by Liz Carlisle
In addition to the joint resolution on sustainable agriculture research, the 1985 Montana legislature also passed an organic food definition law—the fourth in the country, behind only California, Oregon, and Maine. Even before the ink dried on the bill, Jim and Dave were already putting together a steering committee to write Montana’s first organic standards. Dave hadn’t forgotten the labeling roadblock he’d hit in his attempt to retail organic beef, and he wanted to make sure Montana’s future sustainable farmers had a market. He and Jim became founding board members of the first statewide certifying organization, and they worked hard to foster its strength and grassroots character. Meanwhile, AERO—heavily populated with Timeless farmers—formed the state’s original organic growers association in 1987. At each turn, Bud Barta, Tom Hastings, and Russ Salisbury joined the new groups, rapidly building a critical mass that gave the organizations legitimacy and impelling energy.
While it may have seemed to some onlookers that Montana’s organic farming movement came out of nowhere (or worse, California), the truth was that it had very deep, local roots. And although the Alternative Energy Resources Organization may have been the place to start digging up these roots, you had to keep going to get anywhere near the bottom. Indeed, AERO traced its own origins back to an even older, fiercer citizens’ group: the Northern Plains Resource Council.
In 1972, a group of rough-edged cowboys and cowgirls crammed into the living room of a tiny ranch cabin in southeast Montana’s Bull Mountains, home to the son of a member of Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall Gang. The US Bureau of Reclamation had just released a plan to site twenty-one new coal-fired power plants in Montana, and the ranchers were concerned that such drastic development would destroy their land. Determined to stop the ghastly strip mining, they promised one another they wouldn’t let the coal companies buy them out. And to make good on their word, they formed a nonprofit council.
The rancher’s group—the Northern Plains Resource Council—proceeded to organize their neighbors. They went from living room to living room, explaining the implications of the proposed mining and urging their neighbors not to sign away their property. When Consolidation Coal started knocking on those same doors, contracts in hand, they were astonished to find landowner after landowner uninterested in their lucrative offers. They were even more astonished when these stubborn ranchers helped convince the Montana state legislature to pass a series of environmental protection statutes. But the most incredible underdog victory came in 1977, when the Northern Plains Resource Council united with like-minded groups across the country to drive a strip-mining regulation bill through the US Congress. In a short five years, Montana’s ranch families—led by a particularly resolute group of women—had delivered an unequivocal message: Coal is not the future we want.
When the dust settled and a substantial share of the proposed power plants had been successfully blocked, the niece of one of those forceful women asked a thought-provoking question: If coal is the future we are against, what is the future we are for? This sparky thirty-year-old—Kye Cochran—was one of several countercultural young people whose volunteer labor had supported the crusade of their more traditional agrarian parents, uncles, and aunts. While the Northern Plains Resource Council continued its advocacy against dirty energy (as it does today), several of its fresh-faced volunteers launched a new group, to promote alternative solutions. In another living room—at the roomy Billings Victorian that Kye and her comrades had christened “Bozovilla” (in tribute to a psychedelic political radio theater show)—the Alternative Energy Resources Organization was born.
A proud member of both AERO and NPRC, Russ Salisbury liked reminding people just how far-reaching the roots of Montana’s sustainable agriculture movement really were. This “new” approach to farming hadn’t begun as a hippie project in the radical sixties and seventies, or as a desperate response to the eighties farm crisis. It had grown out of a deep agrarian heritage, a heritage that underpinned the strip-mining fight, the counterculture, and even Russ himself. Russ didn’t quite wear this story on his sleeve, but it was plainly visible on his favorite vest. Denim blue, with a sheepskin lining and collar, it was emblazoned with an orange logo that read “Farmers Union.”
LEGISLATION, EDUCATION, COOPERATION
Russ had been a member of the Farmers Union since he was eight. He’d gone to the union’s camp every summer and learned its three key principles: legislation, education, and cooperation. Now a local authority on this century-old farmers’ organization, Russ thought newcomers to “alternative agriculture” ought to know its story too.
