Lentil Underground (15 page)

Unabashedly himself, Casey clearly relished the opportunity to introduce little bits of difference to this traditional farm country. And yet, his posture toward his neighbors was fundamentally respectful and humble. Casey felt his fellow farmers—from Fort
Benton to Guatemala, organic community gardens to conventional family farms—were all fighting the same problem, and that they needed to work together to solve it. At the heart of that problem, Casey believed, was disconnection from the earth. Even if they hadn't been physically removed from their land, he observed, farmers around the world were experiencing a spiritual separation, as their jobs and landscapes became just as industrial as any city. “Monoculture, monoculture, monoculture,” Casey lamented. “It's kind of like the rural person's concrete—mind-numbing.”

Casey wasn't convinced that organic advocates or political progressives had all the antidotes for this oppressive monotony, nor did he think his conventional neighbors on the east side of the Missouri had it all wrong. Western Montanans might think things were all flat and predictable out here, he teased me, but there were plenty of colorful twists and turns around these labyrinthine gullies and craggy river breaks. “Life isn't black-and-white,” Casey told me adamantly, “and neither are any of our particular situations.”

For example, what we were about to do next was the very thing Casey'd been trying to avoid by using the tined weeder and all those synergistic crops. We were gonna spray.

“Can you follow me in the Ford?” Casey asked, handing me the keys to a beat-up brown truck with a container of 2,4-D in the bed. “I need to take this stuff out to my dad.” I nodded, and Casey hopped into the cab of a small tractor-trailer, which appeared to have been a furniture van in a previous lifetime. His own load
included a mammoth tank of water, a medley of herbicides, and the hookup for refilling the sprayer that Bob Bailey was currently running on the family's conventional acreage.

“It's hard to go cold turkey with this organic stuff,” Casey explained. “I'm in both worlds. Timeless and Dave's vision, that's where my heart is, but today I'm doing the very opposite of organic. I'm out here with these bandages of spray and fertilizer until I can figure out how to make this organic thing work.”

Making it work, I gathered, meant confronting the dilemma that had vexed Montana's organic farmers from the beginning: weed control. Montana actually lost organic acreage in 2012, and when the statewide organic association asked the dropout farmers why they gave up, they fielded a litany of one-word responses: bindweed, knapweed, cheatgrass, kochia. Insects and disease aren't much of a problem in this neck of the treeless plains, because Montana is so cold and dry that even the bugs and the fungal pathogens have packed their bags for California or the Pacific Northwest. Given the short seasons and long dry spells, the creatures that survive out here are the hardiest people and the hardiest plants: stubborn farmers and stubborn weeds.

Central Montana's two most intransigent communities engage in a constant tussle with each other, and it's a delicate dance. When organic farmers cultivate to control their weeds, they also expose and disturb their soils, so they need to be careful not to sacrifice too much moisture, organic matter, or underground biodiversity. Excessive tillage has beat up the farm ground around here, so extension agents and conservation bureaucrats often encourage farmers to stop plowing and just use chemicals instead. But even in the face of state-of-the-art herbicides, the weeds here never really go away. In fact, a number of Timeless growers have noticed that their families' weed problems actually multiplied
during the previous generation, when their parents started using chemicals.

Rather than attacking his weeds with shock-and-awe poisons, Casey approached weed control as an attempt to win a lasting peace, or at least a détente. I came to appreciate why a lentil farmer might benefit from a background in community organizing and religious studies, as Casey described his approach to fostering coexistence among his human and nonhuman neighbors. Since neither the neighbors nor the weeds were going away anytime soon, Casey explained, he did his best to get to know them better. He was particularly keen to enroll the wisdom of the old-timers around him, aware that their detailed knowledge of this place and its history would help him establish a successful organic system.

It hadn't taken Casey very long to figure out that property lines mean nothing to plants. Thanks to the constant movement of wind, water, and soil, both his crops and his weeds were engaged in an incessant biological conversation with all other botanical life in the vicinity. Sooner or later, Casey would have to deal with his neighbors' chemically adapted weeds, because their seeds would blow over to his place. And if they planted GMO alfalfa, Casey would be vulnerable to pollen drift—when the breeze decided to send that new genetic material to establish itself in Casey's fields, whether he liked it or not. Given that organics couldn't realistically get anywhere going it alone, Casey made a point to reach out. Starting with his dad.

