FEATURE
ARTICLE - Dec.
26 , 2005
A New Green Revolution
by Sam Western
In Montana’s
dying farm country, ‘vanguard agriculture’ puts people
back on the land
Montana, most residents agree, is the Last Best
Place — but it will only remain the Best Place if it stays undiscovered.
In the heart of every Montanan lies the conviction that the fewer
people in the state, the better. Fewer inhabitants mean less competition
for that 20-acre home site just 15 minutes from town, and fewer
people slipping into your favorite trout pool on the Big Hole or
setting up a wall tent in your secret elk-hunting spot.
But there’s a dark side to what Gov. Brian Schweitzer, D,
has dubbed the "Montana Mystique": a stubborn isolationism
that undermines communities and prevents people from seeking solutions
to deep-seated economic problems.
In the rolling wheat country of central and eastern Montana, this
individualism pits farmer against farmer. The winners unfurl endless
fields of wheat across many thousands of acres. The losers, in ever-growing
numbers, simply go belly-up. Often they end up moving away altogether,
adding to the steady un-peopling of rural Montana.
In many ways, this cutthroat commodity agriculture is logical,
the offspring of an economic model designed to feed the most people
at the least cost. A growing number of critics, however, believe
that this economic model is destroying not only rural Montana, but
many of the West’s "flat" counties — those
places that lack the scenery, resorts and urban amenities that draw
new residents and businesses.
Farmer Dean Folkvord of Three Forks, Mont., puts it plainly: "There
are winners and losers in economics. The winners are the cities."
The losers are the small towns and the agricultural areas.
University of Montana economist Larry Swanson says the state’s
small cities are "actually relatively high performers"
in terms of economic well-being. The state’s urban and scenic
areas are mostly in its mountainous western part, and they continue
to draw the overwhelming percentage of new immigrants.
But in eastern Montana’s farming counties, populations are
wavering at the critical threshold necessary to fund county government.
Wibaux County, hard against the North Dakota line, had over 3,000
people in 1920; now it’s down to 971. Treasure County had
nearly 2,000 people 85 years ago; today, it has 745. Even some western
counties, such as Beaverhead, Deer Lodge, Silver Bow and Park, either
stayed the same or lost people between 2000 and 2004.
In fact, if not for growth in three counties — Flathead,
Ravalli and Gallatin — Montana would have had an overall population
loss from 2000 to 2004.
In 2003, eight of the 10 poorest counties in the nation (based
on wages and salaries) were in Montana, all of them agricultural.
On Nov. 29, the U.S. Census Bureau released its latest statistics.
Montana was 45th in the nation in terms of median household income,
rolling around at the bottom of the barrel with West Virginia and
Louisiana.
One wonders what happened. What about the goddamned New Economy?
Wasn’t that supposed to save beautiful rural places like these?
In some places, it has. But other isolated areas, especially those
that depend on commodity agriculture, continue to suffer.
Nonetheless, a growing number of people refuse to accept the demise
of rural Montana. They are not the well-meaning rustic immigrants
with trust funds. Nor are they members of Montana’s traditional
triumvirate of logging, commodity agriculture, and mining —
the people who angrily dismiss the New Economy, declaring the state
will never regain her sheen until she returns to the old ways. These
optimists are the founders and practitioners of what might be called
vanguard agriculture, dryland farmers who are finding new ways to
grow and market their produce.
Some of them are organic farmers, who are reaching beyond roadside
farmers’ markets to compete on a national — even international
— level. "Organic agriculture brings a shimmer of hope
to our industry in Montana," says Nancy Peterson, the state’s
director of agriculture. "It brings the change that’s
necessary."
Other farmers who are not organic, but use holistic and integrated
methods, are determined to show that the small guy can thrive in
a commodity system dominated by Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.
They’re heading into new territory for grain growers, following
the companies that specialize in organic or "natural"
fruits, vegetables and even meat, and now rack up billions in sales
annually.
