Lentil Underground (11 page)

CAVIAR IN THE CATTLE RATION

THE CURIOUS RISE OF THE BLACK BELUGA

Although Timeless Seeds was focused on French Greens, Dave hadn't sacrificed the small part of his own acreage that he reserved for test plots. In between the rows of medics and forage peas was the first lentil Dave ever planted: a tiny black seed developed by the University of Saskatchewan's Indian Head experiment station for use as a green manure, which Jim Sims had started promoting in Montana. Since Dave followed Sims's research so closely, he'd been one of the first American farmers to plant the new variety when it was registered in 1986.

Breeder Al Slinkard hadn't even considered licensing “Indianhead lentil” as a food crop, since the hard seed took so long to cook and its soup “turned an icky grey color.” (Slinkard—aka Dr. Lentil—was already semifamous for revitalizing Saskatchewan's agricultural reputation with a gargantuan, bright-green variety called Laird.) But Dave figured a lentil was a lentil, no matter what its official purpose. Indianheads were cheap. They were great for his soil. And since they'd been bred to make nitrogen, they were 24 percent protein. Why not add them to the cattle ration? And for that matter, why not try some himself?

In the midst of the Trader Joe's hullaballoo in 1994, Dave had gotten a call from an heirloom bean buyer in Idaho. Lola Weyman had ordered French Green lentils from Timeless, but she wondered if Dave had anything new. She was looking for something different, Lola said. Something nobody else had.

Dave hadn't admitted to any of his neighbors that he was eating his soil-building crop. But Lola seemed like a kindred spirit, so he spilled the beans. “I've got this totally beautiful and unusual black lentil,” Dave told her. “It's not released as a food, but it's killed neither me nor the cows nor the pigs nor the sheep.” Dave sent a small package of Indianheads off to Lola, then got back to bagging and sealing French Greens.

The following week, Lola called back. “We should call them Black Beluga lentils!” she exclaimed, noting the inky legumes' resemblance to high-end caviar. Dave had never eaten caviar before, but the idea of selling his illicit cattle feed to elite chefs captured his fancy. He knew it was perfectly safe—the Czech peasants who developed the variety had been eating it for centuries before a Russian plant collector showed up to catalog it. But as the lentil cultivar made its way through the international research establishment—from Nikolai Vavilov's seed bank in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) to a USDA Plant Introduction Station in Pullman, Washington, to Al Slinkard's lab in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan—it had failed to impress cash-crop breeders, who were looking for big, industrial workhorses like wheat and corn. So for years, the modest lentil had languished in a seed vault, and when Slinkard finally saw fit to release it to commercial farmers, it was as a soil builder. Of course, nobody told the Czech farmers their lentils weren't, officially speaking, food. They'd kept right on raising and eating the little black
seeds, especially on New Year's Day, when they were believed to confer good luck. Dave wasn't particularly superstitious, but he fully appreciated another advantage of these lentils, which he suspected wasn't lost on the Czechs either. The standout quality of this variety was that it fixed a lot of nitrogen. That's how it had gotten Al Slinkard's attention—the Canadian breeder had seen all that nitrogen as potential fertilizer for tired wheat fields. But nitrogen could be fuel for human bodies too, which metabolized the key nutrient as protein. When Dave sent his black lentils to the lab for nutrient analysis, he discovered that they contained a whopping 9 grams of protein per half-cup serving, along with copious amounts of fiber, iron, folate, and potassium. No wonder his cattle were so healthy, Dave thought. These lentils were a nutritional powerhouse!

Focused on volume, the industrial breeders of the past half century hadn't stopped to consider that farmers might have
intentionally
selected crop varieties for characteristics other than yield—that, in truth, there might be some wisdom in the old adage “Less is more.” But by the mid-1990s, interest in nutrient-dense foods like these forgotten lentils was beginning to resurge among nutritionists and health-conscious eaters. Perhaps, Dave concluded, their time had come. Timeless had stretched its capacity to the max cranking out green lentils for Trader Joe's, but Dave bagged up some black ones himself to send to Lola. Quietly, Black Belugas made their debut in the fall of 1994.

Unlike the Trader Joe's deal, the new variety didn't take off. Lola sold a few packages here and there—to eccentric chefs and specialty food stores—but most people were as skeptical as the breeder had been. A black lentil? Who wanted to eat that? If Trader Joe's had continued to order truckloads of French Greens, Dave probably would have forgotten about his odd little Belugas, which
were a tough sell. But when the grocery chain discontinued its order, Dave gave his black lentils another look. With Timeless Seeds on the brink, he and his friends knew they needed to realign the business with its original values. What could be more fitting than returning to green manure crops—and getting people to eat them!

