Lentil Underground (20 page)

FROM THE WEEDS TO THE WHITE HOUSE

On Friday, July 13, 2012, Casey Bailey hosted Timeless Seeds' annual field day and barbecue, his first major farm tour. Sweating his way through the scorching, humid affair, the thirty-two-year-old farmer was feeling the heat in more ways than one. It made Casey nervous to put his farm on display, just four years into his organic transition. The hot weather had thrown the Baileys' weeds into overdrive, and Casey couldn't shake the feeling that his fields were a bit too messy to debut, even among friends. He'd noticed that his crops were maturing quickly too, maybe a little too quickly, and he feared this historically droughty season might turn out to be a total loss. Several of Casey's neighbors had already concluded as much and weren't even planning to attempt a harvest.

The difference between Casey and his neighbors, however, was that conventional commodity farmers could typically count on federal crop insurance to keep them running in the black, even if they didn't have a single grain of wheat to show for the thousands of acres they'd seeded. That insurance—along with other federal programs tailored to incentivize a small handful of industrial commodities—played a much larger role in farmers' risk analysis than their guesses at the weather. Drought
sounded like a natural disaster, but it wasn't wholly natural, or necessarily a disaster. Truth be told, the word lent an air of inevitability to a complex problem that was partly the result of its own “solution.”

The problem known as drought was not just a matter of annual rainfall totals. It was created partially by industrial farming practices, which reduced soil water holding capacity over time, so that crops were more vulnerable to water stress in dry years. Unfortunately, these were the same industrial practices that helped farmers qualify for federal support programs that partially sheltered their
income
from the ups and downs of climate. Perversely, the ecological and economic strategies for weathering drought were working at cross-purposes.

Looking ahead to a lifetime of managing his family's farm, Casey knew he shouldn't waste too much time worrying about exactly when the rain was going to stop. That was obviously going to happen several times over the life of any central Montana farm, so what did it matter whether it was this year or next? The real question was how to create the right economic and policy incentives, such that farmers could plan for this inevitable climatic uncertainty. Why not reward people for planting drought-resilient crops and building up their organic matter to increase soil water retention? At the very least, they shouldn't be encouraged—often against their better judgment—to seed varieties that were almost guaranteed to regularly fail.

Much as Casey appreciated his fellow growers' suggestions about farming practices that might help him control his weeds and conserve moisture, it was these larger policy issues he really wanted to dig into. Escorting his guests out of his sweltering lentil field and back to the relative cool of the garage, Casey invited them to tuck into some barbecue. Once they'd loaded their plates
with grass-fed burgers and farm-to-table potluck dishes, the Timeless growers and their guests started talking shop.

“We farmers tend to focus on our operation first, but it really is important to share that experience with our national and state politicians,” Casey encouraged his fellow growers. “They're there for us. At least they should be. And they can be if we speak up.”

Casey was particularly concerned that no one was representing people like himself, whose lives and farms were “not black and white.” He had vocal friends on both sides of the so-called national food fight—zealous urban community gardeners and proud conventional grain growers—but the space in between was a veritable echo chamber. It was uncomfortable to be the organic farmer who was still using diesel-based tillage, or the conventional producer who'd cut his herbicide use to nearly—but not quite—nothing. Since these folks didn't see their systems in progress as ideal, they tended to be very humble. And very silent. “The loudest voices in the organic movement are definitely not coming from the gray areas,” Casey observed, “because when you get in the gray areas, you get quieter. But we need to have a voice.”

If anybody in this crowd was determined to amplify the lentil underground's political voice, it was Doug Crabtree and Anna Jones-Crabtree. At least every couple of years, the pair marched straight into the offices of their elected officials in Washington, DC, as part of the “Farmer Fly-Ins” organized by groups like the Center for Rural Affairs, the Organic Trade Association, and the Farmers Union. Doug and Anna were also applying for every federal program they could possibly qualify for, convinced that each
application presented an educational opportunity as well as a financial one. Rather than modify their farm system to fit the programs, as so many farmers had done to qualify for commodity payments, the Crabtrees were determined to use their farm as the starting point of the discussion—and challenge the agencies to improve on their models. Sustainable agriculture was a better form of stewardship than bare fallow, they told the NRCS, as part of their application for the Conservation Stewardship Program. Organic farming was a promising means of economic development, they encouraged the Environmental Protection Agency, volunteering to serve as a pilot site for the EPA's new Economy, Energy, and Environment program, in partnership with local extension agents.

Anna's fellow farmers weren't surprised to hear that a relatively progressive environmental agency was supportive of organic agriculture. But the fact that the Crabtrees were partnering with the extension service was newsworthy. A handful of agents had enthusiastically participated in AERO trainings and Farm Improvement Club field days, but the service as a whole still had a reputation for being skeptical of organic methods. Of course, they weren't nearly as bad as the no-till boosters at the Natural Resources Conservation Service. How was Anna faring with them? her fellow Timeless growers wanted to know.

Overall, NRCS had actually been pretty good to work with, Anna answered, acknowledging that it had taken some effort for both parties. She and Doug had sunk a lot of time into patient conversations with the agency, but it had paid off. The Crabtrees had received substantial funding for their ecological practices from both the Conservation Stewardship Program and another NRCS initiative called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP. Established in the 1996 Farm Bill, EQIP took a more proactive approach than previous conservation programs. Instead of
paying people to leave their land alone, EQIP provided cost share to farmers who wanted to actively care for it—by planting windbreaks, for example, or buffer strips for wildlife. In 2008, the program had even begun offering cost share specifically to support organic conversion.

