Lentil Underground (24 page)

LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

When I walked into the Montana Organic Association meeting on the final day of November 2012, the first person I saw was Casey Bailey. Laughing over drinks with a couple of his buddies, he looked nothing like the self-described gerbil I'd seen rushing around at harvest. “It's been good to get some rest,” Casey admitted. Everybody I ran into at the Helena conference was more relaxed than usual: Jerry Habets, Jody Manuel, even Anna Jones-Crabtree.

Jerry was particularly chipper, keen to update me on his intercrop. Miraculously, the buckwheat, Black Kabuli chickpeas, and Petite Crimson lentils he'd planted together had ripened at the same time, so he'd harvested the whole lot at once. Big Sky Seeds—less than half an hour north in Shelby—had been able to separate them out, and they'd bought all Jerry's buckwheat. Before leaving for the conference, Jerry had delivered the last of his lentils and chickpeas to the Timeless plant in Ulm, where he'd been heartily congratulated on his successful experiment. Determined to repeat it, Jerry was already talking about next season.

I also got good news from Jim Barngrover, who'd enjoyed a successful harvest too. I had to follow up with Jim by e-mail to get the full tally of what all he'd raised, between his two community
garden plots and his small backyard: “Onions, peppers, peas, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, garlic, shallots, spinach, kale, squash, beans, broccoli, corn, tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries, and various herbs. Then there are the couple of gallons of sauerkraut in the crock in the basement. I also have numerous freezer bags of pesto.” Jim was proud to report that he'd helped Helena Community Gardens donate one and a half tons of produce to the local food bank. And he had bagged a deer on his annual hunt at Bud Barta's place.

Bud hadn't made it to Helena for the organic association gathering. A decade earlier, he'd decided his day job building green homes was enough work for one person and had started looking for a like-minded tenant. For the past five seasons, he'd leased his land to Ole Norgaard, the farmer who was milling heirloom corn at the Timeless plant. In addition to this corn, Ole was also growing a panopoly of other organic crops on the 650 acres he rented from the Bartas: wheat, barley, peas, sainfoin seed, triticale, alfalfa, grass hay. “It's good to have Ole out there,” Bud said. “We think kinda the same about farming, and also about business.” Although Bud wasn't at MOA, Ole was, and he was beaming. He had just managed to get his Montana Morado Maize corn bread and pancake mixes stocked at the natural foods market in Great Falls, and he had a promising lead at another store in Missoula.

Amid the jovial scene at the Montana Organic Association meeting, Dave Oien was the one person who seemed nervous. Both his mauve-colored Timeless ball cap and flannel shirt were spotlessly clean, and the typically chatty CEO was uncharacteristically
silent. Dave sat quietly through dinner, keeping one eye glued to MOA president Daryl Lassila. When Daryl announced that it was time to present the organization's Lifetime of Service Award for the year, the Timeless CEO rose from his seat. “And to introduce our winner,” Daryl told the 140-person crowd, “I'll turn the microphone over to David Oien.”

“This award recognizes an individual who has made outstanding contributions to Montana's organic community over the course of their life,” Dave read. “But,” he interjected, “this year we are giving it to two people, because it's hard to separate their contributions from their partnership.”

These two had been the first to pitch in for everything, Dave told the crowd. Founding members of two co-ops, and among the first applicants for Montana's organic certification program, one or the other of them had truly “been there when.” When the AERO Ag Task Force began meeting. When Dave needed farmers to plant medic. When the lentil pool was formed
and
when the Trader Joe's deal went bust. The pair had helped Jerry buy the Habets homestead, and they'd made sure Tuna didn't lose the McAlpines'. They'd helped Danish immigrant Ole Norgaard get a green card and provided financing for another business Timeless had incubated, Big Sky Organic Feed. “This year's Lifetime of Service awardees have been critical to the existence of Timeless Seeds,” Dave acknowledged, “and to sustainable agriculture in Montana. Please give a big round of applause to Russell Salisbury and Elsie Tuss.”

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.

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.”