Lentil Underground (13 page)

The pile of certification forms crystallized the challenge of converting. When Jerry took his soil out of chemical management, it had been a shock to his system—and not just in the philosophical sense. After decades of relying on fertilizers and herbicides to kill the weeds, the farm had been ill prepared to do these things for itself—and it showed. Canada thistle had roared back so ferociously that a neighbor had reported the Habets farm as a noxious weed hazard, so Jerry'd been forced to spot treat a number of patches and revoke their organic status.

Those few passes on a spray rig had ushered Jerry into the unenviable purgatory of “split production.” Consequently, he now had to separate out nearly sixty individual fields on the maps he prepared for his annual organic inspection. The sprayed sections were classified “T1”—in their first year of a three-year transition back to organic. Next to them were required “buffer” fields that separated “T1” parcels from “organic” ones. Every new crop meant a new field, and Jerry had to meticulously document the
cleaning of all his equipment and storage facilities to prove there was no cross-contamination.

On days like this, Jerry was glad to have some like-minded company to help him sort through it all. “Sometimes I forget that there are other organic growers out there,” he sighed, staring at a series of figures on his legal pad that refused to add up. “It's like I'm the one guy representing organic farming in this neighborhood. People are watching. It's always on my mind.”

As Timeless Seeds entered the mainstream and the new millennium, its growers weren't the only ones learning their way into the delicate balance between fitting in and standing out. CEO Dave Oien was also evolving his philosophy, as he tried to juggle both ends of the food chain. It wasn't just mainstream growers Dave needed to woo, but also mainstream consumers. Organics was now a multibillion-dollar industry, and the big dreams Dave and Jim had taken with them to their first food show finally appeared to be within reach. But Dave was torn. Did he really want to play with the big boys?

Before Dave could decide whether to reach out to mainstream retailers, they found him. In 2005, he picked up the phone at the Timeless plant, wondering who could be calling from Texas. It was Whole Foods. The Austin-based chain—165 stores and growing—was launching a new Authentic Food Artisan program, and they wanted to include four of Timeless Seeds' specialty crops as featured products. For the second time, Timeless had a shot at a major distribution deal.

Dave mulled the grocery chain's offer. He didn't want a repeat
of the Trader Joe's fiasco. He wasn't going to count on this contract, and he didn't expect it to last. But the old processing plant he had purchased more than a decade ago was literally falling down. Had Jerry Habets walked into Timeless for the first time today, Dave admitted, his enthusiastic convert probably would have walked right back out. In order to keep inspiring farm transitions, the business needed a new facility, probably sooner rather than later. Timeless Seeds' ticket into this plant had been Trader Joe's. Perhaps the Whole Foods deal could finance the next one.

Dave decided to accept the national distribution opportunity, but on a few key conditions. The product he sold Whole Foods would be the same thing he sold to Blu Funk and the Good Food Store—organic crops raised by Montana growers like Jerry Habets. The four featured varieties would represent the diversity of these growers' rotations: Black Beluga and French Green lentils from the legume phase, Purple Prairie barley from the grain phase, and golden flax as the representative oilseed. (Oilseeds, as the name implies, are broadleaf plants grown primarily for the oil in their seeds, like sunflowers, canola, or flax.) Timeless would fulfill the new order, but they would continue selling to their other customers too, including the ones who ordered Petite Crimsons or split peas. The character and scope of the business were nonnegotiable.

With a heterogeneous network of collaborators—up and down the food chain—Dave was finally getting a handle on how to run a business like a lentil farm: When in doubt, diversify. Meanwhile, Timeless Seeds' most unexpected grower had taken biodiversity to a whole new level. Back when Dave first seeded black medic, it had been radical to plant two crops at the same time. That's why Jerry Habets had raised his eyebrows at Dave's “messy” fields. But now that Jerry had gotten religion, he'd gone one step messier.
Having had good luck with a two-crop companion planting, he was ready for something even Dave hadn't experimented with: three.

When I came back to finish my field tour with Jerry Habets, at the height of 2012's scorching summer, the drought was making national news. Like the persistent headlines, the shriveled barley at Jerry's neighbor's suggested that climate change might seriously threaten the future of the American food supply. Jerry actually had a pretty good stand of barley: not too tall yet, but nice and green. He threaded the grain through the calluses of his enormous hands, large even for a man of his six-foot-two stature. Not bad for a dry year, Jerry decided. But it was the buckwheat, whose white blossoms had hummed with bees throughout a scorching June, that he was really excited about.

Much like the medic Dave Oien had raised, Jerry's buckwheat had “volunteered” from the fallen seeds of last year's stand to join his mixed crop of lentils and chickpeas. “It's the best buckwheat I've had in three years and Mother Nature did it,” Jerry exclaimed, turning off his truck so I could hear the bees buzzing in the white blossoms. Detecting sufficient excitement in my furious note taking, Jerry took his hands off the steering wheel. “We can get out if you like,” he offered.

Only once I crouched down below the canopy of buckwheat did I realize this was probably the only field of its kind in the world. I was completely disoriented amid the tangle of green flourishing beneath the white blossoms, but I immediately noticed two things: It was unbelievably cool down here, and I couldn't see the dirt.

Without speaking, Jerry separated a single individual from the inchoate web of plant matter to help my eyes adjust to the subtleties of the understory. About a third as tall as the buckwheat, this creature seemed far more focused on the bulbous green protrusions at the base of its fernlike leaves than on the pink flowers that appeared, like an afterthought, on only a few of its stems. This, Jerry told me, was a Black Kabuli chickpea, a specialty dry bean available only from Timeless and a handful of other suppliers.