These farmers have another goal that conventional commodity agriculture
has all but abandoned: maintaining healthy rural communities. Organic
or alternative producers have built grain mills, bakeries and packing
operations; they’re building co-ops and making plans for a
biodiesel plant (see story page 19). Perhaps most importantly, vanguard
agriculture is bucking, acre-by-acre, the dark side of the Last
Best Place mythos — and including people in its solutions.
They have "a long, long ways to go," as one organic farmer
acknowledges. They know that, like commodity growers, they’re
at the mercy of the public’s whimsical taste. And the mercurial
nature of supply and demand could bury them; almost anything that
can be produced can be overproduced.
But it’s difficult to find another movement with the potential
to turn around rural Montana’s long population decline, and
provide an alternative to both corporate commodity agriculture and
the controversial proposal to turn the Plains into one vast "Buffalo
Commons" (HCN, 1/15/01: Plains Sense). And in the successes
and failures of Montana’s vanguard agriculture lie lessons
for the rest of the flat West, which is struggling to prove that
the region has a future outside the cities and below the mountains.
Sexing up the beans
In Conrad in north-central Montana, population 2,638, the November
winds drive the snow sideways. The flakes pelt aging clusters of grain
elevators; the sky is the same leaden color as the buildings.
In the office of one elevator, David Oien shoves aside papers on a
cluttered desk, making room to illustrate a point. "There are
two ways to grow in agriculture: horizontally," he says, moving
his hands sideways. "Or vertically" — and he raises
them about two feet off the desk.
Oien, 56 years old with a shock of gray hair, has just come back
from a farm conference where a speaker from a farm credit association
championed the horizontal approach. "This guy said that if
you wanted to borrow money from him, that if you wanted to be a
viable operation, you’d have to expand your operation by 15
percent a year."
This mentality has prevailed for at least a century. Whenever prices
are low and interest rates high — such as during the 1980s
— the farmers with the least amount of debt, hoping to get
ahead, buy up their neighbors’ land. Flat wheat prices and
intense foreign competition mean grain producers must rely on quantity
to make money. Federal subsidy payments are based on farm acreage,
so volume is the name of the game. With fewer children interested
in farming, the neighbors are often happy to sell.
As a result, in 1920, Montana had about 58,000 farms, averaging
608 acres apiece. In 2004, Montana’s 27,000 farms averaged
2,146 acres apiece.
Oien has spent years trying to buck the expansion trend. He and
a handful of other organic growers, many of them third- and fourth-generation
Montana farmers, have chosen the vertical approach, seeking quality
on the acreage they have, not racing after more — and greener
— pastures on the other side of the fence.
Oien, who was born and raised in Conrad, is one of the pioneers
of organic agriculture. Other farmers talk about his persistence,
creativity, irreverence and bone-deep determination to make the
world a better place — traits Oien says were nurtured during
his years as a student at the University of Chicago in the late
1960s.
Oien began farming with his father in 1976. It was a small operation,
only 240 acres, and his father used the most efficient tools at
his disposal, including herbicides and pesticides — coming
home so soaked in chemicals that his wife would make him take off
all his clothes lest he kill the houseplants.
Oien’s father wasn’t much of a risk-taker; the threat
of ruthless consolidation tends to discourage that trait in conventional
farmers. Oien doesn’t blame him: "He was a child of his
generation as I am a child of mine," he says. His father didn’t
object to Oien’s early experiments with organics, however
— just made a few friendly jabs: "He’d tell me
the only place I could sell it was to my mother," Oien recalls.
In 1987, Oien got together with four other farmers and started
Timeless Seeds. "We grew black medic (a hardy legume used to
fix nitrogen into the soil) not for food, but for seed." This
first venture was not particularly successful, but it piqued his
interest in nitrogen-fixing plants as a form of fertilizer. When
the market for organic foods started to grow in the mid-1990s, Oien
and his partners planted wheat, barley and flax.
They put their crops through a variety of trial rotations. First,
they planted "green manure," various nitrogen-fixing legumes
that are not harvested but plowed back into the soil. The legumes
would be followed by wheat or barley, then by a pulse, such as lentils
or chickpeas, then perhaps by flaxseed or oilseed crops such as
sunflowers. Rotation not only restored the soil; it curbed the growth
of weeds and insects.
