Montana
Montana Lentil Farmers Go Against the Grain to Build Thriving Organic Business
David Oien doesn’t look like a renegade. He’s a pleasant, down-to-earth, third-generation Montana farmer. However Oien and his fellow farmers at Timeless Seeds are renegades. In Montana, a state dominated by typical wheat, Oien and Timeless Seeds went in opposition to the grain by rising natural lentils and different specialty crops in a area the place that they had by no means been grown earlier than. And so they’ve been profitable doing it whereas constructing wholesome soils on 1000’s of acres in Montana and serving to to revive rural communities.
‘We Wanted to Construct Soil Well being’
Again within the late Nineteen Eighties, Oien and his three fellow natural farmers, Bud Barta, Jim Barngrover, and Tom Hastings, had no plans to construct a enterprise rising and promoting natural lentils for meals. They simply needed to construct soil well being.
Timeless Seeds’s founding natural farmers (from left) Bud Barta, David Oien, and Jim Barngrover.
Wheat is king in Montana with 12 million acres of it grown every year. The state’s farmers develop wheat after which let their fields lay fallow, uncovered to the weather. This, mixed with years of tillage, badly eroded Montana’s soils. Soil natural matter, an indicator of soil well being, had been 5 to 7 p.c when Montana was native prairie, however after a few years of rising wheat, that quantity had fallen to 1.5 p.c, in accordance with Oien.
“We would have liked to rebuild fertility, soil well being, natural matter, and organic exercise,” Oien says.
The 4 farmers linked with Jim Sims, an agronomist at Montana State College, who had carried out analysis on the soil-building properties of legumes, resembling lentils and peas. Sims developed a self-reseeding leguminous cowl crop known as George Black Medic. In 1987, the farmers launched Timeless Seeds, aiming to develop and promote Black Medic as a means to assist farmers rebuild Montana’s soils. However typical farmers who had been used to utilizing artificial nitrogen fertilizers didn’t take to the quilt crop. The 4 farmers thought they might additionally promote Black Medic to the state’s natural farmers. However again then, they had been few and much between.
“It was a horrible enterprise mannequin,” Oien says. “Any rational particular person may have seen that. Nevertheless it needed to be executed as a result of cowl crops had been wanted.”
‘Zero Pulse Crops Grown in Montana’
To maintain their enterprise going, the farmers turned to rising natural lentils for meals, which nobody else in Montana was doing.
Protein-rich lentils have been a meals supply for 1000’s of years. Lentils are drought-resistant, making them a really perfect crop to develop in Montana’s dry local weather. As a legume, lentils take nitrogen from the ambiance and convert it to a nutrient supply within the soil to feed crops grown after them. When grown in rotation with different crops, lentils additionally assist to regulate weeds, decreasing the necessity for chemical herbicides.
Regardless of the crop’s benefits, lentils had been unknown in Montana. “Again within the Nineteen Nineties, there have been zero pulse crops grown in Montana; west of the Rockies, there might need been a number of farms. However nobody grew lentils organically,” Oien says.
In 1994, Timeless landed a contract to produce French inexperienced lentils to retail grocery chain Dealer Joe’s, which might promote them underneath their very own model.
“I didn’t know who they had been,” Oien says. “I believed the identify was funky.”
With Dealer Joe’s as a buyer in addition to a rising variety of pure meals shops, Timeless Seeds wanted to broaden right into a processing facility. A grain elevator in Conrad, Montana, was obtainable to lease. Oien went to his financial institution to get a mortgage to lease the power.
“The financial institution requested ‘What’s natural?’ and ‘What’s a lentil?’” he says. The financial institution turned them down, so the farmers integrated the enterprise and bought shares to household and associates to lift cash to lease the power.
Sadly, the Dealer Joe’s contract was short-lived, however Oien noticed it as a studying expertise.
“To have any hope of our survival, we wanted extra management and a line of merchandise underneath our personal model,” he says.