Lentil Underground (6 page)

Newcomers to the effort—who began showing up to AERO conferences in significant numbers—didn't immediately understand the connection between the organization's agricultural activities and its mission. Why was a renewable energy group so involved in farming? Dave Oien found himself fielding this question so frequently that he'd published a response in his
Sun Times
column:

Why agriculture? Because it is Montana's primary industry, certainly. Because it is a primary energy and resource user. That, too. But the reasoning goes deeper. Agriculture is concerned with ultimate wealth—the ability to provide food and fiber—and it depends in a direct way on natural energy sources—on sun and water and wind, on photosynthesis, on the biology of the soil. Agriculture can be the model for a sane and a safe lifestyle, for an economy that depends on local resources and appropriate technologies, for a close and proper relationship with Nature. Agriculture can be a paradigm for sustainability.

Or, as things stood in Montana in 1986, agriculture could be a paradigm for death and destruction. Aware that statutorily supported economic incentives were working against them, both Dave Oien and Jim Barngrover spent a fair amount of time at the state capitol building in Helena, two hours south of Conrad and a fifty-five-mile drive from Jim's job at the Deer Lodge prison. Determined to knock down the barriers that stood in the way of organic
farming, they put on their nicest clothes and scoured the halls of the legislature for like minds.

“I was a slick, highly paid political operative,” Jim Barngrover recalls, jokingly reflecting on his history as AERO's official lobbyist. Sporting an unruly Afro and speaking from what appeared to be, quite literally, a soapbox, the gangly young man looked more like a student protester than a power broker. But although Jim didn't
look
like a VIP, he was nonetheless effective. Aided by Dave and the strength of the AERO membership, the volunteer lobbyist made surprising headway with state representatives in Helena.

Thanks to Jim's behind-the-scenes organizing, the Montana legislature passed a joint resolution in 1985, calling on the state university system to establish a program in sustainable agriculture. The nonbinding resolution could have amounted to nothing more than lip service, but AERO made sure the lawmakers put their money where their mouths were. Six years later, Jim and company would successfully carry a bill to fund the first weed ecologist position at the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station. In an earthshaking move, the state university would hire forest ecology PhD Bruce Maxwell—a Peace Corps alum whose first peer-reviewed publication concerned a floral description of native forests in Micronesia—to join the ranks of the “better living through chemistry” good old boys who were typically tasked with advising farmers. That was all yet to come, of course. But in the meantime, AERO celebrated another major political victory.

In addition to the joint resolution on sustainable agriculture research, the 1985 Montana legislature also passed an organic food definition law—the fourth in the country, behind only California, Oregon, and Maine. Even before the ink dried on the bill, Jim and Dave were already putting together a steering committee to write Montana's first organic standards. Dave hadn't forgotten the labeling roadblock he'd hit in his attempt to retail organic beef, and he wanted to make sure Montana's future sustainable farmers had a market. He and Jim became founding board members of the first statewide certifying organization, and they worked hard to foster its strength and grassroots character. Meanwhile, AERO—heavily populated with Timeless farmers—formed the state's original organic growers association in 1987. At each turn, Bud Barta, Tom Hastings, and Russ Salisbury joined the new groups, rapidly building a critical mass that gave the organizations legitimacy and impelling energy.

While it may have seemed to some onlookers that Montana's organic farming movement came out of nowhere (or worse, California), the truth was that it had very deep, local roots. And although the Alternative Energy Resources Organization may have been the place to
start
digging up these roots, you had to keep going to get anywhere near the bottom. Indeed, AERO traced its own origins back to an even older, fiercer citizens' group: the Northern Plains Resource Council.

In 1972, a group of rough-edged cowboys and cowgirls crammed into the living room of a tiny ranch cabin in southeast Montana's Bull Mountains, home to the son of a member of Butch Cassidy's Hole in the Wall Gang. The US Bureau of Reclamation had just
released a plan to site twenty-one new coal-fired power plants in Montana, and the ranchers were concerned that such drastic development would destroy their land. Determined to stop the ghastly strip mining, they promised one another they wouldn't let the coal companies buy them out. And to make good on their word, they formed a nonprofit council.

The rancher's group—the Northern Plains Resource Council—proceeded to organize their neighbors. They went from living room to living room, explaining the implications of the proposed mining and urging their neighbors not to sign away their property. When Consolidation Coal started knocking on those same doors, contracts in hand, they were astonished to find landowner after landowner uninterested in their lucrative offers. They were even more astonished when these stubborn ranchers helped convince the Montana state legislature to pass a series of environmental protection statutes. But the most incredible underdog victory came in 1977, when the Northern Plains Resource Council united with like-minded groups across the country to drive a strip-mining regulation bill through the US Congress. In a short five years, Montana's ranch families—led by a particularly resolute group of women—had delivered an unequivocal message: Coal is not the future we want.

