Lentil Underground (14 page)

As before, nobody called Dave to tell him the deal was off. But this time, he wasn't caught off guard. Timeless had other
customers to sell to, and these days, they were always ready with a plan B in case restaurants went under or distributors declared bankruptcy. Dave had been adamant that all Timeless lentils sold at Whole Foods would bear the company's own label, so disappointed shoppers knew where to find them when they disappeared from the shelves. Dave asked his fans where they'd like Timeless to retail, and they helped him place his lentils and heritage grains in their local grocery stores. Back in 1994, Timeless had needed Trader Joe's. But they'd been more careful this time around, so they didn't need Whole Foods. They had their processing plant, they had their loan, and they had all their numbers crunched into a neat and tidy feasibility study. Thus equipped, Dave was ready to recruit a new breed of Timeless grower.

Not long after Whole Foods lost interest in “authentic food artisans,” Dave started talking to a young guy who had just come home to his family's conventional wheat operation, 78 miles east of Conrad in Fort Benton. Having traveled extensively and managed a community garden, Casey Bailey had already changed his mind. Now he was ready to change his farm.

THE KEVIN BACON OF CENTRAL MONTANA

Two hours out of Conrad and just across the Missouri River, I arrived at the second stop on my tour of Timeless growers. This was my first visit to Casey Bailey's place, which for four generations had been admired as one of the most carefully managed grain farms in the region. Casey could have made a good living by following in his dad's footsteps. But instead, the thirty-two-year-old had done something audacious. He'd gone organic.

When I arrived at the Baileys' on that sunny May morning, the first thing I saw was an enormous angular spider crawling slowly but precisely behind Casey's tractor. Hundreds of skinny black legs were gliding just below the surface of the soil, synchronized by a fire-engine-red body. As Casey approached the end of the row, the steel spider's exotic brand name became visible from the dirt road. The Baileys' neighbors slowed down as they passed my Subaru, peering across the tidy buffer strip and twisting their tongues on the machine's unpronounceable script lettering: “Einböck.”

“This is the tined weeder,” Casey explained, whisking me into a don't-blink tour of his operation. “I bought it from Austria. It can weed in between the spelt, right in between the rows.” What was spelt? I wondered. The bubbly long-distance runner was talking so fast that I worried even my digital recorder wouldn't keep up.
Apparently, this was the pace of learning on this farm: as you go. Rather than try to stop Casey's high-speed train of thought, I made a note and figured we'd get around to the spelt sooner or later.

“I think it's a real art to do it well,” Casey continued, bringing me back to the in-crop weeder. “It beats the plants up, scores the heck out of them with fourteen-inch-long tines, but as scary as that seems, it doesn't kill the crop. You just have to go like heck and not look back.” Casey was going like heck all right, but I couldn't understand why he was in such a hurry. The Baileys weren't rich, but unlike Jerry Habets, Casey hadn't made the leap to organics under financial duress. So who was Casey trying to keep up with? “I'm racing the weeds,” Casey explained, groaning. After a decade of chemical management, the Bailey farm was habituated, and Casey's organic transition had sent his soil into an agricultural version of withdrawal.

Casey himself had already been enthusiastic about the idea of organic agriculture when he grew his first lentil field for Timeless in 2009. But he knew his
farm
would probably take a little longer to kick its reliance on chemicals, so he'd tried to wean it off fertilizers and herbicides one field at a time. Still, the Baileys' strung-out soil continued to battle thistles, and Casey's neighbors were starting to drop hints. He needed to figure out new ways to kill the unwanted plants popping up in his crop—and quickly.

The tined weeder's spidery legs removed shallow-rooted weeds without ripping out his crop, Casey told me, and he could also use the machine to fine-tune soil moisture levels. As long as he didn't
drive
too
fast, it seemed to work. “It actually looks like it stimulates the plants,” Casey reported hopefully. “I noticed that the places where I used it, the crop was two or three inches taller.”

But as Casey dug into these surface-level questions about weeds, he discovered that they cut deeper than he originally imagined. Unwanted plants, he learned, were a sign of unbalanced soils. In order to control them, he needed to develop carefully planned rotations, so that nutrient users like grain alternated with nutrient producers like lentils. If he could fill the ecological niches on his farm with harvestable plants, he wouldn't attract so many uninvited ones. This was a completely new take on agriculture for the born-and-raised conventional farmer, who had always lined out his field operation one crop at a time and kept everything fastidiously separate. Now he had to think hard about how his plants could work together.