Then, says Oien, "We went around to food shows, selling grains
in 50-pound sacks."
They faced long odds: Most organic farmers don’t get the
federal subsidies that conventional farmers do, but they face the
same high transportation costs when it’s time to get their
products to market.
And grains and pulses lack a certain Madison Avenue cachet. Most
grains go into animal feed, and therefore get less attention from
consumers. When one farmer says, "I grow organic avocados in
seaside Santa Barbara," and the other one says, "I grow
organic wheat in Scobey, Mont.," guess who takes home the trophy
for sexiest product?
Nonetheless, through experiments ("we figured things out in
a disorganized way"), failures, diligence, and what Oien describes
as just plain luck, Timeless Seeds grew. The company won —
although it later lost — a contract to supply French lentils
to Trader Joe’s grocery stores. This fall, Oien (who is still
president of the company) and his partners shipped 66,000 packages
of organic lentils and peas to 160 Whole Foods grocery stores throughout
the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom.
While Oien is the only full-time employee, Timeless spreads the
work around. It partners with a Great Falls-based health-care provider,
hiring developmentally disabled adults to pack seeds and grains.
Today, Conrad has three mills that cater to organically raised
crops.
And the sex appeal? Timeless Seeds’ products, particularly
its black beluga lentils, have won praise from cooks worldwide.
The shiny black lentils resemble caviar when cooked. A food critic
for The Artful Diner, an online food and wine publication, reviewed
a restaurant in Pennsylvania recently, waxing eloquent about "the
beautifully pan-seared black cod set on a seabed of braised black
beluga lentils and finished with a first-rate chive-vermouth beurre
blanc."
Not bad for a plate of beans.
Building the Montana brand This type of niche marketing has obvious
risks. But for those willing to make the leap, vanguard agriculture
brings modest prosperity — even to the state’s most
down-and-out areas.
Take Chouteau County, whose 5,575 inhabitants amount to an anatomically
unlikely 1.5 people per square mile. The county leads the state
in wheat production, and it’s no coincidence that it is also
home to an almost feudal disparity of wealth. In 2003, the roughly
1,500 grain producers in Chouteau received a total of $34 million
in direct farm assistance from the federal government; the top 10
producers reaped $210,000 apiece.
At the same time, Chouteau County ranks in the 87th percentile
of counties nationwide in average adjusted gross income. About one-third
of families with children under 5 years old live below the poverty
line. Since 2000, the county has lost 6.6 percent of its population.
Elementary school enrollment has fallen 22 percent. In 2002, the
county issued just two building permits.
But Chouteau is also home to Bob Quinn, one of the founders of Montana’s
vanguard agriculture movement. Quinn isn’t your average farmer:
He has a Ph.D. in plant biochemistry. And unlike most conventional
farmers, Quinn does not put everything in one basket. His 2,800-acre
farm in Big Sandy resembles an agricultural research station. He
grows as many as 12 crops at once: varieties of lentils, peas, corn,
safflower, wheat, barley, alfalfa, black medic and flax. He’s
about to plant an apple orchard. Like Oien, he rotates his fields
between crops of wheat, barley, oilseed, alfalfa and pulses interspersed
with "green manure."
Quinn’s argument in favor of organic farming starts with
a bit of simple math: Strong demand and limited supply mean that
a Montana organic farmer gets twice the money for his or her product
as a conventional farmer, he says. At the same time, expenses are
lower.
Quinn’s conversion to organic did not happen overnight. For
years, he and his father ran their farm using conventional fertilizers
and chemicals. He first dabbled in specialty grains in 1978, when
he established a wheat buying/brokering company and began to supply
high-protein wheat to California whole-grain bakeries. When demand
outstripped supply, Quinn bought wheat from his neighbors.
In 1983, Quinn started Montana Flour and Grains, a mill in Fort
Benton. When customers began requesting organic stone-ground flour,
Quinn obliged: "By 1985, half of what we were milling was organic."
In 1993, he added a cleaning mill, which removes chaff and detritus
from the grain. Then he sold the plant to a partner; other projects
occupied his mind.
