Our three-part series reports on how Montanans are using organic and regenerative agriculture to revitalize rural economies and the soil they depend on.

The post Common Ground appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Wind and water have eroded Montana soils since the first plow turned earth on the Northern Plains more than 150 years ago, taking with them one of the state’s most important resources. Since then, tillage, plus the fertilizer and pesticides common in industrial agriculture, have continued to degrade the soil that agriculture depends on. With climate change threatening almost 25,000 Montana agricultural jobs in the next 50 years, many farmers, ranchers and researchers believe the status quo is no longer adequate. And though conventional farming continues to account for the overwhelming majority of Montana’s $4.6 billion ag sector, things are shifting. 

Organic has been a USDA certification since 2002, while regenerative lacks a codified or even consensus definition but generally includes a suite of techniques like cover cropping, crop rotation, no-till and livestock integration that decrease erosion, improve biodiversity and capture carbon. 

This series, supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, reports on how Montanans are using organic and regenerative agriculture to revitalize rural economies. Part 1 introduced producers using these methods to build topsoil, drought resilience and profits, while Part 2 explored how investing in soil health can reinvigorate farms and the rural communities that depend on them. Part 3, the series’ final installment, looks at the impact of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a federal agency born of the Dust Bowl. 

PJ Myllymaki unhooks the thin electric wire from a temporary fiberglass fence post, and then jogs through oat stubble to the next post. The February morning air is warm, and she works barehanded. An inch of snow sparkles between the dried oat stalks.

Beyond her pickup, Square Butte cuts into the blue sky not 20 miles north, dark rock towers and white cliffs, both volcanic, flanking its 5,732-foot summit. 

Behind her, PJ’s husband, Kurt, reels the wire onto a spool. He pauses at each post, pulling upward. Those that lift easily, he slots into a plastic quiver slung across his back. The rest he leaves for their 13-year-old son, Kameron, who drives a side-by-side behind them, stopping to twist the posts from the frozen ground with fencing pliers. Kameron’s sister, Kady, 11, is across the field in a flatbed truck, watching a hose fill a pair of 800-gallon troughs with her friend Emma Smith and the Myllymakis’ border collie puppy, Maggie. When the troughs are full, the girls climb out of the cab and turn off the pump.  

The Myllymakis’ 8,600-acre operation is just outside of Stanford, population 403, an hour east of Great Falls and 40 minutes west of Lewistown in the Judith Basin. Mountain ranges including the Highwoods, Little Belts, Moccasins, Judiths and Big Snowies ring the rural valley, which was once home to the cowboy artist Charlie Russell. Breaks country tumbles northeast out of the basin, its rugged draws dropping nearly 2,000 feet toward the Missouri River, 40 miles north. 

With Stanford’s four-day school schedule, the kids are home Fridays and often help Kurt in his daily check of their 250 cows. Today, they’re taking down a fence between the 160-acre pasture of oat stubble and cover crops the animals have been grazing the past two weeks, giving them access to an additional 70 acres of cover crops. 

Once the fence is down, the cows flow into the new pasture. They nose into dried stalks of sorghum sudangrass, millet and turnips. There’s almost no wind. The only sounds are the cows’ quiet rustling and a pack of coyotes yipping to the west. One cow pulls up a turnip, slowly chewing the soil-covered bulb.  

The Myllymakis plant 5,300 acres of cash and cover crops, and run cows on another 3,300 acres of range spread across a mix of deeded and leased parcels. Instead of plowing, they use a no-till drill to seed directly into old crop residue. Theirs is a “continuous cropping” operation, so there are plants growing year-round, which benefits microbial life in the soil and prevents erosion.

But that’s not how they always did it. Back when Kurt was a kid helping his dad, Bruce, on the farm during the summer, there were no cows. They mostly grew wheat, and like the majority of dryland farmers in Montana, they fallowed a portion of their fields every year to store groundwater for the following season and so they could fight weeds by spraying herbicide several times a summer. 

When Kurt and PJ moved to the farm full-time in 2003, Bruce had just bought a few head of cattle but was still mainly growing wheat. In 2004, the couple added their own herd. As is usual on Montana ranches, they calved in February and March, grazed all summer, shipped the calves to a Midwestern feedlot in autumn, and fed the cows and bulls hay all winter. 

Until, that is, a five-acre cover crop experiment convinced them to change everything. 

