by Liz Carlisle
The roomful of organics advocates—many of whom hadn’t even been alive when Russ Salisbury planted his first certified crop—leapt to their feet. When Dave finally managed to quiet the crowd, he passed the microphone to Russ.
“Dave didn’t reach back to what I’m most proud of,” Russ said, as his friend handed him a framed certificate. “He probably wasn’t born then.”
“When I was conceived—” The audience laughed, interrupting Russ’s story after just four words. They didn’t know he was going to reach back that far. The zany farmer’s conception seemed a rather intimate topic for such a public setting. “You know, we have these little competitions about who’s been organic the longest,” Russ continued. “But I started out producing organic fertilizer that first day.”
“Now, was that green manure, Russ?” someone behind me asked, as the room erupted in giggles. Leave it to Russ to skip over seventy years of noteworthy accomplishments and bring it back to basics.
As usual, however, Russ’s outlandish humor had more than a nugget of truth in it. He wasn’t kidding about the influence of his down-home childhood. Proudly outfitted in his Farmers Union vest, he was now telling some of his young fans what it had been like in those days, back when the trip to Great Falls had been a major expedition. Meanwhile, the life partner Russ had met shortly after helping finance Timeless Seeds—Elsie Tuss—had attracted an entourage of her own. With the commanding voice of a woman who, at age eighty, thought nothing of climbing atop a John Deere to survey her livestock, the former nun recounted memories from her own girlhood on a Montana homestead.
A lot of people would assume that such simple, rural upbringings would have made Russell Salisbury and Elsie Tuss provincial. That had certainly been the attitude at my high school in Missoula, where the cowboy section of the hallway was a ridiculed no-man’s-land two floors below the lunchtime haunts of the jocks and the environmentalists. But when I’d worked alongside Elsie in her kitchen, I’d gotten a globe-trotting lesson in geopolitics.
Each time I’d asked Elsie about an issue she and Russ faced on their farm, the savvy Internet user had deftly knit together a worldwide web of interconnected events. From hybrid seed deals in India to oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico to shifting cultivation in Belize, Elsie truly saw the big picture. Her worldview was a direct descendent of the scrappy home economics she’d gleaned from homesteading dryland prairie through the Depression—but with the “family budget” reimagined at the scale of the global village.
Russ and Elsie spent money only on necessities, which is to say, the things they deemed necessary: donating to Doctors Without Borders, for example, or covering the remaining balance of a responsible rancher’s mortgage payment. They didn’t think of these extra-household expenditures as philanthropy. To Russ and Elsie, these were contributions toward essential public services, as though worldwide public health and sustainable resource management were things their extended neighborhood might budget for like road repair or the rural fire department. But as generous as they were with the money they hadn’t spent on themselves, Russ and Elsie were best known for contributions in kind. Over the years, the Salisbury place had become an unofficial, statewide lending library, where pretty much any item of machinery that was still ambulatory was fair game. As Dave Oien put it, “Russ is the kind of guy who will give you anything if you need it, but won’t sell it to you.”
Now I knew the main reason Timeless Seeds and their crops had weathered the drought. It seemed trite, but it wasn’t. They were humble. And they shared.
ALL THE WEALTH OF THE EARTH
While I was in Helena, I spent an afternoon rummaging through the bookshelves in the AERO office on Last Chance Gulch Street. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but the nonprofit’s bulging cache of newsletters and annual reports seemed like the best stack of papers to comb through to make sure I hadn’t missed something important.
Most of what I found at the AERO office was pleasantly familiar. A Sun Times ad for the previous year’s Timeless Festival promised workshops with Captain Compost and cooking demos with Leni Loves Lentils. The proceedings from the 1988 Soil-Building Cropping Systems Conference faithfully documented Jim Sims’s rousing address, and the text of a 1999 radio commentary featured characteristically opinionated Elsie Tuss.
But wedged among Farm Improvement Club evaluations and grower surveys was a piece of AERO history I’d never expected to dig up. Back in 1993, the citizens’ organization had launched a curriculum development project, geared toward fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. AERO had interviewed several farmers for the teaching package, Nancy Matheson had told me, but they’d run out of funding and the project had never been completed. The footage was pretty good, as Nancy recalled, but because AERO had since moved offices and changed directors, it was probably lost to history.
And yet, here it was. I recognized Dave Oien’s name on the handwritten label of a VHS, following the words “curriculum project.” Curious, I located a video production shop at the edge of town that was able to convert the tape to DVD. As soon as I got it home, I popped it into my laptop and hit play. The recording didn’t start with Dave. But uncannily, the opening scene unfolded just a stone’s throw from the current Timeless plant.
Ulm farmer Greg Gould looked directly into the camera, his face shaded by a plain brown ball cap on what was evidently a very sunny day. Perched serenely atop loosely folded legs in the midst of his crop, the bearded farmer responded thoughtfully to his interviewer’s questions, with an astonishing economy of both speech and motion. Gould’s lower body remained still as he methodically traced his fingers over a buckwheat plant, demonstrating the magic of phosphorous conversion.
