Lentil Underground (19 page)

Jody had almost given up on marketing locally, but instead he had asked the meat department manager what the IGA was paying for the conventional beef they were retailing. The manager had taken Jody back to his office and shown him his wholesale price list, which was broken down into various cuts: chuck roast,
T-bone, sirloin. Jody had done some quick math, attempting to mentally reassemble the spreadsheet of cellophane-wrapped packages into a living, breathing bovine. He had told the manager he thought he could sell his natural beef for a pretty comparable price. “In that case,” the manager had said, “yeah, we could sure try it.”

Now that he'd managed to talk them into it, Jody was committed to selling what he could to the local grocery store, even though it was more of a hassle. Jody explained that when he sent his cattle to Minnesota, not only did he receive a higher price, but also he could deliver a whole semi load at once. Retailing at the local IGA, on the other hand, meant processing one animal at a time. So even though the Manuels' ranch was just seven miles from the final point of sale in downtown Havre, Jody had to put in some serious driving time before his beef made it to his neighbors' shopping carts.

“IGA has a requirement that it has to be slaughtered at a USDA-inspected plant, and there's one in Shelby and one in Malta,” Jody reported, estimating that it was about 100 miles to either of these “local” processors. “I can't even get the one in Shelby to return a phone call, they're so swamped. On their answering machine it essentially says that ‘We might call you back or we might not.'” Since neither of his local packing plants would return his calls, Jody had researched a third option: the Little Rockies Meat Packing Company, owned by the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes. Every two weeks, Jody made the ninety-minute trip to the tribes' facility on the far side of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, hauling exactly one cow.

“I tried to talk IGA into taking two animals at a time instead of just one,” Jody continued. “You take these heifers, they're in a group, you know, just out in the pasture. By the time you bring
two or three of them up to the corral, you sort off the one you want to take, load it in the horse trailer by itself, haul it a hundred miles . . . By the time you get down there, she's just going ballistic a lot of times, even if it's a nice, docile, gentle heifer. For no other reason than that, it'd be nice if they took two.” Notwithstanding such difficulties, Jody had recently added another wrinkle to the Manuels' diversified crop and animal operation: direct-market pork. That had been a learning experience too, he confessed. At first, Jody had advertised his local pork in the classified section of the
Havre Daily News
, but after several weeks with no phone calls, he asked Casey Bailey for marketing advice. Casey told Jody to put the hogs on Facebook, and he quickly sold them all.

While Jody worked the phone and the Web, Crystal went straight for her neighbors' stomachs. I got a taste for the persuasiveness of Crystal's approach from the four-course lunch she'd made during my visit, which had included not just a hearty Black Beluga soup and green salad, but also rolls made from the Manuels' Kamut, and raspberry rhubarb crisp with millet topping. The rhubarb had come from the family garden, while the store-bought raspberries tantalizingly anticipated harvests to come—Crystal had just planted some bramble bushes. Offering up such mouth-watering fare, Crystal had started leading an annual nutrition workshop for the women at her church, beginning with relatively innocuous themes like raw food and healthy hydration.

The year before my visit, Crystal's workshop had tackled a much thornier issue—GMOs—and she'd been recommending the movie
Food, Inc.
to curious members of her church group. “They're starting to care about where their meat comes from,” Crystal said, smiling broadly. “So this year, we're going to do a farm-to-fork tasting out in the cover crop cocktail once the pigs are in there grazing it down. I've invited all the women and their kids, and we
have a church van lined up.” I tried to imagine Havre's decent Christian women eating hors d'oeuvres in the cover crop. Leave it to Crystal to pull off white-tablecloth dining among pigs.

Although she'd been steeped in the constitutive irony of modern rural America—the bizarre industrial arrangement that leaves professional food producers among the least likely people to have access to fresh produce—Crystal was determined to bridge the gap between production and consumption, starting with her own family. In a place where it might snow on Memorial Day, however, this was no mean feat. The summertime window of reliably frost-free nights was brief in northern Montana, which meant vegetables started from seed might never mature. In order to have a successful garden, Crystal realized, she'd need to give her veggies a head start in a greenhouse. Since she didn't have one of her own yet, she decided to purchase some young plants in town for her first season.

