Lentil Underground (23 page)

“Jody had a great success with the foundation emmer seed,” Dave reported, hopeful that diversifying into the seed market would help Timeless and other similar businesses reduce their dependence on large companies. “Brandon and Mariah had six really nice acres also. Loren just got that cleaned. So now we need to build markets, because we've got this pedigreed seed that would be a shame to feed to somebody, even if it was the French Laundry or whatever. It's like, this is too good for you guys even; this needs to go back in the ground.”

Since Dave seemed so determined to focus on good news, I decided to take a more direct approach. If I was going to get a straight answer about Timeless Seeds' losses, I realized, I'd have to ask the question point-blank. After thirty years of hard work, this
historic drought year had presented the lentil underground with a moment of truth. They'd started their journey in the eighties, when similarly devastating droughts had killed off their crops. They'd tried to change their farming system—and to some extent, the whole food system—to make it more resilient. But were they really any better off now? I readied myself for an uncomfortable pause, bad news, even the possibility that my study might be done for. But nothing could have prepared me for Dave's response.

“The drought wasn't so bad for us really,” Dave informed me nonchalantly, delivering the stunning news as though it was an afterthought. “Our yields were actually surprisingly good, given the weather we had through the summer.” Although growing season precipitation had dipped 40 percent compared to last year, Dave estimated, Timeless Seeds' farmers had still realized 80 percent of their normal yields, thanks to their carefully chosen crops and all that stored soil moisture.

“So overall, you're down about twenty percent of your typical yield?” I calculated, trying to get the figures straight. Nope, Dave said. The high quality of the Timeless farmers' harvest had made up for the slightly lower volume, so the net effect was a normal inventory. I wanted to be sure I had that right. Historic drought year. Zero losses. How was that possible?

Dave seemed a little puzzled by my question, as though I wasn't asking quite the right one. As I tried to follow his train of thought, it slowly dawned on me that he'd become such a perennial thinker that he couldn't even conceive of farms in annual terms any more. As he kept talking, I began to question my own understanding of this exceptional season. These weren't really this year's lentils, I reflected, watching several tons of legumes pass by en route to the color sorter. Although the seeds had gone into the ground this spring, the water and nitrogen and bacteria and organic matter
that had helped them grow had a much deeper history. In a sense, Timeless Seeds had had three decades to prepare for this summer. No wonder it didn't seem like such a big deal.

“Yeah, we got plenty of lentils,” Dave sighed. “That's why I'm stuck here cleaning them.” Dave was jealous because I was on my way to the annual AERO meeting, once a treasured ritual for the Timeless CEO. Back when Dave was strictly a farmer, he could count on getting a break by the last weekend in October, when AERO always scheduled its conference. But now that he was responsible for processing and distributing his friends' crops, Dave couldn't take a day off until December. He'd see me then, Dave promised, at the Montana Organic Association conference in Helena. I felt a little sad as I drove off in the snow. The season was over. But as Dave reminded me, another season was just
beginning.

THE NEXT GENERATION

Dave Oien didn't cut his own crop in 2012. For the sixty-three-year-old CEO, running Timeless Seeds was more than a full-time job. So he was leasing his land to Jerry Habets, the formerly skeptical neighbor who had become one of his most enthusiastic growers. And for the past four seasons, Dave and Sharon had also been incubating an innovative small farm operation on the fifteen acres next to their house. From Dave's perspective, this fledgling family farm was probably the most successful “harvest” he'd ever grown.

When a graduate student at the University of Montana offered to do a sustainability analysis for the new processing plant Timeless had opened in 2006, David Oien probably saw a little bit of himself in earnest Jacob Cowgill. A central Montana native whose journey through environmental studies had led him back to his rural roots, Jacob was excited to graduate and start farming—and since his girlfriend, Courtney, had grown up on a farm just south of Conrad (long since sold, unfortunately), that seemed like the place to look for land. Having watched so many neighbors move away,
Dave was thrilled to meet a young couple who were actually thinking about moving in. He encouraged Jacob to accept a nearby apprenticeship, and when the young man successfully completed two seasons with his desire to farm still intact Dave and Sharon offered the recently married Cowgills an inexpensive lease on the field in front of their house.

