Lentil Underground (7 page)

BOOTLEG RESEARCH AND FARMER SCIENCE

December 7, 1988, was a bone-chilling day even for the Judith Basin. The AERO staffers who had organized Montana's first Soil-Building Cropping Systems Conference nervously eyed the too-big-looking stacks of programs they had spent weeks preparing, worrying no one would show. The roads were coated with ice, and the spitting snow made it hard to see more than a few feet ahead. Nonetheless, more than 200 producers and researchers chained up their trucks and drove over to the Yogo Inn in downtown Lewistown. It was the height of the farm crisis, and people were hungry for answers.

The conference promised a stellar lineup of agronomists, crop breeders, microbiologists, and distributors from as far away as Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. David Oien and Bud Barta were on the agenda, and Jim Barngrover was handing out information about Timeless Seeds. But the real attraction was neither the out-of-town hotshots nor the Timeless farmers. Rather, the star of this show was Dave's research partner in his new venture, the chain-smoking soil chemist who had painstakingly bred black medic by propagating seeds collected from wild plants. After twenty-two years of experimentation, Jim Sims was ready to debut this new cropping system, and all eyes were on him. The lone credentialed
expert willing to cooperate with Dave and the other sustainable agriculturalists, Jim assured his audience that he knew what they were up against.

“We've got low, erratic precipitation, which is another way of saying drought,” the squarely built Sims pronounced, his deep voice spurning theatrics as he got right to the point. “We've got a hot, dry July and August, which is another way of saying drought.” Sims ticked off a long list of the other challenges Montana's producers faced: short growing seasons, surprise frosts, harsh winters, isolation from markets. “Add to that nonbeneficial insects, disease and weeds, nutrient deficiencies, few crop species (mostly a monoculture of wheat and barley), the saline seep hazard, the erosion hazard,” the folksy scientist continued. “I got tired of trying to list them so I quit.”

Sims's assessment wasn't exactly encouraging, but his frankness got farmers' attention. They were sick of hearing about chemical solutions that worked wonders on test plots in the relatively rainy Gallatin Valley, where the state university was located. At least this straight-shooting character appreciated the conditions they were facing out here in farm country.

Sympathetic to farmers' woes, Jim also appreciated the harsh conditions
he
was facing, in the similarly spartan environment of the land grant university system. Public research dollars had dwindled significantly over the past decade, so plant breeders and agronomists had increasingly come to rely on private funding from chemical manufacturers and commodity groups. That wasn't a problem for most of Jim's colleagues, whose research programs were well aligned with the prevailing cash-grain system. But Jim had to invent a clever means of supporting his unorthodox studies.

“We had some grants from the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee for fertilizer research, but not anything else,” he
recalled, “so we bootlegged research with pulse crops. We satisfied the requirement for working with small grains and fertilizer, but on the side we did a lot of work with cropping systems. The bootleg system; that was really very important.”

After a quarter century of bootlegging, Jim was eager to bring his underground research to the forefront and help Montana's farmers address all those challenging conditions he so palpably understood. “We've got to build a cropping system that fits in our environment, in our water resource, in our soil resource, and get around all these problems at the same time,” he told the packed audience at the Lewistown conference. The Earl Butz approach to farming, Jim explained, treated soil fertility as a matter of chemistry: a balance of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium (NPK) that could be achieved with the correct application of fertilizer. Among the reasons this strategy wasn't working was that soil fertility was also a matter of biology. Soil was alive. Or at least it once had been. By now, industrial agriculture had systematically killed off much of the diverse community of microorganisms in the living fraction of the soil—soil organic matter—which was just as essential to crop health as N, P, or K. To restore the fertility of their land, farmers would need to bring this community back.

This was one of the most underappreciated benefits of crop rotation, Sims continued: Diversity aboveground supported diversity below it, too. When farmers planted legumes after wheat, they weren't just replenishing nitrogen, but cultivating a whole new society underground: symbiotic bacteria, soil-aerating worms, soil-aggregating fungi. It wouldn't happen overnight, Sims cautioned. He had been studying and working on this approach for more than two decades before getting to the point where he was ready to trial black medic on cooperating farms. Even after all that, the black medic system wasn't an out-of-the-box solution. Each producer
would need a good ten years to build the soil and adapt a rotation to his or her own place.

Privately, Sims estimated that he'd need twice that much time—twenty years—to change farming practices on any appreciable scale. “Farmers don't just try something on the recommendation of a guy from the university,” he said knowingly. But Jim had the sense to stick with a technique he'd used for his chemical fertilizer work: on-farm research. If he wanted to convince farmers that this alternative cropping system really worked, he'd need to host his experiments on their land. That was a pretty big request, though, so the first step was finding a few interested farmers who could convince their fellows to participate. In search of willing cooperators, Sims turned to his partners at Timeless Seeds, who were already busy getting the word out.

Six months later and fifteen miles west, the Timeless boys hosted their first major farm tour. By June of 1989, Dave had gotten twenty-six people curious enough about Sims's “miracle” plant to drive out to Bud Barta's place, a 1,200-acre cash-grain operation just outside Lewistown. The crowd was eager to witness medic in action. Nutrients grown by weeds seemed about as realistic as money growing on trees, but with the price of fossil fuel–based nitrogen skyrocketing, these shrewd farmers figured it was worth a day trip to see for themselves. Those who hadn't been to the conference the previous winter had heard through the grapevine about the novel method of undersowing: seeding a nitrogen-building legume at the same time as a cash crop, so as to provide fertilizer free of charge.