So in the spring of 2010, Crystal Manuel had gotten in her minivan and headed off to downtown Havre to buy some heirloom, organic starts. The trouble was, nobody was selling them. Undaunted, Crystal not only got online and found a place to order them—she had five phone conversations with the Arizona-based supplier and brought him to town the following fall to chat with all her neighbors. “We had the organic gardening workshop in November and it was like twelve below zero that day,” Crystal told me, “but we just invited people, and so many of them came.” Crystal's greatest triumph had been convincing an elderly local greenhouse manager to show up. Now he, too, was a proponent of organic fertilizer. “He sells fish emulsion and seaweed now!” Crystal told me, delighted.

In a small town like Havre, you didn't have to be a person of faith to recognize that farm-to-table aspirations were pretty
hollow unless you could a find a way to share the bounty with your whole community. Unless you organized your neighbors, you literally couldn't even get a start. And although Jody and Crystal had gotten their start—and their organic starts—they still felt as if they had a long way to go. Per capita income in Havre averaged just under 23,000 dollars a year, and 17 percent of residents lived in poverty. How many of those folks were going to buy fish emulsion and seaweed?

“One thing that bothers me about this whole industry is the cost,” Jody said, when I bumped into the Manuel family a few months later at an organic conference. “It's tough for the average person, living paycheck to paycheck.” Jody related the story of a missionary friend in the Philippines, who had lamented that local people there didn't have access to the fishery anymore, because all the crab and lobster was being shipped out on big commercial boats. “I can see how it's sort of like that here too,” Jody reflected. “I mean, we're sending our meat to Whole Foods.”

When I'd visited the Manuel place in May, Jody hadn't yet sold any beef to the natural-food chain because he was still transitioning his herd to organics. But since this season's newborn calves would be his first certified animals, he'd started exploring the option. A broker had already been out to the ranch to see if the Manuels' cattle looked like Whole Foods material, and the verdict was promising: The man thought Jody's animals would fetch a healthy premium. The business opportunity was a relief to the budget-conscious father of six. But the good news was bittersweet, since the Manuels' newly certified beef might never again grace the kitchen tables of Havre. “I think I am going to raise prices at IGA now that we have our first organic calves—to get a comparable price—but I don't want to,” Jody told me. “I want our neighbors to be able to afford it.” Three decades after Dave Oien had been
forced to give up on his own organic beef business, he and the lentil underground had built enough of a support structure to allow Jody Manuel to make a go of it. But it still wasn't quite the closed-loop food system they were all shooting for.

As the movement went mainstream, ruggedly individual farmers found themselves sharing in ways they never had before. People like Jerry Habets were sharing knowledge, changing one another's minds. Having revamped their philosophy, people like Casey Bailey had started changing their farms, designing systems in which different elements complemented one another, rather than trying to maximize the yield of a single crop. Once they'd changed their farms, the lentil underground had realized that they couldn't make a living unless they drastically altered their business model. So people like Doug and Anna Jones-Crabtree had begun developing collective infrastructure and devising new financing models to spread risk. Jody and Crystal Manuel had taken this cooperative spirit beyond the farm community, determined to get the rest of their neighbors on board, even if it meant driving their cattle 100 miles, one at a time, and selling their products a little more cheaply at the local IGA.

At this point, the lentil underground hit the limit of what they could do by themselves. They had taken their movement mainstream, but they still hadn't diverted the prevailing current of the food system nearly as much as they wanted to. Most farmers still had to sell into markets warped by monopoly power, and most consumers still had to buy from those markets. So many bizarre incentives were lodged between food and reality that people couldn't afford to do what was truly economical—and sometimes they
didn't even have the choice. Industrial food and farming remained artificially cheap. And in most little towns, the burger chain and the big grain elevator were still the only game in town. Dave and his accomplices had converted a little pocket of farm country, but what they really wanted to overhaul was the American way of eating, and that was a big job. They'd need a larger crew, since the obstacles they were running up against now—like the massive federal Farm Bill and its entrenched system of subsidies—were codified in law. Dave had found people to grow lentils, distribute lentils, and, in this meat-loving part of Montana, even eat lentils. But would they
vote
for lentils?

THE BIRDS, THE BEES, AND THE BUREAUCRACY

POLITICS AT THE POLLINATOR WORKSHOP

On Thursday, June 14, 2012, a steady stream of state and federal employees paraded into the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls to learn about bees and butterflies. But when the projector hummed awake at nine fifteen
A.M.
, the first ten eyes on the screen looked suspiciously alert for this hour of the morning. Lurking amid the nine-to-five crowd were five people clearly accustomed to beginning their day before dawn. From the looks of their focused gaze, they were here on a mission.

