Lentil Underground (22 page)

Like the NRCS, the Conservation Reserve Program had been formed in response to concerns about erosion. Originally launched as a minor part of the USDA Soil Bank Program in the 1950s, CRP got going in earnest when the heartland started hemorrhaging topsoil thirty years later, following a decade of “fencerow to fencerow” farming. While Dave Oien offered his desperate neighbors
legumes, the 1985 Farm Bill had tempted them with something far more attractive: cash money. Concerned that too much land was being farmed, the federal government had revamped CRP, offering to lease “highly erodible” parcels to keep them out of production. All farmers had to do was establish permanent vegetative cover, and they would get a check every year. The program had been rightly celebrated as a triumphant case of voluntary resource conservation—it had significantly reduced erosion. But it had also become a victim of its own success, at the expense of rural communities.

Whether or not they were conservation minded, drought-weary growers had flocked to the CRP's guaranteed income, and the acreage enrolled in the program had ballooned. Within a few years, a far greater share of rural America (and nearly all of the state of Montana) had been classified as “highly erodible,” and Congress had added several new means of qualifying for conservation reserve status as well. Wetlands, saline seep, and wildlife habitat were all grounds for a conservation lease, and the 1996 Farm Bill even allowed farmers to enroll sensitive ground that had been cropped for two of the previous five years—a pretty low bar in a region where many growers fallowed every other season.

Congress had bumped the “heavy cropping” requirement up to four years out of six in 2002—since people had been buying land and farming it for two years just to qualify for CRP. But by then, the basic character of the program had been established. With the federal government paying higher rent than the going rate for cropping, conservation had become the highest and best use of agricultural property. It didn't matter if the land was highly erodible or not. The economical thing to do was to put it in CRP.

You couldn't blame CRP for the fact that it had to operate
within the increasingly absurd context of the American food system, but clearly, the program was suffering from some unintended consequences. In the absence of a thoughtfully legislated social safety net, inventive American farmers had repurposed the federal conservation initiative into rural America's de facto retirement program. Anna Jones-Crabtree didn't begrudge her neighbors for hanging up their farm hats in their golden years, but it bugged her that so many CRP checks were being spent outside the rural economies that had sustained those farmers for most of their lives. “It's ridiculous,” Anna Jones-Crabtree exclaimed. “You should not have a program that pays people to take their entire farms out and take the money to Arizona.”

Although the CRP might have good intentions of combating soil erosion, Anna felt, the program was partially responsible for another form of erosion, painfully evident across the grain belt: the attrition of farmers and farming knowledge. A lot of young people didn't know how to farm anymore, Anna explained, because their parents had left the family tractor idle in the shed while they sat on fifteen-year CRP leases. The standards for “vegetative cover” in the early years of the CRP program had been fairly minimal, so it was entirely possible that some of this farmland would actually have been better off under the management of diversified organic farmers like the Crabtrees. “You can't tell me that CRP that has almost no diversity in its grass mixture is really providing any more wildlife habitat or care than our farm,” she argued. “I don't know for certain, but I'd like to see some studies on that.”

Five-year-old Kale O'Halloran cut this discussion short, bouncing into Anna a step ahead of older brothers Lucas and Quin, who were tracking the green beacon of Kale's John Deere cap in hot pursuit. Parents Brandon and Mariah followed, walking. The thirty-three-year-old music teacher and thirty-two-year-old homesteader mom were too hot to chase after their sons, but they were glad to see the boys burning off some steam. The family had spent much of the summer meticulously weeding the emmer they were growing for Timeless, whose founding farmers were longtime acquaintances of Mariah's dad, Scott Lohmuller.

Although Kale didn't know it, the boisterous five-year-old had landed his parents in an all-too-familiar conversation. The Conservation Reserve Program was a sore subject for the O'Hallorans—the main reason the family had been living in what amounted to farm limbo. Brandon's family owned 3,000 acres in the Shields Valley, south of Bozeman, where both Brandon and Mariah had grown up. Brandon's folks had separated, and none of his siblings or cousins wanted to take over the farm, so the family had taken the land out of production and put it in CRP. Brandon and Mariah were itching to farm and had offered to step in. But Brandon's relatives balked. They were making more money off the CRP lease than Brandon and Mariah could afford to pay as organic producers, and they were not particularly eager to take a pay cut.