Experiments with organic crops on his own farm produced startling
numbers. Through crop rotation and the use of alfalfa to deliver
nitrogen to the soil, Quinn obtained a crop yield and protein content
that were nearly identical to those of conventional methods. By
1993, he was exclusively organic.
During this period, he came across a nearly forgotten strain of
Egyptian wheat called Khorasan, which is extraordinarily high in
protein, yet sensitive to a fungus common in many wetter wheat-growing
areas. Quinn discovered that Khorasan wheat thrived in the high,
dry plains of Montana and across the border in Canada, where the
climate discourages fungi, smuts and other pests.
Quinn called his product "Kamut," from the ancient Egyptian
word for wheat. He guaranteed his customers organic, GMO-free, non-hybridized,
high-protein Khorasan wheat. Kamut has a full, nutty flavor. It’s
called "sweet wheat," and has little of the bitterness
or aftertaste associated with other types of wheat. With cereals
using Kamut, "you don’t have to use any sugar,"
says Quinn. "It stands on its own."
There is now a whole Kamut industry. The mill Quinn started originally
employed 10 people. Today, there are about 110 Kamut growers in
Montana, Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, with a total of about
18,000 acres. Quinn purposely keeps the acreage per farm small.
"We don’t allow any of our growers to have over 20 percent
of their production in Kamut," he says. "I’m adamant
that it not become a monoculture crop."
About 60 percent of the grain goes to Europe, and half of that to
Italy. "They make more products out of Kamut than all other
countries combined," says Quinn. "When it comes to food,
the Italian imagination never quits."
Keeping the profits at home
The organic revolution is on. Organic products are sold in nearly
20,000 natural food stores and in 73 percent of all conventional
grocery stores. Even Wal-Mart is dabbling in organics. The U.S.
organic market is expected to grow 21.4 percent between 2002 and
2007, reaching a value of $30.7 billion, according to DataMonitor,
a London-based research and analysis firm.
Montana has done a decent job of tapping into this market. Only
209,000 of the state’s over 5 million acres of wheat fields
are organic, but Montana rates first nationwide in organic wheat
production. It comes in second for other grains, and also for peas,
lentils and flax.
But vanguard agriculture is about more than just organics. Just
ask Dean Folkvord, the 44-year-old CEO of Wheat Montana. He began
by taking over his family farm, which his father started in 1958
with 250 acres. Now it’s 15,000 acres. Folkvord doesn’t
see expansion as necessarily bad. "That’s the way the
rest of the world works right now," he says. Efficiency matters,
however: "When we started farming, we were getting 20 bushels
per acre. Now we’re at 40, even 50 bushels per acre."
Wheat Montana brands its product with names such as "Bronze
Chief Hard Red Spring Wheat." Although it’s not USDA-certified
organic, Wheat Montana uses an independent lab to ensure that there
are no herbicide or pesticide residues in its products. The company
advertises its products as "Better than Organic."
Folkvord has also figured out something else. "One of the
myths is that farmers produce food," he says. "That’s
not true. They grow the raw products."
The Montana mystique has done little to encourage the logical next
step in agriculture: food processing. According to the Department
of Labor, zero percent of Montana’s population was involved
in food processing in 2003. This means that processing, retailing,
and branding — the source of real profits in food —
eluded the state. Rather than building prosperous rural communities,
Montana’s commodities bolster the bottom line of corporations
such as Cargill, ADM, and ConAgra.
Folkvord’s solution: the Wheat Montana Bakery. Located right
off Interstate 90 in Three Forks, the bakery is a compact Western
version of the textile factories of New England. The full processing,
from seed to sandwich, all happens under the roof of the "Wheatplex,"
which houses a mill and retail store, in addition to the bakery.
The bakery sells 120 types of breads, rolls, flours, pancake mixtures,
specialty grains and wheat berries, the original form of a grain
of wheat. Its products include bagels, "Big Sky" breads,
dinner rolls, French bread, seven varieties of buns, and specialty
health breads made with organic oats.
