-two-year-old farmer was feeling the heat in more ways than one. It made Casey nervous to put his farm on display, just four years into his organic transition. The hot weather had thrown the Baileys’ weeds into overdrive, and Casey couldn’t shake the feeling that his fields were a bit too messy to debut, even among friends. He’d noticed that his crops were maturing quickly too, maybe a little too quickly, and he feared this historically droughty season might turn out to be a total loss. Several of Casey’s neighbors had already concluded as much and weren’t even planning to attempt a harvest.
The difference between Casey and his neighbors, however, was that conventional commodity farmers could typically count on federal crop insurance to keep them running in the black, even if they didn’t have a single grain of wheat to show for the thousands of acres they’d seeded. That insurance—along with other federal programs tailored to incentivize a small handful of industrial commodities—played a much larger role in farmers’ risk analysis than their guesses at the weather. Drought sounded like a natural disaster, but it wasn’t wholly natural, or necessarily a disaster. Truth be told, the word lent an air of inevitability to a complex problem that was partly the result of its own “solution.”
The problem known as drought was not just a matter of annual rainfall totals. It was created partially by industrial farming practices, which reduced soil water holding capacity over time, so that crops were more vulnerable to water stress in dry years. Unfortunately, these were the same industrial practices that helped farmers qualify for federal support programs that partially sheltered their income from the ups and downs of climate. Perversely, the ecological and economic strategies for weathering drought were working at cross-purposes.
Looking ahead to a lifetime of managing his family’s farm, Casey knew he shouldn’t waste too much time worrying about exactly when the rain was going to stop. That was obviously going to happen several times over the life of any central Montana farm, so what did it matter whether it was this year or next? The real question was how to create the right economic and policy incentives, such that farmers could plan for this inevitable climatic uncertainty. Why not reward people for planting drought-resilient crops and building up their organic matter to increase soil water retention? At the very least, they shouldn’t be encouraged—often against their better judgment—to seed varieties that were almost guaranteed to regularly fail.
Much as Casey appreciated his fellow growers’ suggestions about farming practices that might help him control his weeds and conserve moisture, it was these larger policy issues he really wanted to dig into. Escorting his guests out of his sweltering lentil field and back to the relative cool of the garage, Casey invited them to tuck into some barbecue. Once they’d loaded their plates with grass-fed burgers and farm-to-table potluck dishes, the Timeless growers and their guests started talking shop.
“WE NEED TO HAVE A VOICE”
“We farmers tend to focus on our operation first, but it really is important to share that experience with our national and state politicians,” Casey encouraged his fellow growers. “They’re there for us. At least they should be. And they can be if we speak up.”
Casey was particularly concerned that no one was representing people like himself, whose lives and farms were “not black and white.” He had vocal friends on both sides of the so-called national food fight—zealous urban community gardeners and proud conventional grain growers—but the space in between was a veritable echo chamber. It was uncomfortable to be the organic farmer who was still using diesel-based tillage, or the conventional producer who’d cut his herbicide use to nearly—but not quite—nothing. Since these folks didn’t see their systems in progress as ideal, they tended to be very humble. And very silent. “The loudest voices in the organic movement are definitely not coming from the gray areas,” Casey observed, “because when you get in the gray areas, you get quieter. But we need to have a voice.”
If anybody in this crowd was determined to amplify the lentil underground’s political voice, it was Doug Crabtree and Anna Jones-Crabtree. At least every couple of years, the pair marched straight into the offices of their elected officials in Washington, DC, as part of the “Farmer Fly-Ins” organized by groups like the Center for Rural Affairs, the Organic Trade Association, and the Farmers Union. Doug and Anna were also applying for every federal program they could possibly qualify for, convinced that each application presented an educational opportunity as well as a financial one. Rather than modify their farm system to fit the programs, as so many farmers had done to qualify for commodity payments, the Crabtrees were determined to use their farm as the starting point of the discussion—and challenge the agencies to improve on their models. Sustainable agriculture was a better form of stewardship than bare fallow, they told the NRCS, as part of their application for the Conservation Stewardship Program. Organic farming was a promising means of economic development, they encouraged the Environmental Protection Agency, volunteering to serve as a pilot site for the EPA’s new Economy, Energy, and Environment program, in partnership with local extension agents.