The Farmers Educational Cooperative Union of America was founded in Texas in 1902, as a response to increasing monopoly power in the grain business. The very next year, the group had formed its first marketing cooperative. From an initial membership of ten, the Farmers Union had rapidly grown in both numbers and influence, particularly in the grain belt states of Montana, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas. One grain pool at a time, the group’s members attempted to wrest control of American agriculture back from wealthy corporations. By the early 1940s, the grassroots coalition had established itself as a respected political force, credited with everything from the cooperative structure of rural electrification to the institutionalization of the national school lunch program to the successful campaign for women’s suffrage. As the rural counterpart to the US labor movement, the Farmers Union sought to organize working people so that they could use their economic and political power to demand some measure of control over their own lives.
Unique among American farm organizations, the Farmers Union had connected the dots between domestic and foreign policies, calling for cooperation among the world’s peoples rather than military and economic competition. Unfortunately, this prescient attention to the disastrous trajectory of globalization had landed the group in hot water during the cold war, when it was accused of promoting communism and closely monitored by both the State Department and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although the National Farmers Union never faced prosecution, its leaders got the message. If they wanted to stay in business, they’d better soften their critiques of US trade policy and stick to more traditional agrarian issues. By scaling back its more ambitious aims, the union had managed to survive the McCarthy years: but not before its national leadership expelled several outspoken chapters that refused to be silenced.
The Farmers Union had become a bit more staid in recent years, Russ admitted, but the movement it seeded hadn’t slowed down. The group’s populist energy had merely been transplanted to new institutional contexts, where people continued to practice legislation, education, and cooperation in the name of a dignified rural life. “It seemed like AERO became the new Farmers Union,” Russ reflected. “They were the new idealistic people thinking and coming up with new ideas.”
Still, Russ thought, it was important to remember where so many of the AERO activists’ “new” ideas came from. Banding together to stand up to corporate power was something many of them had learned from their parents, whose cooperative ethos and mutual aid had helped them weather both the Depression and World War II. For the substantial and committed membership of that era, the Farmers Union was almost a religion. “My family went to the Methodist church—my folks were always good Methodists—but Farmers Union meant more than Sunday school to me,” Russ recalled. “You know, when I think about my upbringing, I can’t separate church and my parents and the Farmers Union in my mind.”
Russ Salisbury’s way of farming was foundational to his character. In truth, it was more a way of life—at once protest and homage, a point of departure and a comforting foothold of continuity. Russ’s approach may have cut against the prevailing grain, but it was also true to his heritage in a manner that connected the jocular homesteader to a number of other Montanans. It was no accident that steadfast agrarian populists like Russ were so well represented at AERO conferences and Timeless Seeds field days. For agrarians of his generation, the indust
rial present was doubly out of step—with both their remembered yesterdays and their intended tomorrows.
Suspended in a late-twentieth-century no-man’s-land of corporate greed, people like Dave Oien and Russ Salisbury had to dig underneath the shallow traditions of modern agribusiness, to find richer soil in which to root their visions for a workable rural society. But they didn’t have to dig far. As Russ regaled fresh-faced hippies with his childhood lessons from the Farmers Union, and Dave roped his dad into planting black medic, unruly young radicals discovered common ground with the stubborn old-timers who’d preceded them. Together, they defined themselves as a community, united by a shared inheritance and a shared future that were inseparable. This was perhaps the true meaning of the name “Timeless Seeds.” Plants were their tools, but what these farmers were really trying to establish was a more stable collective legacy. Instead of focusing on quarterly profits, they poured the lion’s share of their time and energy into building AERO’s sustainable agriculture “information clearinghouse,” which replaced the logic of trade secrets with the maxim of sharing what you learned. Legislation. Education. Cooperation. And, of course, plenty of perspiration.
5
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.
SEE FOR YOURSELVES
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 o
f 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.