Doug Crabtree and Anna Jones-Crabtree had spent weeks enthusiastically spreading the word about this pollinator workshop, which was facilitated by a nonprofit conservation group called the Xerces Society. The training was geared toward Natural Resources Conservation Service staff but open to the public, and since Doug and Anna thought the discussion was important, they had worked hard to convince fellow farmers that it was worth leaving their farms behind for half a day in the middle of the growing season. Casey Bailey, Bob Bailey, and another Timeless Seeds grower—Jacob Cowgill—had signed up right away.

“Why aren't there more farmers here?” Jacob wondered aloud.

“They're probably out spraying,” Doug answered wryly.

The sole producers in a room full of civil servants, the five
Timeless growers nonetheless made their presence felt. Greatly outnumbered by staff from NRCS, the Montana Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Forest Service, the sharp-witted quintet still managed to ask about half the questions. “Does tillage in the fall hurt ground-nesting bees?” Casey wanted to know. He and his buddies were here in good faith to learn about the sophisticated critters that pollinated their buckwheat and safflower. But they also had a thing or two to share with the NRCS.

When I first heard that an agency called the Natural Resources Conservation Service wasn't already tight with the Timeless crew, I was astonished. The legume strategy was all about natural resource conservation, right? Well, yes, the Timeless farmers explained to me, but the NRCS didn't always see it that way. Founded in 1935 as the
Soil
Conservation Service, the agency sometimes had a one-track mind about exactly which resource it was obliged to conserve. Intensely focused on combating soil erosion, the NRCS had become enamored of an agricultural method known as “no-till.”

Zero-tillage farming, the lentil growers explained, was a farming approach that had become popular in the eighties. Rather than mechanically ripping out their weeds before seeding, no-till farmers left their plows in the shed and used chemicals to clear their fields instead. This way of farming had become even easier when plants like corn and soybeans were genetically engineered to resist herbicides, allowing farmers to spray all year round, right into their cropland. Not everybody thought the environmental downsides of this chemically based, GMO approach were worth the payoff, but since the NRCS had originally been established to prevent another Dust Bowl, the agency had a hard time resisting any approach that kept land in place—even chemically treated
land. As no-till farming spread, the NRCS had taken to it like a sweat bee to a sunflower.

Unfortunately, this focus on no-till had driven a wedge between the NRCS and the sector of the agricultural community that should have been its staunchest ally: organics. By drawing a hard line on tillage but taking a relatively laissez-faire attitude toward herbicides and genetically engineered crops, the agency punished organic producers for the one industrial practice they relied on, without rewarding them for phasing out so many others. There were exceptions, the Timeless growers told me, but by and large the agency's incentive structure effectively discouraged organic farming.

Casey Bailey understood the NRCS's attraction to no-till systems because, at first, he'd felt the same way. After learning about the method in a college class, the fourth-generation farmer had been so excited about it that he'd gone right out and leased some land so he could experiment with tillage-free agriculture himself. The budding ecologist liked the idea of softening his touch on the underground world, so that earthworms and microorganisms could build his soil undisturbed. But since he wasn't plowing, Casey had to use a lot more herbicide to kill the weeds, and he couldn't help but wonder what that glyphosate bath was doing to all the other life in his soil. “I think the chemical companies capitalized on academic soil science when they said that we should be saving our organic matter and not tilling our soils,” Casey concluded. Sure, there were environmental arguments for plowing less. But there were downsides to chemical no-till too: Applying more herbicides increased the risk of groundwater pollution and encouraged the evolution of herbicide-resistant superweeds. Farming wasn't an equation you could solve for one variable.

By the time I met him in 2012, Casey was still trying to
minimize tillage, and he was excited about emergent research on organic no-till (some of it based on Timeless Seeds' original model, the Australian ley system). But he'd come to weigh that objective against several other indicators that he considered equally important to the health of his farm. That was why he had brought his dad to this Xerces Society workshop—so they could learn together about supporting the native bees that pollinated several of their crops. “It's amazing what these little critters can do,” Bob Bailey said in awe. “It almost makes you think there's a God.”

While his dad scouted for bees in the conference center's native plant garden, Casey queried one of the workshop leaders. Which was the best flowering legume to have in the rotation, from a pollinator standpoint? Was early tillage or late tillage better? And how about all that herbicide associated with the no-till strategy? Balancing these numerous considerations was a tricky matter, and it wasn't easy to reform agency programs so that they truly accounted for the complexity of diversified farming systems. But Casey and his fellow growers were determined to try.