It started when Pam Linker, then the soil conservationist at the Stanford field office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), invited them to join a four-year joint effort with the Judith Basin County Conservation District. Teresa Wilhelms, the longtime administrator for the  conservation district, had secured a grant from the state Department of Natural Resources to cover the costs of seeding and research. Linker asked four area producers including the Myllymakis to plant small cover crop plots, and the nearby Montana State University Central Agriculture Research Station planted a fifth. 

PJ, who’d recently become an associate supervisor on the conservation district board, was sold right away. She’d grown up in nearby Windham, where her mother taught business at Stanford High School and her father hauled grain for local farmers for most of her childhood. 

“I almost feel like I have an advantage of not growing up on a farm, because you didn’t have to change me,” PJ said. “I wasn’t set in my old ways.”

But Kurt and Bruce were hesitant. 

“My dad and I were like, ‘That’s gonna be a pain in the butt, but we’ll do it for them,” Kurt said. 

The first year they planted a plot of warm- and cool-season grasses and legumes on leased land, with a fallow plot next door as the control. Linker tracked soil temperatures, moisture, organic matter, water infiltration and soil biology, aiming to determine which cover crop species would do well in their area. 

Some of the results were obvious right away. 

“If you go into a cover crop field, your soil temperature is going to be maybe 85 degrees on a hot day, versus you go into a chem fallow field, and you could be 110,” Linker said, explaining that heat causes moisture loss. Then there were the “tillage” turnips and radishes, which helped break up hardpan created by historic plowing. 

“When you dig up a turnip or a radish and see a 90-degree [turn] in the root, you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve hit the compaction layer,’” said Linker, who’s now Stanford’s district conservationist. “They’re kind of aha moments for farmers.”

For the sake of the experiment, the plot was supposed to stay in the same location, but the Myllymakis moved it to their own deeded land, in part because the landlord was requiring them to keep a third of their lease in fallow. Plus, they wanted to graze cows on the cover crop the next winter.

“We were sold on it enough that we wanted to do it on our own field,” Kurt said.  

It was the first in a cascade of events that led the Myllymakis to switch their entire operation over to regenerative in 2016, meaning they use a suite of techniques like cover cropping, crop rotation and livestock integration that decrease erosion, improve biodiversity both above and below ground, and capture carbon. 

That fall, PJ and Kurt visited Linker’s family farm, 30 miles away, where Pam and her husband, Dave, had started investing in their own soil health in 1996. Kurt checked out specialized equipment like a stripper header and a no-till disc drill, which Dave and their son Brock sell. Over the winter, Kurt attended a Ranching for Profit class where he learned about spring calving and rotational grazing. Another participant told him about the renowned North Dakota regenerative farmer and speaker Gabe Brown, and Kurt watched Brown’s videos on YouTube and began to realize how the whole system could work in concert. 

“I showed it to Dad, and I was like, ‘This is how I want to farm,’” Kurt said. Bruce was on board, so they went all in. 

“It’s a learning process, Bruce said. “I pay a lot more attention to things I never used to, because you’re learning all the time.”

During the transition, Kurt bounced ideas around with Brock, researched online and followed regenerative producers on Twitter. And he leaned on the NRCS. Three times, he drove the six hours to Baker to attend farm tours organized by Ann Fischer, a leader in regenerative agriculture and an NRCS district conservationist for 25 years. He and PJ went on NRCS-sponsored bus tours to regenerative farms in the Dakotas, and turned to NRCS staff for advice specific to their land. Along the way, they’ve implemented all of the agency’s five soil health principles: minimize disturbance, maximize diversity, maximize living roots, maximize cover and integrate livestock.

They now have smaller-framed, heartier cows bred to calve in May and June, which means fewer complications and less stress on the animals, they said. Their fertilizer and pesticide application rates are down, meaning costs are too, said PJ, who does the farm’s books. And last year, when Judith Basin received just 10.4 inches of precipitation, the least since 1960, a local agronomist, Cory Hershberger, told Kurt they had some of the deepest roots and highest moisture he’d seen in the area. They also make higher margins on the beef they sell direct to market, compared to those they consign at the Lewistown Livestock Auction.

“We’re intensifying our management on things that not only are more beneficial for the soil, but then make us more money,” Kurt said. 

The Myllymakis are on the leading edge of regenerative in their area, but they’re not the only ones trying these systems. Linker estimates that at least 30 producers in Judith Basin County have adopted some conservation practices involving soil health.

