Lentil Underground (12 page)

THE CONVERT

Three dry years at the turn of the millennium had left barley farmer Jerry Habets desperately searching for answers. Bankrupt, divorced, and about to lose his family's eighty-seven-year-old homestead, Jerry tried the Bible. Then he went to a psychic. And then he went organic.

It wasn't like Jerry had never heard of organic farming. In fact, he had known about David Oien all his life. The Timeless CEO's famously unkempt homestead was just thirteen miles down the road from the Habets place. And since Dave and his cousin Tom were the only farmers in this town of 2,600 people who were intentionally planting weeds in their fields, word got around. Nineteen-year-old Jerry had raised his eyebrows when he'd seen Dave take the Oiens' land out of malt barley. He thought his neighbor was nuts.

And yet, by the turn of the millennium, the mysterious lentil entrepreneur was looking a little less crazy, having managed to get Timeless Seeds products on the shelves at several retailers and in the hands of a rising Montana chef recently featured in
Bon Appétit.
Dave's bumper-sticker odes to sustainable agriculture—“I (heart) Cover Crops” and “Real Farmers Have Green Manure”—no longer seemed quite so countercultural as they had in the late
seventies. Back then, organics had been, as Jerry put it, “pretty far out there.” But now, “Got Organic?” bumper stickers were commonplace, and Montana even had a statewide trade organization to support the booming industry: the Montana Organic Association. Jerry went to one of the group's conferences and came back convinced that he should convert. That's how he found himself walking in the door of Timeless Seeds, to talk to David Oien about crops.

“Jerry Habets is a real success story for Timeless Seeds,” Dave told me, as we began to wrap up a late-afternoon interview. My first trip to the Oien place—in 2011—had convinced me that I needed to come back for a longer stint, so I'd returned to Conrad the following summer, packing a voice recorder and a digital camera. Having covered the history of Dave's business, we were now chatting about its current roster of growers, whom Dave was encouraging me to visit. Many of these people were former conventional farmers, Dave told me, and their stories would teach me a thing or two about how difficult it was to change agriculture on just one farm, let alone across an entire region. In order to understand what Timeless had become as the movement went mainstream, Dave told me, I'd need to get in my Subaru and see for myself.

I was reluctant to part company with Dave and Sharon, but I didn't have to drive far. I kicked off my grand tour of lentil farms with a visit to their Conrad neighbor, whose experience epitomized the initial phase of transition. When Jerry Habets had joined the lentil underground, the first change he'd had to make
was both the most critical and the most difficult. He'd had to change his mind.

I met up with Jerry on an early May afternoon, just as central Montana's unforgiving sun was reaching its hottest burn of the day. Drought had struck Conrad again—the worst to hit the Great Plains since the Dust Bowl. But this time Jerry was ready. Outfitted with a ball cap to shade his face and a zip-up sweatshirt in case the wind whipped up, he took me on a pickup tour of his farm, pointing out all the things he'd been doing differently since his conversion to “feeding the soil.”

“I'd gone bankrupt farming conventionally,” Jerry told me, recalling the desperate day when he'd first walked into the Timeless plant. “I didn't have money for chemicals or fertilizers, so that became my transition to organic. I was forced into it financially, but it turned out to be the best thing I ever did. I learned to take care of my soil first, and everything followed from that.”

Jerry's relationship to the soil wasn't an abstract philosophy. The dirt his grandfather first plowed up in 1913 made itself at home on the fifty-six-year-old's red, white, and blue plaid work shirt as though it had been woven right into the design. I knew without asking that Jerry had farmed all his life. And that he hadn't majored in philosophy or religious studies, like Dave. In fact, Jerry had spent just one quarter at Montana State before deciding college wasn't for him.

It wasn't hard to see why Jerry had identified himself, for most of his life, as a conventional farmer. Convention was everywhere I looked. We drove by his grandfather's hundred-year-old barn, its roof finally subdued by last year's fiercest storm. Then we passed
the hundred-year-old church Jerry had walked to as a boy, which his grandfather and thirteen other families had constructed the first year they'd arrived, even before building their own houses. There were several advantages to being a third-generation farmer, Jerry emphasized, citing his deep connection to this place. Jerry admired his forebears for their hard work and cooperative spirit, and he was proud to carry those traditions forward.

And yet, in recent years, Jerry had also become more cognizant of his ancestors' mistakes. From the day they first busted sod with a moldboard plow, the Habets family and their fellow homesteaders had taken too much from the land, without adequately giving back. When Jerry took on that regenerative work as his own responsibility, he'd run smack into the downside of being a third-generation farmer: It was hard to change course.

Change had certainly left its mark on the Habets place—but it was a particular kind of change. His grandfather's church had closed in 1962, Jerry remarked, pointing to the fields all around it to demonstrate what that church had been replaced with. The Habets family had continued going to Sunday services, in another sanctuary, but in many ways this prairie had converted to the modern religion of the heartland: wheat, barley, and 2,4-D. Prayers for rain were replaced with center-pivot irrigation, and the guarantee of a good crop became a function of chemistry rather than divine providence.