“As an organic producer, we've found it challenging to fit the square peg of what we do into the round hole of NRCS practices,” Doug Crabtree diplomatically explained. “We need to get to understand each other better.”

Anna put the matter more bluntly. “I don't know what is up with the no-till water you guys are drinking,” she said, taking issue with a study cited by one of the agency representatives. “What about the trade-offs? What about the chemicals and their impact on soil microbiology?”

Anna was frustrated because she and Doug had been inveigled into alternating no-till with their rye crop in order to qualify for support from the NRCS Conservation Stewardship Program, a program that pays farmers for conservation performance by contracting with them to implement environmentally friendly “enhancements.” One of these enhancements, “Use of Non-Chemical Methods to Kill Cover Crops,” seemed like a great fit for certified organic farmers like the Crabtrees, who were already committed to plowing down their cover crop (so as to control their use of resources like soil water), rather than spraying it out. But the way the NRCS rules were written, producers could qualify for this enhancement only if they followed the tillage of their cover crop with a no-till cash crop. And therein, for the Crabtrees, lay the rub.

“The reason we grow rye in the first place,” Doug explained to his district conservationist, Talana Klungland, “is because it's competitive and cleans things up for the next four years. But with this no-till thing, we got a poor stand, and the field's not as clean.” Since the Crabtrees didn't use herbicides
at all,
Doug emphasized, they needed to do at least some mechanical weeding, or their crops would get choked out. Given all the ways their diverse, chemical-free system enhanced the soil, Doug tried to convince Talana, some modest tillage was a small price to pay.

The Crabtrees had invited Talana and two other NRCS staffers to visit their farm the day after the pollinator workshop, to demonstrate what they were talking about. Hill County's most determined organic advocates seemed to be making some headway. Talana was impressed with the lack of erosion at Vilicus Farms, noting that such tenaciously adherent soil was tough to achieve in this windy area, even with no-till. NRCS state biologist Pete Husby, who was making his first-ever visit to an organic farm, gave the
Crabtrees an even more surprising vote of confidence. Thumbing through the
Pollinator Habitat Assessment Form and Guide
he'd been working on with Xerces, Pete suggested adding harvestable species as well as conservation plantings, since Doug and Anna had several crops that were clearly “great for pollinators.” By the end of the half-day tour, it sure sounded like the Crabtrees had convinced at least two NRCS folks that an organic system with appropriate tillage could actually benefit the land.

As satisfying as it had been, however, the conservation show-and-tell session had also exhausted most of the daylight and nearly all of the Crabtrees' abundant energy. Reforming NRCS was even tougher than scouting for nodules or pulling up thistles, I remarked, wondering aloud if Doug and Anna ever tired of engaging with public programs that had been designed to support a completely different style of land management. They couldn't afford not to, Doug told me. Although he and his wife managed their business as carefully as they managed their soils, they couldn't control the weather—or the fluctuations of global markets, which were even more volatile these days, tied as they were to the machinations of Wall Street. Initiatives like the NRCS Conservation Stewardship Program helped buffer the Crabtrees' income and provided some semblance of the much larger government safety net (commodity crop subsidies and insurance) that their conventional neighbors relied on. Without better aligning those initiatives with their practices, Doug and Anna would have a difficult time weathering the start-up phase of establishing a new kind of farm and farm business—let alone convincing other farmers to follow suit. Doug didn't put it this bluntly, but I understood what he was getting at. The Crabtrees weren't just farming for themselves. They'd invested a lot of time and money in resources that benefited everybody: clean water, carbon sequestration, nutrient
management, and yes, pollinators. If Vilicus Farms was providing public services for the common good, shouldn't it get some public support?

Truthfully, even passionate sustainability evangelists like Doug and Anna couldn't sponsor the soil health of an entire region. As the first generation of Timeless farmers had learned the hard way, their effort to revolutionize agriculture in the grain belt could only go so far without some policy changes. Reaching out to local civil servants and state agencies was a good start, but Timeless growers were already thinking ahead to the big prize: the federal Farm Bill. A month after the pollinator workshop, Doug, Anna, and Casey met up again for Timeless Seeds' summer field tour and barbecue. As it had since that first year at Bud Barta's place, the growers gathering offered farmers a rare opportunity to get together and troubleshoot problems. But these days, the strategy session moved swiftly from weeds to white papers. Casey Bailey was hosting this year's tour at his place in Fort Benton, and although he knew his fellow growers could give him several helpful pointers on his field operation, what he really wanted to fix was a lot bigger than his
farm.