The National Association of Conservation Districts named the Myllymakis one of two Montana “soil health champions” in 2020, and PJ, now a supervisor on the conservation district board and its only woman, says she’s become vocal at the district meetings, especially when bare fields lead to blowing dust that closes highways. Kurt has spoken at NRCS events in Great Falls, Havre and Missoula, and the family features in an NRCS “Conservation for the Future” video. In 2019, then-NRCS chief Matt Lohr visited their place on a tour of the state, and the following year Kurt presented to a sold-out crowd of more than 400 at the first Montana Soil Health Symposium in Billings. 

“It means more to other farmers and ranchers to hear from other farmers and ranchers that have done it, so they use us as an example,” Kurt said. 

While Bruce received NRCS funding three times between 2006 and 2012 to help pay for livestock water and the addition of pulse crops, among other things, Kurt and PJ haven’t received any funding from the agency’s cost-share programs. 

These cost-share programs, however, are the main governmental means of encouraging producers to care for their soil. 

Regenerative agriculture is one of the top ways the Biden administration aims to draw down atmospheric carbon. It rolled out a new $10 million NRCS program, Climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry, last June, $2.4 million of which went to tribal producers in Montana. Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which would have massively increased NRCS conservation spending, is currently stalled. 

The NRCS’s work on regenerative agriculture has implications for the future of food production in the face of both climate change and global supply chain disruptions. But this one federal agency — which is tasked with helping private landowners voluntarily conserve natural resources — won’t get there alone. 

Of all the principles of soil health, perhaps the most important is diversity. A polycultural cropping system surrounded by a biodiverse ecosystem is more resilient than its monocropping counterpart, as is diversity of thought and experience among the people who manage those ecosystems. 

Now, as interest in regenerative ag grows — between 2015 and 2021, the Montana NRCS contracted with private landowners to grow 120,241 acres of cover crops, 30 times the 3,364 acres it contracted in the previous five-year period — the agency is seeking new, broader perspectives in Montana. A strategy led by the agency’s state conservationist, Tom Watson, has put local stakeholders in charge of setting their own priorities for conservation funding, and a new national NRCS grant will fund a tribal-led project aimed at helping local producers adopt soil health strategies and study innovative practices.

BORN OF THE DUST BOWL

In early May of 1934, a massive storm blew an estimated 350 tons of loose soil off the high plains of Montana and Wyoming, sweeping it eastward. This “black blizzard” blanketed cities from Chicago and Cleveland to New York and Atlanta. Three-mile-high dust clouds darkened skies, and cities ground to a stop. As dust piled up in the streets, people rushed indoors, coughing and choking. 

Dust storms had pummeled the Great Plains since 1931, caused by the combination of drought and “The Great Plow-Up,” which turned 5.2 million acres of deep-rooted grasslands on the southern prairie into wheat fields. 

“Now, we have the evil with us on an enormous scale, and the nation may as well gird tightly its belt for a continuing battle against this process of land wasting, that is if we are to avoid the eventuality of becoming probably the world’s most outstanding nation of subsoil farming — which of course generally means bankrupt farming on bankrupt land,” federal Soil Erosion Service Director Hugh Hammond Bennett was quoted as saying in the May 14, 1934, edition of the New York Times. 

A zealous crusader against soil erosion and its effects on rural America, Bennett was a soil scientist and adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as a prolific writer and public speaker. 

The following March, another duster descended on Washington D.C. just as Bennett was testifying in front of Congress about the need for a permanent agency and funding to replace the temporary one he helmed. In April 1935, Congress created the Soil Conservation Service, an agency of the USDA, with Bennett as its first director. Under his leadership, the SCS worked to help farmers improve productivity while conserving their land, working closely with local county conservation districts, which were established not long after. Over the years, the agency’s scope grew to include flood control, water supply, habitat restoration and recreation, and in 1994 Congress renamed it the Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS. 

A product of the New Deal era, the Farm Bill funds the USDA and its agencies. Originally created to address food insecurity, support commodity prices and conserve natural resources, namely soil and water, the powerful omnibus legislation reauthorizes national food, agriculture, conservation and forestry policy every five to seven years. Of the estimated $428 billion the 2018 Farm Bill will cost taxpayers by 2023, 76% will go to food security programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; 16% to commodity agriculture through price supports including direct payments, crop insurance and research assistance; and 7% to conservation through the NRCS and the Farm Service Agency. 