Anna’s fellow farmers weren’t surprised to hear that a relatively progressive environmental agency was supportive of organic agriculture. But the fact that the Crabtrees were partnering with the extension service was newsworthy. A handful of agents had enthusiastically participated in AERO trainings and Farm Improvement Club field days, but the service as a whole still had a reputation for being skeptical of organic methods. Of course, they weren’t nearly as bad as the no-till boosters at the Natural Resources Conservation Service. How was Anna faring with them? her fellow Timeless growers wanted to know.
Overall, NRCS had actually been pretty good to work with, Anna answered, acknowledging that it had taken some effort for both parties. She and Doug had sunk a lot of time into patient conversations with the agency, but it had paid off. The Crabtrees had received substantial funding for their ecological practices from both the Conservation Stewardship Program and another NRCS initiative called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP. Established in the 1996 Farm Bill, EQIP took a more proactive approach than previous conservation programs. Instead of paying people to leave their land alone, EQIP provided cost share to farmers who wanted to actively care for it—by planting windbreaks, for example, or buffer strips for wildlife. In 2008, the program had even begun offering cost share specifically to support organic conversion.
Plus, the local NRCS scientists who’d been receptive to the Crabtrees’ ideas had made some real progress at the pollinator workshop, Anna reported. The partnership the Crabtrees were participating in—between NRCS and the nonprofit Xerces Society—was helping move the agency toward more organic-friendly policies. If a proposed grant came through, the pollinator conservation nonprofit would be helping NRCS rewrite some of their practices to better include organic systems, with Vilicus Farms as one of the pilot sites. “Really, a lot of those USDA programs that were in the Farm Bill have helped us, so those are important,” Anna commented, hoping to plant seeds of advocacy among her more reticent fellows.
Anna’s comment got her husband, Doug, going on another federal program that was ripe for reform: the commodity checkoff. Like all farmers, Doug explained, organic growers were contributing to checkoff programs for whatever commodity they raised—wheat, barley, beef. But all this money went to marketing conventional grain, conventional meat. Doug’s deep voice made for a hilariously faithful imitation of the Beef Council’s ubiquitous television ad, “Beef, It’s What’s for Dinner.” Having gotten his fellow farmers’ attention, he asked if they knew who had paid for all those beef ads. Do you raise cattle? Doug asked, eliciting several nods. “Then you paid for it,” Doug finished. “That was the checkoff.”
If organic growers could opt out of those commodity checkoffs and pool that mon
ey into a multicommodity fund of their own, Doug explained, that would add up to 30 million dollars for organic research and marketing. Imagine a clever organic lentil spot running on Super Bowl Sunday! But that policy change would require at least two amendments to the Farm Bill, so they’d better start calling their representatives.
THE GREAT WHITE COMBINE
Of course, a checkoff-supported marketing fund—organic or otherwise—would only help people who had a crop to sell. Sooner or later, every one of these farmers knew they would hit a bad year or a drought. Most of them had already lost a harvest to “the great white combine”: hail. The scariest thing about converting to diversified organic production was that there was no solid fallback plan. “The reason we farm like we do out here,” Casey explained, pointing to the herbicide-resistant Clearfield wheat that his dad had planted on the Baileys’ remaining conventional acreage, “is the safety net. If this crop fails, we’ve got crop insurance. But if my organic crops fail, that’s a big risk.”
Grain farmers have long joked that they are “farming the government” rather than the land, and as Casey’s remark indicated, they haven’t had much choice. The key to their livelihoods lies in aligning their management with farm programs, even if they know it’s not the most prudent way to coax food from soil. Like Orville Oien, Casey’s dad understood this economy, and he knew his best bet was to stick with the protocol that brought the money in, crop or no crop. That protocol, of course, was dictated by federal and state law, which was why Casey had invited several nonorganic neighbors to this tour. He needed to get them on board.