This time, they decided, they wouldn't look for a big contract from a national distributor. They would develop their own brand, their own packaging, and their own relationships with stores and restaurants. The Timeless boys had long since learned the importance of diversification on the farm. When the Trader Joe's deal collapsed, they realized that diversity was key to the resilience of their business too. Slowly but surely, Timeless built a fan base for Black Belugas, beginning in Montana. They emphasized the added value and unique nutritional benefits of the variety, which, to their knowledge, was higher in protein than any other lentil on the market. Each package bore a Timeless Seeds label and was certified organic. The company cleaned every batch themselves to make sure there were no rocks in the bags.

Dave met personally with as many buyers as he could: Missoula's Good Food Store, Helena's Real Food Market, even the cooperative in Bozeman that had originally sold his organic beef. He asked store managers which regional distributors they liked to work with and started placing Timeless products in independent stores across the Northwest. Although he highlighted Black Belugas, Dave offered his customers other choices too: French Greens, Petite Crimsons, Harvest Golds, Pardinas. Timeless Seeds also supplied non-lentil options from other phases of the crop rotation: split peas, flax, and eventually even barley (albeit an heirloom purple variety). This way, stores could figure out which products their customers liked best—and Timeless had a
fallback plan if a particular crop had a bad year. It took six years to build the company back after the Trader Joe's debacle, but by the turn of the millennium, it had emerged stronger than ever. Dave started inviting customers to visit the Conrad headquarters of his growing company, which no longer seemed like such a foolhardy experiment.

The second person to take Dave up on his offer to visit was Blu Funk, a chef from Bigfork, Montana. A hundred and seventy-three miles and a world away from Conrad, Bigfork drew a mix of tourists headed for nearby Glacier National Park, wealthy summer residents, and local vacationers whose families had maintained waterfront cabins for generations. This little town at the northeast end of Flathead Lake was the apotheosis of big sky chic, and its prime attraction, nestled between upscale art galleries and the Bigfork Summer Playhouse, was Blu Funk's gourmet dining establishment: ShowThyme. Blu knew his customers were buying cowboy paintings by the dozens, and he thought they ought to get a real taste of Montana when they ate at his restaurant. So he started purchasing Black Belugas from Timeless in 1998.

Blu's unique presentation sold ShowThyme's customers on his curious side dish, which brought Dave's lentils out of the soup and onto center stage. ShowThyme's little lentil order steadily increased in volume, and Blu became a loyal Timeless supporter. When he called Dave in 1999 to buy more Belugas, the Timeless CEO could fill out the shipping label from memory. “No, don't ship them,” Blu said. “We'll come pick them up.”

“Are you sure?” Dave asked. It was a three-hour drive over the
Rocky Mountains, one that people typically made in the other direction. Yep, Blu said, he and his wife, Rose, wanted to see the operation.

Playing show-and-tell with the owners of one of Montana's finest restaurants, Dave registered an unfamiliar feeling: pride. The Conrad plant was still a pretty humble place—more than a little dilapidated. But Blu and Rose were completely taken with it. “I'm going to put Black Belugas on every plate,” Blu promised. And he did. Dave's former cattle feed became a star at ShowThyme, where it was served as an accompaniment to every entrée, and Blu's customers started asking him where they could get some lentils of their own.

At the dawn of a new millennium, Timeless Seeds had hit a major turning point. After a decade of valiantly paddling against the prevailing currents of American agriculture, Dave could feel a gathering wind at his back. It was partly that the world had changed since 1986, when Dave and his three buddies started their little black medic business in his Quonset hut. Organic food was now a multibillion-dollar sector of the American economy, and environmentalism wasn't quite the dirty word it had been a generation ago. But if Timeless had benefited from these changes, it had also helped catalyze them. Ten years after everybody told Dave his idea was impossible, he had convincingly proven them wrong, and the evidence was plainly visible in the thousands of acres of lentil fields spread across central Montana. As a result, people who still thought Dave was a little kooky were showing up at his door in increasing numbers, interested in planting some lentils of their own. These weren't the AERO members and solar energy
enthusiasts who'd been struggling upriver with Dave all along. This was the mainstream.

Helping his conventional neighbors convert was exciting for Dave, whose vision had always been to transform agriculture on a regional scale, if not a global one. But it was also a departure from Timeless Seeds' kumbaya coalition-building. Conventional growers had different expectations than Dave's buddies did, and most of them had no idea what they were getting themselves into. Dave knew firsthand that farm conversion was an intense process, which unfolded as a series of sweeping changes. First you had to change your mind. Then you had to change your farm. Then you had to change your business and the institutions that served it. And now that you were a weirdo, you either had to change your community or form a new one.

Joining the lentil underground wasn't an easy road, and Dave didn't expect anyone to make the sacrifices he had. So now his challenge was to shorten the learning curve for those who wanted to follow in his footsteps. This was where things stood in 1998, when the last person he would've ever expected showed up at the door of the Timeless
plant.