Lentil Underground by Liz Carlisle Read Free Book Online

the legislators and researchers at the congress had their own “stations” (the Aussie term for a diversified livestock and crop operation), and the charming American had managed to score himself a handful of invitations. What he’d witnessed had completely shifted his thinking about how to boost soil fertility back in Montana.
    The Australians were using a more efficient strategy than the chemical approach, Jim discovered. After twenty years of experimenting with medics and clovers, the Aussies had developed a system called “ley” (temporary pasture) farming. Under this form of management, legumes were used as both fertilizer and livestock forage, so the soil was continuously regenerated by the agricultural system itself. Sims was astounded by the diverse array of plants the Australians used as soil builders. He returned to Bozeman determined to adapt such an approach to the northern Great Plains.
    â€œI looked about for something I could use for the legume phase that would reseed itself in this environment,” Jim recounted, recalling his hunch that most of the Australian legumes probably wouldn’t grow as well half a world away. “I was walking about the research farm and there was a bunch of black medic, so I said, well, I could try that. I gathered seed with my hands to get enough to put in the first experiment.”
    Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that. Jim’s funding still came from the chemical companies, and his dean and department chair at MSU continued to tell him (as they were telling the Ag Task Force) that the only things that would grow in Montana werewheat and barley. Plus, there was no market for anything else, the authorities insisted. This last argument was a rather circular one, Jim realized—the church of wheat and barley’s self-fulfilling prophecy. When he questioned the agricultural marketing experts over in the economics department, they actually told him with a straight face that their models showed low demand for Montana legumes—as if this “low demand” was simply the result of some immutable economic law. And yet, how could anyone demand a product that not only didn’t exist, but also had been declared impossible? The hand manipulating the supply side of this equation was anything but invisible.
    Once he figured out that MSU’s economists didn’t have much to offer him, Jim started doing his own research, and he discovered that Montana had supported a profitable pea industry in the 1930s. The pea business had been so lucrative, in fact, that the crop had succumbed to blight because it wasn’t being rotated with anything else. When Montana’s peas crashed in the late 1940s, the Gallatin Valley Seed Company had moved its operations to Twin Falls, Idaho, inaugurating a sixty-year pea monopoly that Idaho and Washington had swiftly locked in with protective legislation. Jim wasn’t fixing to get Montana back into the pea business, but he figured if legumes had grown here before, they could grow here again. Neither the opinions of his colleagues nor the wishes of his funders were going to stop him.
    Instead of battling his superiors, Jim went straight to Montana’s farmers. It didn’t take him long to identify David Oien as a fellow traveler. After meeting Dave at the extension workshop, Jim convinced his new friend to plant a couple of his “oddball acres” with self-seeding legumes. Dave chose a patch of earth right outside his front window, and his first black medic crop went in the ground in the spring of 1983.
    Dave started with twenty pounds of medic seed, enough toplant two acres. He fed the tiny “weed” seeds into a twelve-foot disk drill and let ’er rip. Once again, Dave talked Orville into helping, explaining that this experiment was basically like seeding alfalfa (aka
Medicago sativa
) or sweet clover. Medic was a cousin to those plants, Dave told his dad. It looked similar,