When the dust settled and a substantial share of the proposed power plants had been successfully blocked, the niece of one of those forceful women asked a thought-provoking question: If coal is the future we are against, what is the future we are for? This sparky thirty-year-old—Kye Cochran—was one of several countercultural young people whose volunteer labor had supported the crusade of their more traditional agrarian parents, uncles, and aunts. While the Northern Plains Resource Council continued its advocacy against dirty energy (as it does today), several of its
fresh-faced volunteers launched a new group, to promote alternative solutions. In another living room—at the roomy Billings Victorian that Kye and her comrades had christened “Bozovilla” (in tribute to a psychedelic political radio theater show)—the Alternative Energy Resources Organization was born.

A proud member of both AERO and NPRC, Russ Salisbury liked reminding people just how far-reaching the roots of Montana's sustainable agriculture movement really were. This “new” approach to farming hadn't begun as a hippie project in the radical sixties and seventies, or as a desperate response to the eighties farm crisis. It had grown out of a deep agrarian heritage, a heritage that underpinned the strip-mining fight, the counterculture, and even Russ himself. Russ didn't quite wear this story on his sleeve, but it was plainly visible on his favorite vest. Denim blue, with a sheepskin lining and collar, it was emblazoned with an orange logo that read “Farmers Union.”

Russ had been a member of the Farmers Union since he was eight. He'd gone to the union's camp every summer and learned its three key principles: legislation, education, and cooperation. Now a local authority on this century-old farmers' organization, Russ thought newcomers to “alternative agriculture” ought to know its story too.

The Farmers Educational Cooperative Union of America was founded in Texas in 1902, as a response to increasing monopoly power in the grain business. The very next year, the group had
formed its first marketing cooperative. From an initial membership of ten, the Farmers Union had rapidly grown in both numbers and influence, particularly in the grain belt states of Montana, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas. One grain pool at a time, the group's members attempted to wrest control of American agriculture back from wealthy corporations. By the early 1940s, the grassroots coalition had established itself as a respected political force, credited with everything from the cooperative structure of rural electrification to the institutionalization of the national school lunch program to the successful campaign for women's suffrage. As the rural counterpart to the US labor movement, the Farmers Union sought to organize working people so that they could use their economic and political power to demand some measure of control over their own lives.

Unique among American farm organizations, the Farmers Union had connected the dots between domestic and foreign policies, calling for cooperation among the world's peoples rather than military and economic competition. Unfortunately, this prescient attention to the disastrous trajectory of globalization had landed the group in hot water during the cold war, when it was accused of promoting communism and closely monitored by both the State Department and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although the National Farmers Union never faced prosecution, its leaders got the message. If they wanted to stay in business, they'd better soften their critiques of US trade policy and stick to more traditional agrarian issues. By scaling back its more ambitious aims, the union had managed to survive the McCarthy years: but not before its national leadership expelled several outspoken chapters that refused to be silenced.

The Farmers Union had become a bit more staid in recent years, Russ admitted, but the movement it seeded hadn't slowed
down. The group's populist energy had merely been transplanted to new institutional contexts, where people continued to practice legislation, education, and cooperation in the name of a dignified rural life. “It seemed like AERO became the new Farmers Union,” Russ reflected. “They were the new idealistic people thinking and coming up with new ideas.”

Still, Russ thought, it was important to remember where so many of the AERO activists' “new” ideas came from. Banding together to stand up to corporate power was something many of them had learned from their parents, whose cooperative ethos and mutual aid had helped them weather both the Depression and World War II. For the substantial and committed membership of that era, the Farmers Union was almost a religion. “My family went to the Methodist church—my folks were always good Methodists—but Farmers Union meant more than Sunday school to me,” Russ recalled. “You know, when I think about my upbringing, I can't separate church and my parents and the Farmers Union in my mind.”

Russ Salisbury's way of farming was foundational to his character. In truth, it was more a way of life—at once protest and homage, a point of departure and a comforting foothold of continuity. Russ's approach may have cut against the prevailing grain, but it was also true to his heritage in a manner that connected the jocular homesteader to a number of other Montanans. It was no accident that steadfast agrarian populists like Russ were so well represented at AERO conferences and Timeless Seeds field days. For agrarians of his generation, the industrial present was doubly out of step—with both their remembered yesterdays and their intended tomorrows.

Suspended in a late-twentieth-century no-man's-land of corporate greed, people like Dave Oien and Russ Salisbury had to dig underneath the shallow traditions of modern agribusiness, to find
richer soil in which to root their visions for a workable rural society. But they didn't have to dig far. As Russ regaled fresh-faced hippies with his childhood lessons from the Farmers Union, and Dave roped his dad into planting black medic, unruly young radicals discovered common ground with the stubborn old-timers who'd preceded them. Together, they defined themselves as a community, united by a shared inheritance and a shared future that were inseparable. This was perhaps the true meaning of the name “Timeless Seeds.” Plants were their tools, but what these farmers were really trying to establish was a more stable collective legacy. Instead of focusing on quarterly profits, they poured the lion's share of their time and energy into building AERO's sustainable agriculture “information clearinghouse,” which replaced the logic of trade secrets with the maxim of sharing what you learned. Legislation. Education. Cooperation. And, of course, plenty of
perspiration.