Lentil Underground (21 page)

Most of the families at the Timeless gathering had solved the insurance problem with another form of subsidy—one partner, typically a woman, worked a job in town. They were in good company: In 2012, small farms (defined by the USDA as those grossing less than 350,000 dollars) relied on off-farm sources for a whopping 67 percent of their income. These weren't hobby farmers, but
people who reported a positive farm income and considered agriculture their “major occupation.” The USDA didn't ask farmers
why
they took off-farm jobs, but if they had, they would've gotten a talking to from people like Doug Crabtree.

“I'm a type 1 diabetic,” Doug told me matter-of-factly, carefully avoiding the dessert table, “so not having health insurance is really not an option. At least one of us has to keep a job that has insurance because we're not a civilized nation where we provide that basic service to our population.” Since she was a federal employee, Anna explained, her husband was covered on her plan. If she died tomorrow, Doug would still have health insurance for the rest of his life. And it was good insurance. On one of their Farmer Fly-In trips to DC, the Crabtrees had proposed allowing all participants in the Farm Bill's beginning farmer programs to buy into this same federal employee health plan. It would be a win-win, Doug and Anna figured: The farmers would have access to affordable care and the influx of young policyholders would lower the median age in the pool.

“I think that's an idea that actually could have some legs,” Doug said, “but two years ago, we went to DC as they were debating the health thing, and—”

“Our good senator Baucus told us, we'll take care of it, it'll be fixed in two years,” Anna finished. “Yeah, right.”

Health coverage had also been an unrelenting headache for Sharon Eisenberg, ever since the New York native moved to rural Montana to wed a renegade lentil grower. As a self-employed accountant married to a self-employed farmer, Sharon's only option
was the private insurance market—which was more or less highway robbery. “It was astronomical; it was just crushing really,” Sharon told me, “but we always had it, because I figured if we didn't, you're banking the farm against the medical system. Guess who's gonna win that one?” Health insurance premiums had eaten up 10 to 15 percent of her family's budget, Sharon estimated, and this was for a policy with a 5,000-dollar deductible. If they could barely afford private health insurance, they definitely couldn't afford to actually use it. So they'd done so just once—when Dave had to have an appendectomy. Apart from that operation and childbirth, they'd had virtually no interaction with their local hospital. “So that's your health insurance, being healthy?” I asked, half joking. “Yep,” Dave said. “Exactly, that's exactly right.”

Since she did people's taxes for a living, Sharon knew her family wasn't the only one in Conrad with inadequate health care access. At least half her clients had no insurance at all, Sharon estimated, and a lot of those were farmers. Although it was expensive, Sharon tried to talk her neighbors into getting some kind of coverage, because she knew they were continually exposed to occupational hazards, on top of the usual risk of medical problems. “They're just hoping nothing is going to go wrong,” Sharon said. “Well, you dig around in most modern American families and you're gonna find some health issue of some kind.”

“I don't know if we're lucky or if it's just because we've eaten extremely well for thirty years,” Dave mused, grateful that his biggest health issue had been that appendectomy. Both Jon Tester and Jess Alger were missing digits, and Dave had noticed Doug Crabtree periodically checking his insulin levels during his farm tours at Vilicus. “It's probably some of both,” Sharon concluded. “You just kind of sneak by.”

But more likely, Sharon had learned, you don't sneak by. You get caught. “Everybody comes up short when you actually have some issue, like if you have a child with some illness or something,” she told me. “If that had happened to us, I probably would've closed my office and gotten a job at a big employer in Great Falls. That's what you have to do—you need to be in a group where they can't turn you down. So I'd have been commuting to Great Falls with everybody else in Conrad. When I first moved here, nobody was doing that, and now it's extremely common—and it's a pretty good hike.” But after spending two hours a day on I-15 for several years, many of Dave and Sharon's neighbors had run out of time, patience, or gas money. Eventually, they'd made that commute to Great Falls one last time—in a U-Haul.

Especially if you had a family member with a chronic illness, Sharon explained matter-of-factly, it became harder and harder to stay on the homestead. If your spouse or your kid got really sick, it would be virtually impossible to stick with a livelihood like organic agriculture—in which your
crops
weren't even insured. People around here might tell you it was bindweed that forced them to quit organics—or stop farming all together. But once you got to know them as well as their accountant did, you started uncovering other reasons.

One such reason I'd heard a lot about in these rural communities was breast cancer. When someone in Conrad or Havre or Fort Benton was diagnosed, it was common for neighbors to respond with their long-standing tradition of mutual aid. But cancer treatment was expensive, and no matter how generously rural families pooled their resources to help one another out, it was seldom enough to cover hospital bills. Sharon had just seen this happen with one of her uninsured friends, Dorothy (not her real name), who had recently been diagnosed with a malignant tumor and
needed surgery. Dorothy and her husband had held an auction sale, but Sharon knew the proceeds would pale in comparison to Dorothy's medical expenses. From Sharon's point of view, the only real solution to this problem was a single-payer health care system: Medicare for all. She didn't think recently passed federal legislation—the Affordable Care Act—went far enough, but it might be a good start. If it ever got implemented. “We'll see what the Supreme Court does with this Obamacare,” Sharon remarked. “But if they toss it, what are we supposed to do—have a bake sale for Dorothy? Okay, we can bake some brownies and raise a few bucks for Dorothy's medical bills.”

“They better be marijuana brownies if she's got cancer,” Dave cracked.

In truth, I learned, Dave and Sharon had discovered a reasonably praticable legal stopgap solution, at least for themselves and their staff: a state-administered small business health care program called Insure Montana. Since 2006, Timeless Seeds had been able to cover their employees—though not their growers—under this program. The company paid half the premium, the state kicked in a portion based on the policyholder's income and family size, and most of the Timeless staff got health insurance for less than 100 dollars a month.