So instead, Brandon and Mariah were doing their best to improvise a farm system on the 160 acres they
did
have access to: the spurge-challenged parcel attached to the place where Mariah's parents had retired, on the outskirts of Lewistown. The weedy
suburban farm was both too much and too little for the young family: too much work and too little income. To make ends meet, Brandon directed choir for the Lewistown Public Schools, which meant it was often dark by the time he made it out to check his crop. The O'Hallorans' agricultural methods might have been sustainable, but their lives were not.

Frustrated with the challenges of part-time farming, Brandon and Mariah had started talking to other growers in the Timeless network about the need to overhaul the Conservation Reserve Program. Without a policy change, the O'Hallorans worried, they'd never have a farm of their own. “We can't compete with the federal government,” Mariah told me. “What—thirty bucks an acre? There's no way; we just can't do it.”

“Do you have a commercial driver's license?” Casey Bailey asked Brandon, changing the subject. Having discovered that the friendly band director had grown up on an operation much like his own, Casey had started scheming up a plan. He chuckled to himself, recalling the day he and his college buddy had perplexed a nearby rancher with their harvesttime bebop. A trio would really keep his neighbors guessing.

“Oh, sure,” Brandon answered nonchalantly. “We did a bunch of custom haying when I was a kid, and I would haul the swather.” In fact, the O'Hallorans' swather—the machine that leveled their neighbors' fields of alfalfa into neat rows of hay—was just the first of many things Brandon had hauled around. He'd driven talc for mining companies in college, and for a couple of years he'd made some extra cash building roads.

Casey was sold. “Can you come back up here for harvest in
about ten days?” he asked. Brandon brightened. Helping with the Baileys' crop would keep him from dwelling on that CRP lease on his family's land. Plus, Casey's fields really were looking good this year. Whether it was the scrupulous youngster's diligent weeding or a streak of meteorological luck, it appeared that all those diverse plants were going to generate an impressive bounty.

Still, as the mercury climbed, it became clear that central Montana was in the throes of a particularly punishing drought. In the company of his fellow Timeless growers, Casey felt good about the bet he'd placed, on the long-term ecological wisdom of organic rotations, rather than the short-term protection offered by the conventional farm industry and its system of subsidies. But as he said good-bye to his guests, Casey began to wonder about this wager. Would his lentils make
it?

THE MOMENT OF TRUTH

On a scorching afternoon in late July, I returned to the Bailey place, hoping to lend a hand. Casey and the crew were in full swing, scrambling to cut all their crops before Mother Nature beat them to it.

As soon as I turned off on Clearlake Road, I saw Casey in his combine. “Everything's coming on at once,” his girlfriend, Kelsey, told me, pressing a glass of water into my hand. “Peas, lentils, hay.” Casey and his college friend Bob were cutting peas at the moment, Kelsey explained, and then they'd need to clean out the combine before they could get to the lentils. “We go until two
A.M.
sometimes at Casey's,” Bob admitted, as I rode along for a few passes of the pea harvest. I noticed he'd stashed a sandwich and some chocolate in the cab.

The crew worked until eleven that night, and they were back at it right away the next morning, even though it was a Sunday. While his buddy gathered the last of the peas, Casey tried to decide what to harvest next. He was tempted to try the spelt (the ancient grain he rotated with lentils), but the stand hadn't matured evenly. Some of the seed heads looked perfect, probably just a day or two shy of falling off the stalk. And yet, other plants looked as if they could use another week to soak up the plentiful sunshine.
Not sure what to do, the fledgling organic farmer asked his dad. Bob Bailey had never even heard of spelt until his son started growing it, but he'd had to make this kind of call every summer of his life—and Casey trusted his judgment.

“Looking out here, it looks ripe,” Bob said to his son.

“Will the combine cut it?” Casey asked. He was worried because there was still a lot of “green” in the crop—it didn't seem to be quite dried down.

“Well, you're here now,” Bob said, “and it might hail tomorrow night. How tough is the straw? How dry was it last year?”