Bob Bailey warmed the crisp air with an ear-to-ear smile, still toiling cheerfully away at age sixty-eight. While Bob loaded his spray
rig with the three herbicides in the tractor-trailer, his son laid out the logic of the chemical approach. “We just put in seven thousand dollars,” Casey computed in awe. “Seven two-and-a-half-gallon jugs at a thousand dollars each. It pencils out to spend that kind of money fighting weeds—isn't that crazy?” I nodded in agreement. It was a lot of money, all right, but Casey did the math for me.

“Compare this sprayer—with a hundred-and-twenty-foot boom, going twelve miles an hour—to organic plowing—a fifty-foot plow, going six miles an hour. With the organic method, you cover three hundred acres a day; with this outfit, fourteen hundred and forty acres day. Killing weeds this way costs less per acre, because glyphosate and fuel cost less than pulling a plow running diesel.”

Casey shuttled the 2,4-D over to his dad, then turned back to me. “So if we could start oilseed pressing and running
that
for fuel instead of diesel, that would feel so good. It would feel like freedom.” Aha. Now I knew why Casey was so excited about the safflower he was growing for Bob Quinn's Oil Barn. Thirty years after the methane digester and alcohol fuel still had gone up at the Oien place, Quinn had developed another concept for a solar farm. Farmers like Casey would grow safflower, press it into oil at the Oil Barn, rent it to local restaurants as frying oil, and then pick it up and use it to fuel their tractors. A maverick experiment station breeder from Sidney, Montana—a modern-day Jim Sims—had spent thirty-eight years developing the high-oleic safflower that would burn clean in both human bodies and diesel engines. Casey had been one of the first to sign on for the pilot project.

Bob Bailey squinted in the blinding sun to read the time on his cell phone, admitting to me that he'd been learning—slowly—how to text. The elder Bailey was open to his son's new ideas, and he had been listening to Casey's proposals as intently as I had. “I've
never done it this other way,” Bob told me, “but Casey's helping me learn. You can get an equilibrium going and things take care of each other. With conventional farming, you might spray something out, and it would make something else worse.” Although Bob could see the biological wisdom of Casey's approach to farming, however, he was painfully aware of the math his son had just rattled off. Spraying herbicide did indeed pencil out, and so long as Bob Bailey stuck with this prevailing calculus, there would be a chemical company and an equipment dealer behind him.

Stumped by a seemingly insoluble math problem, Casey had begun to conclude that his weeds were the least of his difficulties. He was eager to change his farm, but there was only so much he could do from the seat of his tractor, or even his elegant Austrian cultivator. Like most folks in Fort Benton, Casey had always observed the unspoken rule of “Live and let live,” focusing on his own operation and staying out of his neighbors' affairs. But as he talked to his dad, Casey came to understand that the actions of everybody around him—from his loan officer to his fellow farmers to his insurance agent—were shaping his choices. If he wanted to do things differently, Casey needed to think beyond his own enterprise to the ones that were connected to it. In order to change his farm, he'd have to stick his nose in other people's business.

This was the third stage of conversion, both for Timeless growers and for the company itself: becoming increasingly sophisticated about the rest of the food system, beyond the farm gate. Where could they get financing? Proper equipment? Could they find a seed-cleaning facility that saw organics as an opportunity rather than just a risk of weed contamination? Right about the time Casey began growing for Timeless, Dave started talking business with two other farmers who were eager to work out some answers to these questions. Doug Crabtree and Anna
Jones-Crabtree needed to figure these things out quickly, because they were starting the most ambitiously diverse farm in Montana—from scratch. Dave was surprised that two midcareer professionals in Helena had bought farmland 250 miles northeast of their house, just shy of the Canadian border. But the Timeless CEO had to admire the Crabtrees' dedication. Back in the eighties, Dave recalled, his AERO buddy's fateful stand against Montana State University had initiated a DIY fervor on dozens of Montana farms. But Doug and Anna were taking that same attitude to their equipment dealer and their banker. Unwilling to let such institutions constrain their vision, the Crabtrees took a three-step approach to every enterprise necessary to their field operation. Infiltrate. Innovate. And if need be, duplicate. If the farm industry wouldn't do what they needed, Doug and Anna resolved, farmers would have to team up and do it themselves.