After considering several crops that might complement his nitrogen-fixing lentils, Casey had decided to plant nitrogen-feeding spelt, a heritage grain that had recently become popular with gluten-sensitive consumers. Finding markets for his new crops was key for Casey, who had to prove his ecological approach could support a secure livelihood, the way his dad's conventional grain operation always had. As the fourth-generation manager of a respected family farm, Casey had to explain to his family and neighbors why he was doing things differently. Because driving a funny-looking, foreign-sounding weeding machine straight through your crop was really, really different.

The typical technique in Fort Benton—or anywhere else in rural America, for that matter—is to cultivate
before
you sow. Tilling the ground in advance of planting is an age-old strategy. Temporarily clearing the weeds out of the way gives the crop a head start, and if your seedlings grow fast enough, they can
monopolize the sunlight and shade out any unwanted growth below. Or, I should say, preseason tillage
used
to be the typical technique. Far from chasing arcane weeding machines across the Atlantic, Casey's neighbors have long since parked their John Deere plows and Massey Ferguson cultivators in the shed. These days, American grain growers abolish their weeds with one expeditious pass on the sprayer—and then they go to the lake. Just a day's drive east of here, in fact, commences the geographic signature of the Midwest: mile upon mile of identical corn and soy plants, genetically altered to resist herbicides. Since their crops are impervious to their chemicals, farmers in Nebraska and Indiana can apply weed killers as liberally as the law allows. It's a simple, one-shot solution.

Fort Benton's primary agricultural product—wheat—hasn't yet followed the genetically modified path of the heartland's corn and soy, but it seems only a matter of time. For everyone in this neighborhood but Casey, tillage is fast fading into a mere metaphor, a quaint children's-book notion of what Old MacDonald does on the farm. It felt “revolutionary” and “crazy” when he dusted the cobwebs off his dad's old plow for the first time in decades, Casey admitted. But if he was going to farm the Bailey place organically, he'd need to embrace the challenge of weed management—and the extra effort and continual troubleshooting that came with it. The holy grail, Casey told me, getting back to the discussion about rotations, was to establish such a perfectly balanced plant community on his farm that he could prevent weed problems rather than treat them. He was convinced that the best weed-management strategies were subtle and biological: choosing the right plants to rotate (alfalfa was key), timing his seeding just right, spacing his rows a little closer together. By paying attention to little things that helped his crops thrive, Casey hoped to minimize the amount of time and fossil fuel he spent making passes on
the tractor. But as he tweaked and tinkered his way toward that long-term vision, Casey had to do something about the weeds that were growing on his farm now. He took a “lesser evil” approach to this dilemma, balancing the pros and cons of tillage and chemicals. In this case, Casey felt, careful tillage was more in line with “how nature works.”

The colossal steel spider sitting in Casey's spelt may have been more in line with nature, but it was a glaring about-face from local culture. Like most kids taking up their parents' profession, Casey wanted nothing more than to lie low as he experimented with his own way of doing things. But the highly visible process of organic conversion had forced him to explain himself. “My neighbors were like, what are you doing over there?” Casey recalled, laughing. The bright-red tined weeder had blown his cover.

Cultivation—weeding mechanically rather than chemically—is the single practice that most starkly distances organic farmers like Casey from the familiar rhythms that characterize their central Montana communities. Casey and his fellow tillage farmers run on a different schedule, with different machinery, different inputs, and an entirely different philosophy. These organic growers not only face an ever-adapting cast of wily weeds (which have evolved into impressively resilient beings in the face of the neighbors' herbicides). They also have to contend with the farm industry that has congealed around grain monocultures and chemically driven “zero tillage” farming, which is rapidly becoming the mainstream management strategy on these erosion-prone Great Plains. This double whammy of social and ecological challenges means
that those on the diversified, organic path have had to cultivate their friendships and their problem-solving capacities as carefully as they till their fields.

