Lentil Underground by Liz Carlisle Read Free Book Online Page B

trees to managing his parents’ farm, Bud might have fit right in with the laconic ways and uniform landscapes of his neighbors. But instead, he’d taken one more handyman job, which had turned out to be quite a bit different from the rest. For the final three years of the heady seventies, Bud had served as the technician for a traveling renewable energy road show.
    Living out of a bus with the fourteen other crew members of the New Western Energy Show, Bud Barta had discovered a way of life far removed from his father’s simple credo. The troupe—a political take on the old-time medicine show that deployed theater and do-it-yourself demonstrations to “fight the finite energy conspiracy”—left a lasting impression on the humble tradesman. Between performances, the Energy Show often stayed on organic farms, which impressed Bud as a good model for how he might combine his practical skills with his newfound ecological consciousness. By the time he returned to his family’s place, Bud had come to believe chemicals were immoral. “They are polluting our water and will have long-lasting effects on future generations,” he’d written in the newsletter of the Energy Show’s parent organization, the Alternative Energy Resources Organization. “We don’t have any right to impose our thoughtlessness on them. I don’t want MY kids around chemicals.”
    But Bud made little progress converting his neighbors (whose property completely surrounded his) or his father (who wasleasing it to him). The stubbornly individual son of an equally stubborn agribusinessman, Bud faced the quintessential dilemma of the second-generation progressive farmer: His father was just as committed to his own brand of innovation as he was to a low-input alternative. Bud summed it up matter-of-factly. “My dad was the first in the county to farm with chemicals; I was the first to farm without them.”
    Frustrated, Bud recalled a conversation with one of the organic farmers he’d stayed with during his Energy Show days, a jovial guy his age who had faced similar struggles transitioning his family operation. I oughta call David Oien, Bud thought. He wasn’t the first. Another AERO acquaintance was already on the phone with Dave, cooking up a plan to supply hundreds of other farmers with their “miracle” fertilizer crop.
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
    A philosophically minded thirty-six-year-old with a long face and an arresting mop of curly hair, Jim Barngrover spoke with a slow, measured cadence that identified him immediately as a leader. While Bud’s boyish countenance and Dave’s ready smile lent a certain exuberance to the nascent green manure scheme, Jim’s carefully enunciated tone never strayed too far from solemn. When the former teacher lectured about this new way of farming, you had the sense that it was a matter of life and death.
    For Jim this was, in fact, the case. While Dave and Bud had overhauled their farms in anticipation of a crisis, Jim had already lived the very worst of their fears. As a five-year-old kid growing up on a sugar beet farm in Worland, Wyoming, Jim had seen his dad come home sick one day following exposure to the insecticideparathion. Donald Barngrover never got better. Jim watched in horror while his father gradually succumbed to Parkinson’s disease, which forced the Barngrovers to forfeit the family farm. Stoic Donald finally died in 1996, but not before he’d spent forty years wrestling with slow physical and mental degeneration.
    Researchers would later confirm the link between Parkinson’s and parathion, but Jim didn’t wait for the journal articles to come out. Aware that Montana had recently passed a new constitution that promised the right to a “clean and healthful environment,” he moved across the state border in 1975 and got involved in anti-pesticide activism and chemical-free farming.
    Since Jim no