The grainy, shadow-drenched picture and Gould’s meditative voice lulled me into the reverie of a midsummer Montana afternoon. Since this footage had never been edited into curriculum—and I wasn’t a sixth grader anyway—I let my focus drift. But fourteen minutes in, Greg beckoned me to listen up.
“There is something that we should remember today,” Gould said emphatically, “even if we forget everything else.” The Zen-like farmer had ditched the buckwheat plant, I noticed, and he was now caressing a handful of soil, passing it lovingly between his palms. “There are more organisms living beneath the soil than there are above it,” Greg instructed. “From this life comes all the wealth of the earth. We are merely promoting a system that doesn’t kill this life but can supply us with enough food.”
AN ECOLOGICAL BIOGRAPHY
As I drove back over MacDonald Pass, Greg’s words lingered with me. I had come to central Montana to trace the case study of a remarkable green business, to investigate the “triple bottom line” that generated good livelihoods from organic specialty lentils. Such values-based supply chains have become an increasingly popular model for simultaneously serving “people, profit, and planet.” Grocery stores are now filled with grass-fed lamb, wildlife-friendly rice, organic fair trade tea, domestic fair trade wheat. Ventures like this are notoriously difficult to sustain, so I thought it would be a good idea to take a closer look at one that had survived for two and a half decades.
But when you begin to excavate the bottom line of Timeless Seeds, I discovered, it’s not really the bottom line at all. What makes this lentil business go is a complex belowground ecology that reaches back to century-old grain pools, through the living rooms of stubborn ranch women, and across the political spectrum from counterculture political theater to populist revolt. Like Greg, Timeless and its growers are always trying to be a little gentler, to participate in the market in a way that doesn’t kill their delicate underground, which is where it’s really at.
The company—ostensibly the story I’d been following all summer—was merely the humble crop harvested out of a complex social ecology. What I’d realized as I spent time with the Timeless farmers is that most of what they were doing was tangential to the business, at least in mainstream economic terms. But if so many of these farmers’ activities fell o
utside the purview of a typical enterprise, I could see how their broad-based efforts were nonetheless integral to their success. As they carefully stewarded an ecosystem, a social movement, and an information network, the lentil underground had introduced me to a very different form of economy. In the process, my neatly bounded case study had morphed into a sort of ecological biography. Timeless, much like the components of an ecosystem, could be understood only through its connections.
In making these connections, the plants and people of the lentil underground bore a curious resemblance to one another. Both initiated change in their communities that could only be described as radical. In the literal sense of that word, the underground allies sought fundamental transformation at the very root of their respective systems. Surrounded by producers, they insisted on lives as regenerators. “I can’t sell things, but I can fix them,” Russ Salisbury had told me. “That’s what we do,” his friend Scott Lohmuller had philosophized. “Clean up, rebuild.” But as Scott’s daughter Mariah had discovered when she and her husband attempted to launch an organic farm, being a regenerator was an underappreciated, largely invisible role. Socially and ecologically indispensable, it remained economically near impossible.
“YOU CAN’T DO IT ALONE”
Much like a newly initiated legume farmer, I want to think that lentils are a straightforward substitute for synthetic fertilizer, a cheaper, more environmentally benign alternative. To some extent, this is true. But if that was really all there was to it, there would be no lentil underground—just a smattering of savvy growers rationally applying plant-based nitrogen instead of expensive ammonium nitrate. But the fact is that biological fertility is more than just a different nutrient management approach. It’s an entirely different way of life—one in which time and space broaden considerably, and the illusion of control falls apart.
Building your soil biologically is not a precise prescription for a particular crop, but a contribution to a larger ecology, subject to independent variables, geologic time, and global biogeochemical cycles. You will not capture all the value on this farm, in this year. You cannot individualize your return. To build biological fertility is to build community—to accept interdependence with other creatures and foster a common benefit. This way of life cultivates a new kind of awareness, a new empathy. You have to pay attention beyond this homestead. You have to pay attention beyond this season. You cannot spray and then forget about it and go to the lake.
Planting organic lentils—and all the other crops that go with them—becomes part of who you are, what you are conscious of, how you see the world. It forces you to listen more deeply, more expansively. And it softens, to some extent, the borders of the self. This is the great irony of the lentil underground, or perhaps its secret. What rugged individualism brought together, only community can sustain. When I’d asked Casey Bailey to reflect on the biggest lesson he’d learned by bucking the corporate farm industry, he’d paused for a full ten seconds, then answered firmly. “That you can’t do it alone.”
Since they know they can thrive only as part of a team, the members of the lentil underground are unceremoniously selfless. “I don’t care if it’s not benefiting me,” Bud Barta told me flatly. I’d asked the hardworking builder if it bothered him that the money currently being made in organics didn’t seem to be flowing back to the movement’s originators. “As long as more people are moving in that direction,” Bud said, “I’m happy. I mean, that’s why we did it.” Another Timeless grower was angry about proposed cuts to Farm Bill programs, but not the ones he benefited from. “I don’t care if they cut my corn payments,” Jerry Sikorski had told me in frustration. “I don’t deserve payments, but for Christ’s sake, don’t cut the food to the poor people.”