“Well, last year we swathed it, so it's hard to judge,” Casey answered. Swathing—the method typically used to cut hay—was a good option for growers who were nervous about too much moisture in their grain. Swathers cut plants off at the stems, leaving a neat windrow to dry in the sun until the combine gathered it up. But this two-step process required an extra pass through the field, which was both expensive and time-consuming. And if it rained, you were screwed.

“Shoot, I think I'd cut it if it was mine,” Bob said, careful to phrase his advice in a way that emphasized Casey's role as the decision maker.

“Why don't you jump on the combine with me,” Casey suggested. “Let's cut a little bit and see how we feel.”

Kelsey watched the father-son team take off slowly down the row, Casey's brow furrowed in concentration. “He definitely gets stressed-out during harvest,” she sighed. As the duo made their way back toward us a few minutes later, however, the younger Bailey's expression had completely transformed. The spelt was ready all right, and it was a bumper crop. “This stuff is crazy,” Casey gushed. “That's a full load just down and back.”

Kelsey and I hustled to clean out a bin for the prolific ancient
grain, which was evidently going to get harvested right now. The hesitation of a moment ago had been replaced with an exuberant sense of urgency. “We should be able to finish all the spelt today if we run both combines,” Casey calculated, already revving up for another pass.

As Casey's dad had reminded him, the forecast was calling for showers sometime in the next twenty-four hours—maybe even hail. A perfectly ripe crop was an attractive target for north-central Montana's great white combine, so the Baileys were anxious to get that abundant spelt safely stashed. The crew took a quick meal break just before five, anticipating a long evening. When I went to bed at ten thirty, they were still cutting, their headlights illuminating the field.

I barely glimpsed Casey on his way out the door the next morning, a piece of Kamut bread in his hand as he raced back out to the combine. Last evening's rainstorm had passed him by, but he knew today could be an entirely different story. “We finished the field of spelt and it filled the bin exactly,” he told me, not pausing to rest on his laurels. “Today we'll go look at another field to see if that's ready.” I had a ranch tour to attend, so I bid farewell to the Bailey harvest crew for the next couple of days, wishing them clear skies.

By the time I got back to Fort Benton, forty-eight hours later, Casey had a whole new set of issues on his mind. “We were halfway done with the lentils and the combine broke down,” he said dejectedly. “Those French Greens look so good.” Once again, Casey found himself at the mercy of Mother Nature. Until he could get his precious seeds squirreled away, they were subject to the vicissitudes of Chouteau County's unpredictable climate.

“My emotions just go like this during harvest,” Casey sighed, making dramatic up-and-down motions with his calloused hands. “I'm happy, but I'd be happier if I was cutting lentils.” And yet, he had a million things to do in the meantime, Casey reminded himself. Rather than lose precious moments to worry, he jogged off to start haying, making a mental note to check in with Brandon O'Halloran. Following up on the conversation he'd had with Casey at his farm tour, the fellow Timeless grower had made good on his promise to lend a hand with the Baileys' harvest, and he was now busy helping Casey's dad bring in the family's conventional grain.

But before he could make it out of the driveway, Casey spied a familiar compact hybrid coming toward him, with its telltale
TIMELSS
plates. It was Dave Oien, of course (who else would arrive at the precise moment when things were in their most chaotic state of disarray), but he wasn't alone. A broad-shouldered man in a collared white shirt stepped out of the vehicle that had been tailing Dave, and vigorously shook Casey's hand. By now, Casey knew how to recognize a prospective Timeless buyer on a field trip, and he pivoted deftly into tour-guide mode. The broad-shouldered man wanted to know how many bushels of peas the Bailey Farm was going to bring in this year, and he liked to get his information firsthand. His Connecticut-based company was interested in brokering the deal Dave had told Doug and Anna about in June—shipping Montana-grown peas to China for nutritional supplements.

“Did you get your combine fixed?” Dave asked his protégé, while the pea dealer checked out Casey's samples. The veteran farmer was as nervous as his greenhorn grower about the delay of the lentil harvest. Timeless Seeds had one other French Green producer this year, but the drought was so bad at his place that the crop was likely to fail. If the Baileys got hailed out, Dave would have to spend
the next twelve months explaining to broad-shouldered, white-collared businessmen why he couldn't supply the popular variety. “They're flying in the part tomorrow morning,” Casey reported reassuringly. “We'll be back at it before lunch.”