For Jacob and Courtney, the offer to start farming at Dave's place had seemed almost too good to be true. Dave's well-amended soil was the ideal foundation for launching the diversified vegetable farm they had in mind, and the heritage turkeys they wanted to raise could go in his greenhouse. Timeless Seeds would buy the Cowgills' lentils and heirloom grain, and most of the implements Jacob and Courtney needed were available in Dave's equipment yard. Since Dave's place was already under organic certification, they could get started right away, without the usual three-year transition period. Loading all their worldly possessions into two flatbed trailers, three pickups, and two cars, the Cowgills moved out to Conrad in March of 2009.

While visiting Dave and Sharon over the course of the summer, I'd had the chance to watch Jacob and Courtney's young farm and family blossom, as they chased toddler Willa through rows of chard and squash and carrots. Four seasons in, Prairie Heritage Farm was supplying fresh produce to eighty-seven local families through their community supported agriculture program—a pay-in-advance arrangement that was essentially a weekly farm subscription. In the winter, the Cowgills offered a grain CSA as well, one of the first such businesses in the region. And they were famous for their heritage turkeys, which had become Thanksgiving favorites across western Montana.

Dave monitored the Cowgills' development with the pride of a father, bringing surprise treats out to the field on long harvest
days and teaching Jacob how to fix his tractor. So it was bittersweet when Jacob and Courtney came to him and told him he'd succeeded in helping them achieve their dream. After four years at Dave and Sharon's farm, they'd sufficiently developed their field operation, their customer base, and a small nest egg. They were ready to buy a farm of their own.

In September 2012, Jacob and Courtney moved from Dave and Sharon's land onto their new place in Power, Montana. The thirty-acre homestead was forty miles closer to their main customer base in Great Falls and Helena, and the new property came outfitted with a butcher shop. Dave helped the Cowgills clean out the turkey coop they'd erected in his former greenhouse, and lent them his horse trailer to move the birds down to Power. If they needed extra acreage, Dave told the Cowgills, they could always keep farming some grain at his place. It was going to be awfully quiet around here.

Before the first snows of 2012 blanketed north-central Montana, Jerry Habets prepared the Oien farm for winter. He was experimenting with a new cover crop called sorghum Sudan grass, known for its deep-penetrating roots. While they were alive, these roots exuded a compound called sorgoleone, known to suppress several species of annual weeds. And when the Sudan grass died, the gargantuan mass of decaying roots made a substantial meal for underground microorganisms. Postharvest feasts weren't just for people, Jerry explained. You needed to feed the soil too.

Down the road in Valier, Tuna McAlpine was also tending a cover crop of sorts. Tuna hadn't grown any lentils to sell to
Timeless this year, but he was planning to plant some as ground cover and just see what happened. “If the lentils don't make it,” he told me, “they're still a good plowdown. Wheat, you can't do that.” Tuna's youngest son, Lane, had expressed interest in taking over the farm someday, and the fifty-four-year-old rancher wanted to leave the land in good shape for the next generation of McAlpines. So he'd been seeding more legumes, and each autumn, he'd been leaving more of his plants in the earth.

Back when he was a kid, Tuna told me, people farmed in circles. Starting with the perimeter of their field, they spiraled inward until they got to the middle. Tuna drew a picture on my notepad to illustrate the method. “You see,” he said, pointing to the corners of the paper, “it leaves them skips, because you can't turn in a square.” When farmers reached the center of their inward spirals, Tuna explained, they went back to pick up these triangular “skips” left at the corners of the field.

In the eighties, Tuna continued, people decided that it was more efficient to make a few outer rounds and then just go back and forth all the way across the field, so they didn't have any corner skips to deal with at the end of the process. At first, Tuna had followed in line. He was happy enough going back and forth, and in fact, he might never have considered the circular method again, had it not been for a seemingly unrelated development: the advent of “net wrapping” for hay bales. This new technology allowed farmers to speed up the time it took to tie a bale of hay—but net wrap was also three times as expensive as the twine it replaced. Tuna hated the thought of spending money for something he didn't really need, so he considered whether there might be another way he could make up a little time while haying. And then it hit him: circles. When he used the back-and-forth system, Tuna's baler was idle for a moment every time he made a turn. But when
he went in circles, there was no need to pause—he just kept right on making hay until he got to the center of the field.

“So I went back to round and around,” Tuna said, “but that leaves them skips. It's not really that much you're leaving out there, but in a bug's eye or a bird's eye it can make the difference between total removal of all the habitat and leaving some. Where do insects go, ladybugs, little birds? A pheasant could weather a storm in there. It's a way of farming things but still leaving something.”