Interestingly, it was the firsthand experience of another Timeless grower that had led to the development of Insure Montana. Back when he was in the Montana legislature, Jon Tester had sponsored a bill to establish the state-administered insurance program, aware that rural families were desperate for better access to medical care. Subsequently elected to the US Senate in 2006, Tester had gone on to help pass the Obamacare law that Sharon was now tracking with such curiosity. The issue was still a personal one, Jon told his constituents. If he lost his next election,
he wasn't sure he'd be able to afford health care himself. He could probably find a less intense off-farm occupation, but in many ways the senator was doing the same thing his neighbors were: working a second job for the insurance.

Of course, Jon Tester wasn't in DC just to pick up his federal benefits. He and the lentil underground had an ambitious legislative agenda to tackle. They'd made some progress on issues like health care, crop insurance, and conservation programs, but they were about to face their toughest battle yet. If they lost this one, it could put them out of business for good.

When he heard, in 2002, that Montana was already hosting three to four dozen test plots of genetically engineered wheat, Jim Barngrover was troubled. He figured the crop would hit the market within the next two years, and then the genie would definitely be out of the bottle. Personally, Jim's biggest reservations about GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, concerned their potential impacts on human health and the environment. But as a seasoned activist, he knew the most convincing argument for a precautionary approach to the new technology was economic.

Montana farmers sold about 60 percent of their hard red spring wheat to countries that did not accept genetically modified grain, Jim explained in a 2003 AERO
Sun Times
article. If the state's wheat supply became contaminated, growers could lose up to 900 million dollars a year. Lambasting the legislature's failure to curb or at least regulate GMOs, the Timeless partner found himself in the ironic position of defending the integrity of conventional wheat—against the genetic drift of an even less desirable plant.

Despite the state government's track record of inaction, Jim promised, AERO, the Northern Plains Resource Council, and the Montana Farmers Union would force the GMO issue with a more aggressive suite of bills in 2003. The legislation they sought to pass would not only mandate stringent state regulation of genetically engineered crops but would also require labeling of GMO products, establish manufacturer liability, and require seed companies to ask farmers' permission before sampling their crops and filing a patent infringement lawsuit.

The GMO fight was clearly an uphill battle against deep-pocketed interests, so the Timeless farmers had to dramatically extend their political network. Intent on building a strong enough coalition to fight back against genetically engineered wheat, Jim found himself collaborating with a number of unlikely allies. The lefty activist met with libertarian populists, consumer groups, lobbyists from the famously conservative Farm Bureau and Montana Grain Growers—anyone who thought a foray into genetically engineered crops merited at least a bit of caution. It wasn't enough to push a bill through in 2003, but momentum was building.

In 2005, AERO launched the Grow Montana coalition, convening a diverse group of aligned organizations to consolidate their influence in Helena. As the 2009 legislature approached, it appeared the alliance had a decent shot of passing the most popular piece of its legislative package: the Farmer Protection Bill. As sponsor Betsy Hands explained, the Farmer Protection Bill would establish a standard crop-sampling protocol for patent holders to follow when investigating farmers, something GMO seed companies had been doing with increasing frequency. If a grower acquired patented plant material unknowingly—by planting contaminated seed or via pollen drift—they couldn't be held liable for patent infringement. After several years of failed attempts, it looked like the
farmer protection measure finally had the necessary votes to pass. The bill sailed through the Montana House of Representatives on a 57–43 vote, and Jim Barngrover started thinking ahead, imagining how he might leverage this majority to pass some of his more far-reaching GMO-related proposals.

And then, before it could reach the floor of the state senate, the Farmer Protection Bill was tabled in committee. Two days later, an investigative reporter from the Associated Press offered an explanation. Monsanto had hosted a dinner for members of the Senate Agriculture, Livestock, and Irrigation Committee at a private club in Helena. Somewhere between the steak and the dessert, the legislators had changed their minds about patent infringement.

“Eventually we did get a GMO bill that was very significant,” Jim Barngrover told me. The political veteran finished his story on an upbeat if not fully resolved note. Following the embarrassing steak dinner scandal, the state department of agriculture had aggressively championed farmer protection and had helped pass a revised version of the bill in 2011. “It still isn't where I want to be, by any means, but it protects farmers,” Jim told me.

“And I should also mention,” he added, “when Tester was president of the state senate, he got a resolution through the senate and the house and signed by the governor. That resolution stated that there would be essentially no commercialization of GE wheat in Montana until or unless our major markets, principally in Asia, accept GE wheat. I was in the office with him when he and [Kamut farmer/entrepreneur] Bob Quinn authored that resolution together.”

Offering his own take on the genetic engineering issue between bites of farmer Linda Lassila's famous lentil cake, Casey Bailey appeared ready to take up where the previous Timeless generation had left off. He'd been following a California proposition to label GMOs, which he strongly supported. “When companies have to make society more ignorant to succeed, that really irritates me,” Casey said, explaining his position. “And, really, we don't know if these genetically altered plants are changing—I mean, we are a part of our environment. It's foolish to think that we can play around like this without feeling the consequences.”

Casey's holistic ecological perspective had him fired up about another policy issue as well, which steered the barbecue conversation back to the shortcomings of federal conservation programs. Casey was annoyed by the preservationist view that all human impacts were bad, and he shared Doug and Anna's opinion that federal cost share should reward good stewardship instead of essentially telling farmers to give up. The no-till trend was one thing, but the real agrarian cop-out, from Casey's perspective, was the way some people took advantage of the Conservation Reserve Program. One of the most popular government programs in this area since its inception in 1985, the CRP was paying farmers—handsomely—to do nothing.