Plus, the local NRCS scientists who'd been receptive to the Crabtrees' ideas had made some real progress at the pollinator workshop, Anna reported. The partnership the Crabtrees were participating in—between NRCS and the nonprofit Xerces Society—was helping move the agency toward more organic-friendly policies. If a proposed grant came through, the pollinator conservation nonprofit would be helping NRCS rewrite some of their practices to better include organic systems, with Vilicus Farms as one of the pilot sites. “Really, a lot of those USDA programs that were in the Farm Bill have helped us, so those are important,” Anna commented, hoping to plant seeds of advocacy among her more reticent fellows.

Anna's comment got her husband, Doug, going on another federal program that was ripe for reform: the commodity checkoff. Like all farmers, Doug explained, organic growers were contributing to checkoff programs for whatever commodity they raised—wheat, barley, beef. But all this money went to marketing conventional grain, conventional meat. Doug's deep voice made for a hilariously faithful imitation of the Beef Council's ubiquitous television ad, “Beef, It's What's for Dinner.” Having gotten his fellow farmers' attention, he asked if they knew who had paid for all those beef ads. Do you raise cattle? Doug asked, eliciting several nods. “Then you paid for it,” Doug finished. “That was the checkoff.”

If organic growers could opt out of those commodity checkoffs and pool that money into a multicommodity fund of their own,
Doug explained, that would add up to 30 million dollars for organic research and marketing. Imagine a clever organic lentil spot running on Super Bowl Sunday! But that policy change would require at least two amendments to the Farm Bill, so they'd better start calling their representatives.

Of course, a checkoff-supported marketing fund—organic or otherwise—would only help people who had a crop to sell. Sooner or later, every one of these farmers knew they would hit a bad year or a drought. Most of them had already lost a harvest to “the great white combine”: hail. The scariest thing about converting to diversified organic production was that there was no solid fallback plan. “The reason we farm like we do out here,” Casey explained, pointing to the herbicide-resistant Clearfield wheat that his dad had planted on the Baileys' remaining conventional acreage, “is the safety net. If this crop fails, we've got crop insurance. But if my organic crops fail, that's a big risk.”

Grain farmers have long joked that they are “farming the government” rather than the land, and as Casey's remark indicated, they haven't had much choice. The key to their livelihoods lies in aligning their management with farm programs, even if they know it's not the most prudent way to coax food from soil. Like Orville Oien, Casey's dad understood this economy, and he knew his best bet was to stick with the protocol that brought the money in, crop or no crop. That protocol, of course, was dictated by federal and state law, which was why Casey had invited several nonorganic neighbors to this tour. He needed to get them on board.

“I want to be an organic farmer who's respected by
conventional farmers,” Casey said emphatically. “I want to make this work for all of us. It's going to take changing subsidies and crop insurance. It's these policies—and there are so many power players involved—that really steer what we do out here, that make our landscape look like it does.”

Support for farming organic legumes had improved markedly since Dave had started doing it thirty years earlier. In the 2012 Farm Bill, the USDA had finally rolled out a whole farm revenue insurance program. Now that it was possible to insure lentils—as well as a number of other diverse crops—the Crabtrees were planning to sign up. “We spend more on crop insurance than fuel,” Doug told me. “It's our biggest expense.” Still, Doug and Anna couldn't cover their rye, and the insurance available for several of their other crops wasn't that great. As Jerry Habets had explained to me when I'd oohed and aahed over his intercrop, buckwheat could be insured only under the oxymoronically titled Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program. “It's basically little to nothing,” Jerry told me.

Plus, like the existing checkoff program and Montana State's enterprise analysis, all these federal insurance options assumed that each field contained only one crop. I got an earful about that from the guy who'd brought his grass-fed burger to the barbecue, Timeless grower Jess Alger. Jess ran an integrated farm and livestock operation fifty miles south of the Baileys in Stanford, Montana, and like Jerry Habets, he used intercrops—sometimes even spontaneous ones.

“We had a whole bunch of winter wheat coming up in the peas,” Jess told me, “so we left it for the winter wheat. By the time the winter wheat got ripe, well, then the peas had climbed on the wheat, so we had about half wheat and half peas. Well, that was a hassle with the federal crop insurance. They were not impressed.
‘Well, you called it peas.' ‘Well, yeah, it is.' ‘Well, you've got wheat.' ‘Well, yes we do.' . . . On and on, it was, round and round and round we went.” Since it wasn't immediately clear which of his plants was
the
crop,
Jess had the insurance adjusters thoroughly flummoxed.

Timeless growers like Jess Alger continued to press their representatives in DC to provide better insurance for their crops, but what they needed even more urgently was better insurance for themselves. It wasn't a conversation these proud farmers tended to initiate, but health care posed the single biggest economic risk for most of the people who were at the barbecue.

Jess was lucky: As a retired Air National Guard member, he was eligible for federal Tricare. But when he'd lost a kneecap several years earlier, he hadn't had any coverage. The surgery he'd needed had cost 5,000 dollars, which had been a major hardship for the penny-pinching rancher. Even more worrisome for Jess had been the fact that his other knee had also been weakened by his injury, so he was pretty sure he'd need the same procedure again in a few years. But by that time, Jess had been covered by Tricare, which cost him just 233 dollars a year. The federal insurance policy had paid for every cent of Jess's second operation.