A fair indication of the lengths to which the Crabtrees were willing to go in order to responsibly steward a patch of land was the sheer duration of the drive required to get there. From the couple's home in Helena, it was a three-hour trip to Havre, the town referenced in their farm's formal address. From there, the journey continued
another
forty-five minutes north, passing perpetual fields of conventional grain that seemed to stretch forever.

This was the point at which, on my first visit to the Crabtrees' farm, I instinctively pulled out my phone to make sure I was still on the right track. And then I had to laugh at myself. Where exactly did I think I was going to get a cell signal from? Heaven? More out of inertia than faith, I kept going, hoping for some sort of landmark. And then, just before the Canadian border, the uniform landscape erupted into a succession of distinct, multicolored strips. Here it was, the only organic farm for miles around, home to a good portion of Timeless Seeds' Black Beluga lentils.
Looking for all the world like a garden that had somehow fallen into a magnifying glass and emerged as a 1,280-acre farmstead, the Crabtrees' operation was the most labor-intensive I'd seen yet. So I was astonished to learn that Doug and Anna both had full-time office jobs. They were raising more than a dozen crops—on the
weekend.

A P
H
D WITH A DIRTY SECRET

It was the fifth official day of summer in Hill County, and Doug Crabtree and Anna Jones-Crabtree's crops were beginning to reach ankle height. Doug and Anna were pleased to see that all sixteen of them appeared to have established reasonably well, including the Black Beluga lentils, which had started sporting nitrogen-fixing nodules a couple of weeks ago. Four seasons into farming this 1,280-acre spread, the Crabtrees were still working hard to improve the soil. They weren't there yet, but the nutrient base they'd built up was beginning to bear fruit. Or rather, it was giving forth a cornucopia of grains, legumes, and oilseeds. “Nodules, little baby nodules!” Anna crowed excitedly, as the Crabtrees scouted their lentil crop. “That is the most magical thing in the world,” Doug agreed.

Closer to Canada than it is to the nearest town, the Crabtrees' dizzyingly diverse farm is cold, windy, and smack-dab in the middle of nowhere. Aside from a few conventional farming neighbors, the only thing around is an abandoned air force base. The shadow of the spooky surveillance radar station doesn't look like the most auspicious place to launch a bold model for the future of dryland farming. But fortysomethings Doug and Anna have a track record of assiduously avoiding easy roads. Sometimes, the Crabtrees
have found themselves navigating life's potholes out of necessity. If Doug's family farm hadn't gone bankrupt in the eighties, he might still be tending one of the largest cash-grain operations in Ohio. On the other hand, he might not. The main reason Doug and Anna are out here seeding the north forty appears to be their sheer stubbornness. Headstrong even for Montana, the Crabtrees share an unflinching commitment to the gold standard of green living.

Unlike cautiously politic Casey Bailey, I quickly learned, Doug and Anna made no apologies about sticking their noses in other people's business. In her off-farm life, Anna was a sustainable operations director for a federal agency, and she wasn't afraid to tell managers to change their procurement policies or power down their computers over the weekend. Doug was a veteran organic inspector who had observed and evaluated hundreds of farms and processing facilities throughout the northern plains—candidly.