Bud and Jerry have long since refused the enduring myth of the lone ranger. They know it’s false, because they’ve actually tried to live it. They’ve managed to carve out some of the independence they were looking for—but, perhaps paradoxically, not by themselves. Far more capable of truly going it alone than 99 percent of contemporary Americans, these people who can build or fix most anything are nonetheless intimately aware of their reliance on communities larger than themselves.
Part of this radical humility is letting go of the mentality that “bigger is better,” that more grain is unquestionably merrier. Jerry Sikorski and his wife, Kathy, live in a part of eastern Montana hot enough to grow corn, which has proven to be a profitable crop for many of their neighbors. The Sikorskis have included the prolific grain in their rotation, but they pay attention to annual rainfall totals and reduce their seeding density accordingly. “We don’t shoot for a hundred bushels to the acre,” Jerry told me, “but we keep a plant population down around thirteen thousand plants per acre. It means less grain, but it also means fewer plants to use the available moisture.”
Another hallmark of the lentil underground is their openness to new people and ideas. They aren’t bound by an unquestioning loyalty to the way Granddaddy did it, or by a suspicious wariness of outsiders. The heritage and heirloom crops they grow manifest deep relational ties and long experience, but these carefully chosen plants are certainly not xenophobes. Black medic made its way to Montana from the American Southeast. Ley cropping came from Australia. Lentils were domesticated 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, and breeders like Al Slinkard borrowed liberally from international collections when developing varieties for North America.
Like their seeds and systems, the people of the lentil underground trace their own development along paths that meander well beyond Montana. Dave Oien has made half a dozen trips to East Asia. Casey Bailey traveled and studied in Guatemala. And seventy-three-year-old homesteader Russ Salisbury ultimately hopes to leave his place to a nephew-in-law who was raised on a smallholding in Belize. “Carlos is my best teacher,” Russ says of his younger relative and farm manager.
The Timeless farmers pursue neither uncompromising allegiance to tradition nor a wholesale break from previous generations in the name of progress. They worship neither past nor future. Instead, change and continuity find themselves intertwined into a way of life more cyclical than linear. As they revisit their grandparents’ mutual-aid agrarianism, these farmers imbue this tradition with a newfound appreciation for the global reach of their neighborhood.
For each member of the lentil underground, this journey eventually arrives at the same question with which it began: how to save the family farm. Their problems haven’t gone away. But they’ve learned to see them differently. Instead of noticing the immediate obstacles in their path—weeds and drought—they’ve begun to observe more systemic ones. The infinitely interconnected farm they now see before them presents a suite of daunting management challenges, but unlike rain and plant evolution, farmers can do something about at least some of them.
This Montana lentil harvest is no fairy-tale success, but a complicated saga of adaptation, learning, and even some hard times. The story of Timeless Seeds is not a heroic one, but then again these fragile plains are not a place that needs heroes. “What I’d tell beginning farmers who want to do this,” Anna Jones-Crabtree told me, “is, yes, believe in yourself; but also, every season you learn something new, and every season you adjust and rework your plan.”
People like Anna don’t tend to make headlines as organic industry leaders, because their aim is not runaway success, but resilience. Anna and her fellow Timeless growers attempt to create a workable niche for themselves in the food system, while simultaneously questioning the very foundations of that system. By finding creative ways to stay in the game without fully accepting its rules, the lentil underground alters the landscape slowly, subtly, subversively. This is why they can withstand challenges that bring the rest of American agriculture to its knees, like the 2012 drought. Instead of building farming systems that are maximally productive under ideal conditions, they’re designing dynamic agroecosystems for the long haul, which can both survive adverse conditions and adapt to them. The many dimensions of
the lentil underground—from the diverse community of microorganisms beneath the surface of the soil to the diverse community of people organizing for change beneath the surface of red state America—are at the root of this supple strength. This is not the strength of the mythological Westerner, who can outcompete all rivals. This is the strength of generations of real Westerners, who know how to work together to weather life’s storms. In a world made increasingly volatile by climate change, this is the kind of strength we need.
BEYOND THE FOODSHED
The thing is, Timeless Seeds only does enough business to contract with about twenty farmers. Sure, they’ve helped spawn a movement that includes other such companies, which also support a diversified organic approach. Loyal friends and family members are in on the action, as are dedicated scientists and nonprofit staffers, enthusiastic chefs, and passionate consumers. A couple dozen Timeless investors help spread some of the risk, and larger networks provide various forms of support. Anna Jones-Crabtree has her circle of sustainability professionals, while Jacob and Courtney Cowgill are bolstered by their CSA members and a tight-knit crew of University of Montana environmental studies alumni. Dave helped piece together the Oien family’s livelihood with his parents’ Social Security check, and Jess Alger got his knee surgery covered by Tricare. But as charming as this homespun patchwork is, it’s full of gaping holes, which are anything but romantic. The social and environmental challenges these farmers endeavor to address are more than they can handle on their own.