Casey Bailey would break down three times in his lentils, but he escaped the threat of hail and ended up with a bin-busting crop. I first heard the news from Dave, when I went by the Timeless plant in late October to get a rundown on the 2012 season. By the time I arrived, central Montana was cloaked in a billowy layer of snow. but since this year's harvest was complete, that was okay. With the fruits of their labor stashed safely in their elevators, Timeless Seeds' farmers could finally take a deep breath. The CEO's peak season, however, was just getting started.

When I rolled into Ulm at eleven o'clock on that crisp fall morning, the Timeless parking lot was full. Operations manager Leni Yeager greeted me at the door, pausing midstride to give me a hug in the lobby before racing back to the hard-hat zone. Peering after her, I caught a glimpse of Loren Nicholls, who was busy cleaning what appeared to be emmer. A few paces beyond him, Jason Roberts was packaging product to ship out on the FedEx truck. Even the gentle former Peace Corps volunteer who used the Timeless facilities on a work-trade basis had gotten caught up in the hectic pace. The fair trade rice importer, Mary Hensley, was whirring away on her computer.

Amid all the commotion, Dave had somehow found the time to talk to a University of Montana environmental studies major, who was conducting an interview for a class project. “We started in 1986, just four farmers,” I could hear him cheerfully narrating for
the millionth time. When the student researcher began asking about net and gross and pounds of product, I piggybacked on the conversation, anxious to hear about this year's yields. I'd spent the past couple of months back on my own campus—in Berkeley, California—and I'd been hearing dire news about crop loss in the grain belt. Eighty percent of US agricultural land had experienced drought in 2012, the most extensive dry spell since the 1950s. According to some projections, the future of American farming was in doubt. “How was the crop?” I asked Dave, preparing for the worst.

“Jon Tester brought us some beautiful purple barley,” the Timeless CEO raved, surprising me, “and Jody's lentils were really nice.”

“So the Manuels' plants had successfully developed nitrogen-fixing nodules after all?” I asked, relieved to be starting the conversation on a happy note.

“Yep, Jody's lentils kicked in,” Dave answered. “Nine hundred pounds per acre, which is more than four times what he got the year before. Unfortunately, the driver he hired for harvest turned his farm truck over. Jody called me—it wasn't the middle of the night, exactly, but it was pretty late. I picked up the phone and Jody said, ‘What should I do? My hired man tipped the truck over.'” Not only had the hired man spilled four hundred bushels of lentils, Jody divulged, but he'd been hauling them across pasture, so the Manuels' cattle were presently chowing down on this unexpected midnight snack.

Dave had counseled Jody through the process of shooing away the cows and salvaging about half of the Black Belugas. Now Crystal was joking with all her Timeless buddies about how much the cows had enjoyed their “lentil cereal.” Once they'd developed a taste for those gourmet Black Belugas, Crystal quipped, they'd become “lentil junkies.” In fact, the Manuels' herd had been so
desperate for another lentil fix that they'd broken into the pigpen. Jody and Crystal had been feeding their pigs lentil “screenings”—rejects from the cleaning process at the Timeless plant—so that the hogs would be accustomed to a legume diet by the time the Manuels turned them out in the cover crop cocktail. The cows had sniffed out their new favorite food, tromped right through the pigs' fence, and feasted.

“Maybe you had the right idea from the beginning, huh?” I teased Dave, as we cracked up over Crystal's legume-crazed cattle. Central Montana's original Black Beluga farmer had of course fed the same lentil chow to his own cows—on purpose—back when he was the only one in the area experimenting with Canadian plant breeder Al Slinkard's “Indianhead” variety. “Yep,” Dave said. “But that's an expensive cattle ration these days.” As Dave's voice got more solemn, I braced myself again. Perhaps now I'd get the story of the drought, I thought, trying to formulate a polite question about how much money Timeless had lost this year. But Dave was already on to another upbeat story.