Lentil Underground by Liz Carlisle Read Free Book Online Page A

they could use the same seeder for it, and besides, a college man from Bozeman was promoting it with
research.
This wasn’t just another wild hare dreamed up by Dave’s hippie friends in Missoula. Let’s see how it grows, Orville said dispassionately from the seat of the tractor, while Dave rode the drill. But Dave couldn’t help but be optimistic. It was a perfect mid-May afternoon, and he and his dad were literally planting the seeds of the future together.
    What excited Dave most about medic was that it was not just an annual green manure, but the keystone of a long-term cropping system. Dave and his dad would sow the medic this year and let it go to seed. The plant’s black seedpods had such thick walls that only about half of the tiny amber seeds would escape in time to germinate this season. The other half would remain in the soil and germinate the next year, along with whatever grain crop the Oiens planted. Dave and Orville’s grain would easily canopy out over the low-growing medic, which would obligingly supply nitrogen throughout the season without hogging either sunlight or soil moisture. This farming method—undersowing—was a completely different ball game for cash-grain agriculture. It meant that farmers didn’t have to choose between fertilizer crops and grain crops. They could grow them at the same time.
    Dave got even more excited when his medic started poking up out of the ground. He had a great stand with good soil cover. It wasn’t long, however, before weeds started to creep in, encroaching on the noncompetitive legume. Dave sprung into action, protecting his plants with the tenacity of a first-time parent. Everythree weeks he went out to the fields by himself. He spent long evenings working up and down his two acres, pulling weeds before they had a chance to spread.
    Dave’s first year as a black medic farmer yielded 150 pounds of seed. He wanted to expand his experiment, so he harvested the entire crop and convinced his dad to plant it on ten acres instead of just two. The Oiens finished season two with more than 650 pounds of the prolific legume. At this point, Dave was running out of oddball acres, and he didn’t want to keep this miracle plant to himself anyway. He needed to get some friends in on the deal. In the fall of 1985, Dave managed to convince three AERO buddies to purchase starter seed from him at 6 dollars a pound: Tom Hastings, Jim Barngrover, and Bud Barta.
A CARPENTER WITH A CONSCIENCE
    Bud Barta was the perfect foil for his unconventional crop. The gentle, bearded father of three was muscular, not macho—the kind of guy you’d hope to have with you if your truck broke down. He credited his father with teaching him the critical skills of life (“farming, mechanics, and common sense”), to which he appeared to have added few bells and whistles beyond a bachelors of science in electrical engineering. Although Bud had always earned respectable grades, he’d been in no particular hurry to go to college, since he’d enjoyed his post–high school jobs as a carpenter and general contractor. Nor was he particularly eager to hang around academia after graduation. Neither graduate school nor a high-paying job with an engineering firm appealed to Bud, who had been just as happy trimming trees to pay for school as he had been with school itself. Truthfully, all Bud really wanted was to earn an honestliving that still left plenty of time for fishing and skiing. So he’d moved back to the 1,200-acre ranch and grain farm where he’d grown up, two and a half hours southeast of Conrad, in Lewistown, Montana.
    Bud’s quiet workingman’s manner matched the character of his hometown. Dubbed Charlie Russell country after the cowboy artist who’d made it famous, Lewistown was a poor-but-proud agricultural hub. People here trusted guys like Bud, who were more doers than talkers. Had he gone straight from trimming