Aside from the novelty factor of its ebony seeds (which made a stunning hummus), the chickpea had other attributes that recommended it to Jerry. First of all, it was drought resilient. Second, it was a legume, so it made its own fertilizer and donated the surplus to the plants that followed it. The problem with the wondrous black bean, however, was that it also appealed to Jerry's neighbors. Not the two-legged ones (who probably had no more idea than I did that it was even out here), but the deer. Last time Jerry'd planted Black Kabulis, the deer had munched his whole crop a week before harvest.

The deer were one reason Jerry'd added a second layer of green under the chickpeas, a low-lying mass I simply could not distinguish into discrete individuals. These Petite Crimson lentils were another of Timeless Seeds' specialty pulse crops, also champion nitrogen fixers that did well without much moisture. Jerry'd tried this crop before too, but a hot spell had burned them up, so he figured the shade of the chickpeas might give them a better shot at survival. When Jerry told me how the Petite Crimsons returned the favor, I chuckled at the thought of a guard lentil. But apparently that was the case: Lentil plants were so unappetizing to deer and ground squirrels that they provided some protection for the Black Kabulis.

Jerry hadn't planned on doing all these things at once. His plan
had been to raise just the chickpeas and lentils this year, then plow their nitrogen-rich stalks under after harvest. The lentil/chickpea “stubble” would feed his soil with nitrogen and organic matter, which would in turn support next year's grain crop. This sequential approach to nutrient management—rotation—is how most newly organic farms recover from what Jerry described as not just one, but two traumas. The first trauma had been gradual but devastating: decades of industrial management had slowly depleted the land's organic matter and biological fertility. The second trauma had been more sudden. When Jerry converted to non-chemical management, he had abruptly cut off the source of fertility on which his industrialized farm had come to rely, leaving it somewhat nutrient poor. As tempting as it might be to return to the “band-aid” of fertilizers, Jerry explained, the only real solution to these double traumas was to patiently rebuild the natural fertility of the soil. In general, this meant taking a break from nitrogen-using plants like wheat and barley for one or two seasons during the legume phase of his rotation, which Jerry was more than happy to do. But when the seeds of the previous year's buckwheat spontaneously germinated in the midst of his lentil/chickpea intercrop, Jerry realized his uninvited guest might be on to something.

A solid stand of buckwheat would partially shade the heat-sensitive Petite Crimsons and Black Kabulis, Jerry realized, envisioning a tripartite canopy structure taking shape in his field. The buckwheat would also acidify the soil, which might help convert chemically “locked” forms of soil phosphorous into plant-available versions, much as lentils and chickpeas fix atmospheric nitrogen. Plus, the combination of all three crops would help crowd out the weeds that had dogged Jerry since his conversion.

He didn't know it, but Jerry had stumbled onto an ancient
agroecological principle. For centuries, farmers in the Americas had grown three or more plants together to provide complementary nutrients, control pests, and apportion the summer's abundant sunlight to suit each plant's needs. In fact, Miguel Altieri had discussed this system at AERO's 1984 Sustainable Agriculture Conference, using its Mexican name,
milpa.
Jerry's accidental intercrop was a northern cousin to this classic three-sisters combination of corn, beans, and squash. A Montana milpa.

From the looks of the bees humming along in the buckwheat's flowers and the lentil tendrils hooking themselves to its stalks, everybody seemed to be happy with the arrangement. This triple intercrop was an experiment, Jerry admitted to me. He'd never raised
two
other species underneath his canopy crop. He had no idea if they'd all mature at the same time and wasn't sure how he'd separate them from one another if they did. He'd be happy if he just got a buckwheat harvest out of the deal, since the other plants would make a good soil-building plowdown. “But if I time it just right . . . maybe . . .”

Jerry didn't want to jinx himself, but we both knew that yielding three specialty crops off one field would incontrovertibly validate his transition. Now that Jerry had successfully transformed his thinking, he needed to accomplish the same thing for his farm. “I've had to be pretty cautious about it, sort of one field at a time,” he told me, “since I started all of this when I was literally bankrupt.”

When Timeless Seeds began to take their movement mainstream, their first crop of new growers were people like Jerry, who were worried about losing their land. These distressed farmers were
ripe for the first step of conversion—changing their philosophy. But since most of them were buried knee-deep in debt, putting that philosophy into practice was a slow process.

So as Timeless grew, Dave began to court farmers with more secure access to land and capital, who could afford the risk associated with overhauling their field operations. He knew there were several folks in central Montana who had the means to experiment a bit. But since things were working out for them, these more secure growers were also more reluctant to change. To convince his newest recruits to join the lentil underground, Dave had to answer questions he'd never gotten before, very specific questions about net and gross and yield.

That was one of the main reasons why Dave had taken the Whole Foods contract: credibility. With a major national distribution opportunity in hand, Timeless Seeds successfully landed a grant from the state of Montana to conduct a comprehensive feasibility study, in 2005. This helped the company drum up its first commercial financing, from a socially responsible investor west of Missoula called Stranie Ventures (now Good Works Ventures, LLC). The influx of capital allowed Timeless to purchase a much larger, more professional facility just north of Great Falls in Ulm, Montana.

Since he'd already won and lost one major distribution deal, Dave wasn't surprised by the way things unfolded. Business picked up sharply when Timeless products first appeared on the shelves at Whole Foods. The company moved into their expanded facility in October 2006, to great fanfare. Dave started calling around to recruit new growers. And then Whole Foods dropped the Authentic Food Artisan program.