In fact, it was Doug's job that had put Dave Oien on the Crabtrees' radar. As director of the state of Montana's organic certification program, Doug had been among the first to learn that Timeless Seeds had moved into a new facility in Ulm and was seeking new growers. He and Anna had been talking for years about buying a farm, and they could envision how it might come together—diverse rotations, high-value specialty crops, ecological management. Unfortunately, the farm the Crabtrees saw in their mind's eye was sort of like the maddeningly elusive picture on top of a puzzle box—upon opening the box, they'd had difficulty finding the right pieces to construct their intended whole. The right land. The right financing. The right markets. Trying to find all these pieces at once was a daunting proposition, and it didn't help to be organic. But the expansion of Timeless Seeds—a local
company that actually wanted to buy the stuff the Crabtrees wanted to grow—was like that key corner piece that made it seem feasible to assemble the rest of the jumble into a workable picture. The Crabtrees took an epic road trip, scouting available land as far north as Alberta and as far east as North Dakota. At long last, in 2009, they closed on two sections of land, twenty-four miles north of Havre. Doug and Anna named their new place Vilicus Farms, after the Latin word for farmer, or rather the
other
Latin word for farmer. Most Latin textbooks used
agricola,
which translated to English as “one who labors on the land,” Doug explained. But he and Anna preferred
vilicus,
which more nearly described their notion of a farmer: One who
belonged
to the land and was honor bound to care for it.

Sporting Carhartt jeans and two layers of fleece, Anna admired the subtle early-season stirrings of her austere surroundings. Waxing poetic over the smallest signs of life in her sleepy-looking field, she noted a ladybug clinging to a delicate blossom. “Isn't it beautiful here?” she exclaimed.

I had to laugh. Getting out in nature on the weekends is the big prize for professionals like Anna who land plum jobs in the heart of Big Sky Country. But for reasons her officemates still struggled to fathom, Anna had skipped over the world-class wilderness available just minutes from her desk in Helena and instead invested her upper-middle-class income in the opportunity to drive 250 miles every weekend to “farm camp.” While her friends enjoyed lakeside cabins and mountain ski chalets, Anna delighted
in the musty rental where she and Doug had spent all their free time for the past four years. Tall and confident, Anna juggled a farm, a full-time job, and a very active presence on the Timeless Seeds board.

When she'd joined the Timeless board in 2010, Anna had pushed Dave to think beyond the farm to the food system. Could the company improve the sustainability of its products at other points in their life cycle? Where were the bottlenecks in the operation? Could Timeless eliminate them by bringing more capacity in-house? Anna celebrated when the business finally got its first state-of-the-art color sorter in January 2012, thanks to a particularly supportive distributor who financed it. There was a definite whiz-bang factor to this gadget, which used an electric eye to identify off-color lentils and sort them out of the batch with a mighty puff of compressed air. But the color sorter was also an essential component of the Timeless production chain. The truth was, when farmers delivered their Black Belugas to the plant in Ulm, they weren't all black. Inevitably, some portion of the lentils had split open, revealing their yellow insides—and there was almost always some errant wheat and barley in the batch as well. The chefs who were popularizing Timeless Seeds' nitrogen-rich legumes as haute cuisine were paying for black lentils, not yellow ones, and they were unlikely to appreciate it if their order contained complimentary wheat and barley seed. So, before shipping its product out to customers, Timeless had to sort out any lentils that weren't picture-perfect—and anything that wasn't a lentil.

At first, the company had struggled along with the only machines they could afford—a leased color sorter from Costa Rica and a used model they bought from a friend in Canada—both of which were in constant need of repair. Then they'd gotten a lucky
break: A nearby grain plant had installed its own 500,000-dollar color sorter and agreed to work in Timeless product on a fee-for-service basis. But there, to Anna's consternation, the lentils had languished—sometimes for months. Since the Timeless color-sorting order was such a minor part of the larger processor's business, it was not a priority, which meant Dave's entire inventory rested on when—and whether—things at the other facility happened to be slow. So it was a huge relief to both Anna and Dave when Timeless installed a machine of its own, one that actually worked. Now that Timeless had its own color sorter, they could separate Black Belugas from cracked Belugas themselves, whenever they needed to. It seemed like a trivial victory, but with every added measure of self-determination, the lentil underground gained more ability to focus on its mission.