Wheat Montana now has 110 employees, from farmers to bakers, and
its own Web site. The company just opened its sixth franchise store
in Montana. "We’ve been growing at 22 percent per year.
Any faster than that and it gets kind of scary," says Folkvord.
Locals look at Folkvord as a model for agricultural change. "You
have to admire the guy," says Three Forks Mayor Gene Townsend.
"He could have just as easily fallen flat as succeeded."
The WheatPlex has "been really good for Three Forks,"
says Townsend. "Of Dean’s total employees, about 80 to
85 are from right around here."
Southwest of Three Forks, across the mountains, is the Dillon-based
Great Harvest Bread Company, which has 206 bakeries in 39 states,
with 18 more scheduled to open within the next year. Founded in
1976 in Great Falls, Great Harvest specializes in whole-grain breads,
granola, muffins, scones, cookies, rolls, dog biscuits and bread
sticks.
Great Harvest CEO Mike Ferretti says his company buys exclusively
Montana wheat from about 20 farmers. Yet Great Harvest does most
for local economies through its retail and franchising. Each of
its six Montana stores grosses about $475,000 per year. Franchise
bakeries typically pay between $7 and $14 per hour, according to
company spokeswoman Maria Emmer-Aanes; after a probationary period,
employees usually get full medical and dental benefits.
Huge hurdles remain
Despite its successes, vanguard agriculture has had a relatively modest
impact on the economy. To make a real difference in the West’s
flat counties, "you’ve got to have a comparative advantage,"
says Fraser McLeay, a New Zealand marketing specialist now based in
Missoula.
This economic term, much bandied about in the last decade, sprang
from the fertile mind of a wealthy, self-educated 19th century Englishman
named David Ricardo. He held that countries that do not focus their
economies on areas where they are naturally strongest are doomed
to failure and stagnation. Ricardo applied this theory to England’s
Corn Laws, which protected local growers. He said England should
import corn from countries that could produce it more cheaply. It
took 23 years, but in 1846 Britain repealed the Corn Laws. Agriculture
has never been the same.
But does Montana have any comparative advantage in producing grains?
McLeay is silent, and then shakes his head. No: Inexpensive labor,
low distribution costs, cheap land and unregulated chemical use
give the edge to China, Argentina and the Ukraine. Currently, 104
countries produce wheat. In 1981, the U.S. produced half of the
world’s wheat supply; today, it’s down to 25 percent.
Any comparative advantage Montana has is wiped out by transportation
costs, says Gov. Schweitzer. A monopoly on rail service allows Burlington
Northern Santa Fe to charge Montana producers as much as it does
producers in Ohio, Kansas or the Dakotas, even though Montana is
closer to Pacific ports. "All we can do is write postcards
to the (railroad) barons in Fort Worth," Schweitzer says. "And
they write back, saying, ‘Well, isn’t that too damned
bad?’
"If anything, we have a comparative disadvantage, save one,"
says Schweitzer: "the Montana Mystique."
In other words, the very mystique that has helped destroy rural
Montana may be the key to rebuilding it.
Few Montanans understand the dark side of the mystique better than
Schweitzer. In a Washington Post interview, Schweitzer, who has
a longtime background in agriculture, talked about what he learned
after being whipped by Republican Conrad Burns in the 2000 U.S.
Senate race. Schweitzer hired a focus group to find out why he lost,
and learned "that a significant percentage of Montana men are
mule-headed, unwilling to change their minds on issues, even when
presented with information showing their views are not supported
by facts."
Four years later, Schweitzer began his run for governor with ads
of himself "on a horse or holding a gun." He won.
Now, to sell his state’s hard red spring wheat, the governor
is trying to leverage the bright side of the Montana Mystique: the
state’s reputation for clear air, clean water and good soils,
and the intangible romance of the "Last Best Place."
Schweitzer recently made a deal with the Taiwan Flour Mills Association,
promising officials a boatload of exclusively Montana hard red spring
wheat. The deal was at first a source of exasperation. "You
wouldn’t believe the people coming up to me, saying, ‘Oh,
Governor, this is complicated, really complicated,’ "
he says. The system is not designed to keep grain separated. "The
worst," he says, "are companies controlling the loading
process in Portland. They don’t want a ship leaving the dock
to be carrying Montana grain. They want it to be Cargill grain or
ADM grain."