But Tuna wasn't just leaving something. He was also putting something back. In May, he'd invited me out to visit the ranch, to see the restoration projects he'd been working on for the past two decades. I was disappointed to arrive just as the weather turned to blowing rain, but Tuna was unfazed. “I've already saddled up the Japanese quarter horses,” he said enthusiastically, pointing to a pair of four-wheelers parked just outside his door. “You ready?” Tearing up and down hills he'd known all his life, Tuna proceeded to lead me through a harrowing three-hour obstacle course. Plunging straight into the creek that snaked through the middle of his property, he yelled back through the whipping wind for me to follow. Just in time, he pointed out the electric fence strung above the water, which was fast approaching at eye level. “Duck,” Tuna yelled back at me. “It's hot.”

The creek, Tuna explained as I caught my breath, was one of his projects. He'd noticed it getting narrower and deeper as he managed his grazing to allow for regrowth of riparian vegetation. Although Tuna had made some immediate, obvious changes on his ranch—12,000 new trees, five new wetlands—it was gradual recovery processes like the shifts in this creek bed that he found most fascinating. In several places where he once grew crops, Tuna told me, he had decided that wasn't the most appropriate use
of the land, so he'd turned it back to pasture—which was now looking so healthy it could have passed for native range. Another spot he'd formerly farmed had been flooded out year after year, and Tuna had eventually realized the water was coming from the ground. He'd remade the natural spring, which had pleased both his cattle and the deer. Restoration farming raised food too, Tuna pointed out. “Both of my sons shot their first deer in this coulee,” Tuna told me proudly, “so we have some deer to eat that way. You get to feeling like you're part of the place. It's a symbiotic relationship.”

Tuna was just a stone's throw away from Glacier, the spectacular national park that had always existed in some degree of tension with the agricultural communities to its east. Other ranchers in this neighborhood complained about the wildlife that came across the park boundary and ate their crops. They were particularly upset about federal protection of gray wolves, which occasionally made off with one of their cows. But Tuna saw things differently. “If you drop down in the bottoms,” he reflected, showing me his favorite part of the ranch, “it's almost like a wilderness. I think everything could be more wild, like these wetlands. I think farms could add more wilderness. This production system isn't just about taking everything for your own benefit.”

When we came out of the bottoms, Tuna and I spotted something running on the hill across the coulee. I knew it wasn't one of his cows—it was running too fast. It occurred to me that it might be a deer or a pronghorn antelope, but it looked too big.

“I think that's a griz,” Tuna declared, squinting. “Yep, two of them.” I did a double take. Grizzly bears were a relatively uncommon sight even in the park, and downright rare as far east as Valier. Of all the incredible things I'd seen at Tuna's ranch, this seemed like the best piece of evidence that his restoration projects
were working. Tuna's agricultural practices were clearly providing what my professors called “ecosystem services”—known simply to these bears as food and a place to hang out. Instead of policing a strict partition between civilization and wilderness—what academics called “land sparing”—Tuna was implementing the cutting-edge ecological strategy of “land sharing.” The hard-nosed rancher seemed to have known all his life what conservation scientists were just beginning to appreciate: The fundamental ecological processes that supported farms were the same ones that supported national parks. So if farmers managed for these basic environmental goods—nutrient cycling, natural pest control, carbon sequestration—they could grow food and steward the land at the same time. Nature and agriculture weren't competitors. They were, as Tuna had said, symbiotic.

I reached for my camera to document the remarkable grizzly sighting. And then I hesitated. What would Tuna think? Grizzly bear reintroduction was a hot-button issue in rural Montana, and a lot of ranchers felt that federal wildlife protections had overreached. After a summer of tagging along with Timeless Seeds' growers, I had a feel for the razor-thin margins of this way of life, and I couldn't blame Tuna if he was concerned about whether the bears might harm his cattle. He had his kids' college education to worry about. Having come to respect the rancher's dedication to responsibly stewarding his land, I didn't want to come off as a know-it-all environmentalist from Missoula. Who was I to say that a bear sighting was something to celebrate?

It seemed like an eternity to me, but I managed to hold my tongue until Tuna spoke. “That's awesome,” he said, as the bears bounded over the hill. “We haven't seen them on the place in three years. Did you get a photo? I can't wait to show Anne and the
kids.”