“What we need, you know, is a good pest management app,” Casey said to me, whipping out his smartphone to take note of what appeared to be poor germination in his safflower. Casey had been talking about the app idea with other Timeless growers, but in the meantime, he was busy putting the “social” in social media—synching his phone and his laptop, updating his Facebook page, and nonchalantly moving millions of bits of information around the world in his search for the proper cultivator or the secret to eradicating field bindweed. Just four years after Bob Bailey let his son experiment with organics on a fifty-acre plot, the ambitious youngster had already joined the board of the Montana Organic Association and become one of Timeless Seeds' key growers. Casey's fledgling venture was a veritable Kevin Bacon of Montana's sustainable farming community, except that you didn't have to trace anywhere near six degrees of separation.

In the course of diversifying his farm, Casey seemed to have met everyone. Amaltheia Dairy's Nate Brown had sold Casey four pigs, which had permanently altered the olfactory character of Casey's Volkswagen Jetta on the trip home from Bozeman. A quirky independent breeder from Big Timber, Dave Christensen, had supplied Casey with the seed for his first planting of open-pollinated corn. When I asked about the robust grass across from his lentils, Casey had to say the name twice, to make sure I caught the pronunciation. This Kamut (Kuh-MOOT) was contracted to Bob Quinn, a Big Sandy farmer who had become famous for developing and trademarking the popular ancient grain.

Though Casey's connections appeared far-flung, I noted a common thread. I'd seen that open-pollinated corn before, I realized—
on a visit to the Timeless plant in Ulm. Another farmer—Ole Norgaard—had launched a small business to package the corn into corn bread and pancake mixes, and since he didn't have sufficient electrical power on his farm to operate his milling machinery, he'd parked his mill at Dave's facility. Big Sandy farmer Bob Quinn didn't need any help from Timeless, having made millions on Kamut. But Quinn's most recent venture hinted that he might have been talking with Dave too. The safflower Casey and I were standing in was bound for Quinn's Oil Barn, an on-farm fuel venture uncannily reminiscent of the integrated energy scheme that had long ago transformed the Oien homestead into the talk of Conrad. Sure enough, I found out, when Bob had begun considering a transition to organics back in the eighties, he'd spoken at length with Dave, who had helped recruit the now famous Big Sandy entrepreneur into the Farm Improvement Club program.

The latest in a long line of organic farmers whom Dave had inspired, Casey planned to sell about a third of his harvest to his mentor. I wasn't surprised that Casey's French Green lentils were headed for Timeless at the end of the season, but I was interested to learn that Dave had also tapped Casey to experiment with emmer, one of three heritage wheats gaining popularity in high-end restaurants under their collective Italian common name “farro” (along with spelt and einkorn). Since he had a committed buyer for these two premium crops, Casey had the freedom to experiment with other things too: millet, mustard, and grass-fed cattle.

Casey's catholic appetite for projects matched his similarly ecumenical enthusiasm for information and people. A former music major at the University of Montana, Casey had also taken courses in religion (at Westmont College in Santa Barbara), urban studies (in San Francisco), and liberation theology (in Guatemala). The
sole Timeless farmer who had been to both a major Occupy protest and countercultural mecca Esalen, Casey had started an intentional community in Missoula while he was in college there. When he'd come home to farm, Casey had brought all these experiences with him, to the bewilderment of Fort Benton. One of his musical buddies from college visited every summer to help with harvest, Casey told me, grinning mischievously. “One year, we were playing ‘Confirmation,' you know, the Charlie Parker tune. We got so we had it down, and then a rancher came by because he thought it was a dying cow.”

Singing arias in the tractor cab and practicing yoga in the field, Casey upended nearly every stereotype about men in rural America. He was more than happy to cook while his girlfriend, Kelsey, took care of outdoor chores. In fact, Casey
liked
baking his own bread from the Kamut and spelt he raised. He also stocked organic soap in his tidy bathroom and enjoyed the aesthetic pleasures of watching his diverse fields bloom: “farming for colors.” Among those colors were purple—the hue of his specialty barley—and pink, the shade Casey had semi-accidentally painted his barn. Although he swore the color had looked different on the paint can, Casey liked seeing the look on people's faces when he playfully nicknamed his business Pink Barn Organics. The athletic farmer was already notorious as the only man in town sporting Red Ants Pants—designer workwear made by a Montana company with a flair for the burlesque and a mission to flatter its (mostly female) customers' curves.