The state got around the resistance to branding by asking the Taiwanese
to narrow their request. "We asked them to tender a request
for hard red spring wheat with a certain amount of protein, this
much ash content (mineral residue), this much gluten, with this
test weight and this amount of moisture," says Kim Falcon,
Montana’s wheat and barley bureau chief. "The chances
are good they are going to get mostly Montana wheat."
Finding customers — and getting them their product —
are just the first of many challenges for rural Montana, however.
Agriculture’s reluctance to change has all but crushed the
next generation of farmers. "I think the next generation has
already given up hope," says David Oien.
Not entirely. Take Roy Benjamin of Shelby, a tall, lanky, earnest
and articulate 19-year-old. Of the 40 members of Shelby High School’s
class of 2004, he’s the only one who went into agriculture.
Born into a farming family, he never wanted to do anything else.
So he skipped college and plunged right into farming — organic
farming.
He sells to Montana Flour and Grains, a USDA-certified organic
flour mill in nearby Fort Benton. Benjamin likes the tactile feel
of organic farming. In a market "where you sell your wheat
to somebody who is basically working for the Chicago Board of Trade,
I like bringing my wheat to Montana Flour and Grains. You give it
to them physically."
Like other organic or niche food growers, Benjamin sees his kind
of farming as a way to stabilize declining rural counties. The intensive
management of the land requires more people and more time on the
land, he explains. This in turn creates demand for tires and equipment,
and stimulates the local economy.
The future of farming in Montana, he says, lies in two directions.
People like himself will run smaller organic farms — although
Benjamin says he may have to double or triple his current acreage.
And people like his brother will run "large, large operations
… It’s not one bit unrealistic that my older brother
will eventually run 20,000 acres. The thing is, we’ll both
be feeding one family on the proceeds.
"I don’t want to farm half the county in order to make
a living," he says.
Hard-nosed realism
Bob Quinn’s beliefs are set in concrete. Literally. His motto
is molded into the slab surrounding a flagpole in his garden: "To
know the past is to appreciate the blessings of the present and
inspire great deeds in the future."
For farmers, facing the past isn’t easy: Their livelihood,
commodity agriculture, has helped destroy local communities. That
painful fact goes against the theology that farmers are the providers
for the world, a notion that carries a remarkable power to blind.
But as one farm advocate says, "The only people making money
in eastern Montana are the guys selling plywood to board up the
windows."
Montana’s organic and alternative farmers, aware of their
imperfections, are trying to walk into the future with their eyes
wide open. They rely on two pioneer virtues: ingenuity and risk,
attributes, ironically, that seem to have vanished from commodity
agriculture. In challenging received wisdom, these farmers have
had to become hard-nosed realists. They know they could get knocked
on their asses. In fact, most of them already have, but so far they
have managed to get back on their feet.
"There’s a lot of people beating their breast about
what’s happening to rural Montana," says David Oien.
"But there is no precedent that says agricultural prosperity
lasts forever. Look at the Fertile Crescent. Agriculture blossomed
and then it disappeared. Cultures evolve."
Still, vanguard agriculture has succeeded in raising more than
crops in rural Montana; it has also raised hope. It’s done
this not so much by the food it grows or the chemical-free methods
it uses, but by putting people back into the equation. After all,
it is people, not commodities, that will keep rural Montana alive.
Slowly, vanguard agriculture is breaking the paralysis brought
on by the state’s reliance on its identity — on the
Montana Mystique — at the expense of its long-term interest,
which lies in viable communities.
And in the end, resurrecting Montana’s communities may prove
the key to restoring its land. As Wendell Berry has observed: "The
land cannot prosper unless the people using the land are prosperous." Samuel Western splits his time between Sheridan and Cheyenne,
Wyoming. He has written about the West for nearly 25 years. He is
the author of Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River: Wyoming’s
Search For Its Soul (Homestead Publishing).