Pulling apart leaves and digging up roots, Anna herded three spirited Jack Russell terriers, matching the nervy dogs' unflagging energy with her running narrative of observations. The lentil scout's long blond hair was pulled back in braids, and she was wearing work gloves so she could use every spare moment to pull a few weeds. Accustomed to making things happen, Anna epitomized the expression “hands-on.” Sure, she could earn a comfortable living sitting behind a desk churning out spreadsheets, but she'd rather be driving a tractor and running a grease gun.

Doug Crabtree was even more in love with this place than his wife was. Having spent two decades on other people's farms—as a tenant, researcher, and organic inspector—he was overjoyed to be tilling ground of his very own. “Overjoyed” was probably a better adjective for Anna than it was for Doug, who spoke in a deliberate Ohio drawl (if, indeed, there is such a thing). The stockier, more staid Crabtree didn't wear his excitement on his sleeve
to quite the extent that his wife did. But the intensity of Anna's running commentary was reflected in her husband's piercing gaze. Together, they made an imposing duo.

The Crabtrees' color-coded field maps and detailed rotation spreadsheet hinted at Doug's day job: organic certification program manager for the Montana Department of Agriculture. In 1999, a first-term state senator from Big Sandy named Jon Tester had carried a bill to create a state-administered certification program, and Doug had been hired to build and manage it. The veteran organic inspector's first day in his new Helena office had been a bit of a culture shock—not so much for Doug as for his colleagues. At first, they'd felt right at home with the midwestern farm product, who'd seemed like a regular steak-and-gravy kind of guy. But when the staff hit the break room at noon, Doug had whipped out a meal unlike anything they'd ever seen, full of dubious vegetables and exotic spices. “Nobody steals my lunch, because they don't know what it is,” Doug told me. “They ask, though, because it smells so good.” A decade later, Doug's colleagues still weren't sure what to think of his lunch, but they had to respect his management acumen. Having seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of agricultural record keeping, Doug clearly took pride in Vilicus Farms' tidy, precise system.

According to the Crabtrees' map, their farm was divided into sixty-eight strips, separated by pollinator plantings that provided habitat for native bees. Each strip had been seeded according to its cropping history and soil conditions, with the typical sequence proceeding from spring grain to green manure to fall grain to oilseed to edible legume. Since Vilicus Farms averaged a minuscule
11.47 inches of annual precipitation, the Crabtrees' primary goal with this rotation was to build soil organic matter to better hold precious water. Replenishing nutrients and organic matter came in a close second, hence all the legumes and green manures (preferably less thirsty varieties). As I'd discovered when trying to make cell phone calls from the Crabtrees' fields, it was quite windy north of Havre, so the crop sequence also served to reduce erosion. Finally, cycling through so many species kept the bugs and the weeds from getting too comfortable. Doug and Anna rattled off several more reasons why it was agronomically advisable to seed this or that crop—saline seep, songbirds, soil carbon—but that was all gravy.

For the 2012 season, the Crabtrees were using sixteen different plants to accomplish this series of lofty objectives, but they'd selected this year's planting from a staggering twenty-four-crop repertoire identified in their rotation plan. As the document acknowledged, the future of any one of the Crabtrees' strips could shift according to an ever-fluctuating cast of variables: nitrogen levels, weed pressure, rainfall—and, of course, markets.

At ten thirty
P.M.
, a Honda hybrid with
TIMELSS
plates rolled into farm camp. It was Dave Oien—a bit later than expected, but bearing a carton of organic eggs and a fresh batch of granola. Timeless Seeds' CEO had made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Conrad to conduct the first field visit of the 2012 season and negotiate contracts for the three crops he was buying from Vilicus Farms: emmer, flax, and Black Beluga lentils. Although Anna, Doug, and Dave unanimously voted to save the business conversations for morning,
they couldn't resist launching into a discussion over a late-night snack. The impassioned exchange crystallized the tensions of transitioning from underground movement to aboveground enterprise.

Dave had just returned from a trade show in China, and he was excited about a potential Asian buyer for one of his pulse crops. “I think the pea deal might work out,” he told the Crabtrees, cheerfully.