Leo Habets had recognized his son's knack for this clean and controlled way of farming, and he had encouraged Jerry to start leasing some of his own acreage when he was just nineteen. Jerry couldn't resist the pull of the land, but he was a little ashamed to be coming home so quickly from Bozeman, where he'd quit college after just a few months. He wondered if he shouldn't be making something of himself in the wider world rather than staying home
to farm. Although he was already bringing in a good crop by his second season, Jerry felt like a yokel compared to his older neighbor David Oien, who lived closer to town and had a college degree. So when Jerry drove by one day and saw a mess of medic in one of the Timeless farmers' plots, he secretly felt a surge of pride. He may have been just a simple farm boy, but he had clean fields.

“I needed to be humbled,” Jerry reflected as we drove past his own weeds, expressing gratitude for the bankruptcy that had forced him to change his ways. Encouraging me to take pictures, he explained just how beneficial wild mustard is for pollinators. In fact, Jerry said, chuckling, the beekeeper he hosted in exchange for honey had been pressing him for his secret. “The bee guy asked me, ‘What is that yellow stuff—the bees are all over it,' and I said, ‘That's a weed!' The old way of doing things is that when you saw a few weeds out there, you went out and you killed them. But weeds are just as good for the soil or better than what you plant out there.”

Now that he, too, was a “weed farmer,” his neighbors had started to look at him like he used to look at Dave Oien, Jerry admitted, grinning. “They think I'm crazy; they're wondering what I'm doing. They have no concept that we're actually feeding organisms in the soil with these weeds we're plowing under. Their idea is if there's anything green out there, you're not a very good farmer. But my intention has changed from making money to growing good-quality, healthy food. I think the soil's happier; I really do. The farm just feels better. It's like it knows I'm not going to pillage.”

Jerry sighed, pointing out the parched, yellowing barley on the place across the road. Yellow leaves mean nitrogen deficiency and disease, he explained. The adjoining farmer had planted too many barley crops in a row, and his yields had been steadily decreasing as a result. Jerry knew it was no use trying to
tell
his hapless neighbor to change his ways. He'd have to do what Dave Oien had done—patiently build his own organic system and wait for conventional growers to come to him, when they eventually
had
to find out why his crops looked so good in a drought year. To learn this humble way of farming, Jerry explained, you needed to be in the right frame of mind. It was a spiritual process, he told me. “It's almost like you have a shift in your faith and then you understand that the other way wasn't the right way to do it. That's not the way Mother Nature wants things to be done.”

A truck approached from the other direction, and Jerry stopped and opened his window to say hello. It was the neighbor, probably the only person Jerry would have seen today if I hadn't been visiting. The affable farmer inquired about Jerry's father's health and told Jerry to congratulate his parents on their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. These two men knew nearly every detail of each other's lives, a no-nonsense form of intimacy that had been more common around here when there was a farm family for each 280 acres.

“Look, it's not like my neighbors are stupid,” Jerry said as we pulled away, as if to explain how he could show so much respect to someone with such yellow barley. “The one over by Dad's told me, ‘You know, these chemicals are going to kill us,' but yet he won't go organic. He can't make that leap.”

That leap, as Jerry's crop tour underscored, was called organic
conversion
for a reason: Becoming an organic farmer was a radical transformation, as much philosophical as agronomic. For Leo Habets, as for Orville Oien, farming had meant taking decisive
action. Success had been measured in quantitative achievements: bushels per acre, percent protein. But Jerry's approach was completely different. Instead of telling me about things he'd done, he'd been telling me about things he'd noticed. Rather than ticking off the usual litany of statistics about northern Montana's ubiquitous annuals (my notebooks were full of “WW” and “SW”—winter wheat and spring wheat), Jerry was sharing some decidedly nonquantitative observations about the perennial drama of life on this increasingly wild farm. I'd been hearing a lot about trees.

“I've got this tree in the backyard that's just greening up now, and that means it's time to plant,” Jerry told me as we turned back toward his house. “Most everyone else here's done seeding—their crops are up and starting to suffer for lack of moisture. But the year I converted, I learned to go by what the tree was doing.”

The first spring he farmed without chemicals, Jerry explained, he'd gone out to seed at the same time as everyone else. But it had been miserable. His tree—which hadn't quite budded out yet—had been blowing all over the place in the whipping wind. It still felt like winter. So Jerry'd put his seeder back in the shed and waited. His neighbors had dropped subtle and not-so-subtle hints that he should be out working, Jerry recalled, but he'd stuck to his guns and held off for a few weeks. Come August, his patience had been rewarded: While his neighbors' barley had clearly suffered in the hot weather, his had come through okay. Later seeding was better in an organic system, Jerry explained. The crops grew more slowly, and they could hang on, even if there wasn't much moisture. Long stretches without rain were inevitable in this part of the country, and the weather was only getting more forbidding and unpredictable. “We're definitely seeing climate change,” Jerry told me. “It used to be you could count on a three-day soaking rain in June; Dad used to call them the June rains. But up
until last year we haven't had that, and then it came too early. We haven't had the usual fall frosts.”

A modest shower finally showed up for Jerry in 2012—on May 24—but there was a downside to the moisture. While the sun was shining, Jerry'd had an excuse to focus on seeding and put off his rainy-day project. But there was no escaping it now. When I pulled into Jerry's driveway for a follow-up interview, I spied him through the window, hunched over his dining room table. “This isn't a very exciting day to visit,” he apologized. “I'm doing my organic paperwork.”