Bud ushered the parade of pickups into his front yard, then gathered his guests at the edge of a field that had been planted with wheat the previous year. The typical practice—summer fallow—was to leave such an area bare, so it could store moisture and soil fertility for the following wheat crop. But Bud's field was littered with an irregular smattering of low-growing plants. Sporting trefoil leaves and bright-yellow flowers, the early summer growth was uncannily reminiscent of the invaders his fellow farmers were used to yanking out of their yards. Bud's visitors were surprised. Wouldn't these plants suck up all the nutrients that Bud needed for next year's grain?

“This is black medic,” Barta told the crowd, introducing them to the miracle species they'd been hearing about. “It's a legume, like alfalfa, so it fixes nitrogen for my grain crop. But unlike alfalfa, it doesn't suck my soil dry.” Barta dug up a medic plant so the crowd could see its nitrogen-fixing nodules and abbreviated root system. “The roots are shallow, because medic doesn't need much water,” Barta explained. “In fact, I might end up with
more
moisture for my wheat because the medic keeps the ground covered to limit wind erosion.”

“So this is your new rotation crop?” one of the farmers asked. “You plant it in the alternating years instead of summer fallow?” Not exactly, Bud explained.

“See how hard these are?” Bud said, inviting his guests to pinch the dense seed heads of the medic. “Only about half of these will germinate this year. After I harvest those seeds, I can plant winter wheat right into the same field—without tilling the soil. The other fifty percent of the medic will grow up under the wheat, and it will keep releasing nitrogen throughout the season. The wheat will canopy out over top of it, so I won't have any trouble at harvest.”

When he'd finished his biology lesson, Bud got to the really juicy part. “As long as I don't till, the medic will reseed itself each year, so I don't have to plant it again. I've drastically reduced my diesel costs, and my fertilizer bill is practically zero.” The somewhat private farmer had an understated way of putting things, but everybody in attendance knew what a revolutionary state of affairs they were witnessing. Bud's place was darn near farming itself.

Come back next season, Bud encouraged his visitors, as he and his new business partners wrapped up the tour. The inquisitive tinkerer was just as curious as anyone else to see what would happen next.

Bud Barta's place wasn't just a farm anymore. It was also a research site, lined out in split-block comparisons just like the Oien place. Since nobody but Jim Sims would plant medic on MSU's study plots—which were too small and too well watered to approximate real-world conditions anyway—green manure farmers had to serve as their own scientists and extension agents.

Each year, the Timeless farmers trialed new practices. What happened if they planted their seeds farther apart? Closer together? Deeper? Shallower? Was it better to seed early or late? Alongside their black medic, they added test plots of other legume varieties—Australian medics, Sirius peas, yellow blossom sweet clover. Dave Oien religiously followed research out of Canada, where the university in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, had hired a legume breeder. Dave drove north across the border to get buckwheat seed, west across the Rocky Mountains to get Austrian
winter peas, and up to the little town of Sunburst, Montana, in search of another pea variety called Trapper.

With the help of Jim Sims, the Timeless farmers took notes on the results of their experiments, some of which had now been running for more than five years. But even more important, they invited their neighbors to see for themselves. After that field tour at Bud's place, not a summer went by without at least one Timeless-sponsored demonstration day. The little group's big outreach efforts appeared to be making an impact.

“Organic farming isn't just leaving off chemicals, it's a good management program,” one farmer wrote in answer to an AERO survey about the Barta farm tour. “I got to thinking, here I am raising food and spreading poisons on it,” another survey read. “It just didn't make sense.” A third farmer was even willing to speak to a reporter. “It was just the thing I needed,” he told her. “After that conference, I parked my sprayer for the last time.” The conferences and field tours were a good start for the new crop, the new company, and the new movement. But if they were going to speed up Jim Sims's twenty-year timetable for changing agriculture on the northern plains, it would take more than one show-and-tell session a year.

Jim Barngrover, now chair of the AERO board, was already thinking one step ahead. Even before he scheduled the field tour at Bud Barta's place, he had applied for a grant to hire a dedicated staffer who could survey the status of sustainable agricultural practices not just on one farm, but across the entire northern Great Plains and Intermountain West. Since no one was officially collecting
statistics on organic farmers, nobody could say for sure how many of them there were, what they were doing, or whether it was working. For the most part, organic farmers felt more or less like Dave Oien had when he'd started—alone. So it was quite the shocker when the survey results came back, comprehensively describing a whopping 188 sustainable farms across the region. These farmers were doing all sorts of things—planting green manures, integrating crops and livestock, leaving mulch on their fields at the end of the season—most of which, survey respondents reported, were working pretty well. But the farmers also had research questions—research questions that weren't being addressed by their local universities and extension agents. Frustrated, a lot of them had given up on getting good information from the experts. But the survey hinted that these renegades might be willing to listen to someone else: one another. Although fewer than half of respondents reported working with their county agent, three-fourths cited other farmers as an information source. It was this crucial piece of data that stood out when all the surveys made it back through the mail to their author, Nancy Matheson.

Nancy Matheson had grown up just twenty miles from Dave Oien on a grain farm east of Conrad, and like her neighbor, she was as proud of her roots as she was horrified by their most prominent branches. Although Nancy had gone away to UC Berkeley for college, she'd also come home during the summers to drive a combine, and she'd taken the AERO job partly because it meant she could live in Montana full-time. Although most people tended to look to the countercultural youth of liberal urban enclaves as the most likely leaders for social movements, Nancy found equal potential in the communitarian ethos of her parents and grandparents. In 1990, equipped with the data from her survey, she launched a new AERO program, carefully designed to advance a
sweeping vision for sustainable agriculture within a familiar agrarian context.