Farm Bill conservation funding is as large as it’s ever been, hovering between $5 billion and almost $6 billion annually over the last decade. Nationally, the NRCS helped encourage a 35% decline in soil erosion rates on cropland between 1982 and 2017, and today it works to conserve water quality, habitat and soil health on the Great Plains, especially through rangeland conservation. But some argue the agency is hamstrung, essentially tasked with cleaning up problems that other USDA programs perpetuate through subsidies like crop insurance and commodities payments, which can disincentivize conservation practices. 

“We have a federal agency and massive millions and billions fighting against itself,” said Becky Weed, a Belgrade-based shepherd, organic farmer and local and organic food advocate, who called the USDA’s conservation budget “crumbs being swept off the table in the lobbying halls of Congress.” 

Weed, who has received an NRCS grant for hoop houses, noted that NRCS money also enables big agribusiness, for example by funding methane digesters for industrial dairies and development of hog manure pools to help concentrated animal feeding operations meet emissions regulations and protect water quality. Those examples don’t show the full picture though, Weed said, explaining that cattle on rangeland produce much less methane, and the very concept of concentrated feedlots is an artifact of the trade-subsidy system.

“The entire reason why we have developed this practice of massive feedlot cattle and hogs and these giant warehouse chicken-growing methods is because the price of corn and soy has been subsidized for decades, and had those commodities not been so cheap, we never would have even built the industrial system,” Weed said. 

However, even that system is beginning to lean toward increased investment in soil health. In 2021, the USDA’s crop insurance arm, the Risk Management Agency, began providing additional premium subsidies for producers who plant cover crops. 

Closer to home, the agency’s challenges look more like limited resources and bureaucratic hurdles. Between 2017 and 2021, 40% of applicants to the Montana NRCS’s main programs, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), received funding, with $48.9 million going out to producers in 2021 between the two. 

Red tape restricts which practices are eligible, and the programs are designed to bring producers up to speed on conservation, so they don’t typically help people like the Myllymakis.

“When you come across somebody like Kurt and PJ that are far out ahead of the average person … they were already doing what we had to offer, so there was nothing we could do,” said Tom Watson, who leads the agency in Montana. “That’s one of the frustrations I have … and certainly one of the frustrations I know producers have in the program.”

ON THE GROUND 

Raised on a farm in western Nebraska, Watson studied range management at the University of Wyoming, and has worked for the NRCS in Wyoming, Oregon and Montana. He stands well over six feet tall, wears round-rimmed glasses, and goes to work most days in a plaid shirt and a ball cap. 

In his 32-year career with the agency, Watson has seen states deliver programming in various ways. Most, he says, take a top-down approach, with the person in his role determining statewide priorities. That’s what Montana did before he became state conservationist in 2018. 

“I sit here in Bozeman, and I’m supposed to decide one or two or three priorities for everything happening in the state?” he said via video call from his home office. “What that did not allow for was creativity and innovation at that local level. And who in the hell knows more about conservation needs than local people? Certainly, not me.”

Watson adopted that mindset while working as the assistant state conservationist in Oregon, which has a conservation strategy designed to empower local stakeholders.

Watson and his team are obligated to administer CSP and national EQIP initiatives, but they do have flexibility with part of their EQIP funding, and have tailored the Oregon framework to Montana through a five-year-old strategy called Montana Focused Conservation. The strategy administers funding according to locally set priorities, and last year allocated $11.6 million to producers. Through the program, working groups in each county create long-term Targeted Implementation Plans, or TIPs. The groups have already written more than 100 of these detailed, time-intensive documents focused on resource issues ranging from soil health and water quality to forest resiliency, wildfire fuels reduction, wildlife migration, invasive weeds and pollinators. 

“Relationships, to me, are the key to everything,” Watson said. “They drive everything that I do, and I try to make them drive what my people do, meaning there’s no way that the agency can do it all.”’

The framework centers groups like the Ranchers Stewardship Alliance, a rancher-led group based in Malta that partners with landowners, the NRCS, state agencies, the National Wildlife Foundation and others to encourage regenerative practices. Last year RSA worked with partners to put $2.1 million into locally led conservation projects in Phillips, Blaine and Valley counties. The group has worked closely with the local NRCS field office and conservation districts to write six TIPs addressing resource issues including wildlife migration, bird habitat and soil health through grazing management. It’s now writing one focused on transitioning marginally productive farmland back to native prairie, a key lever in slowing climate change. 

While the NRCS has helped fund some of RSA’s projects, there are regenerative ranching tools like portable water, temporary fencing and wildlife-friendly border fencing that it can’t fund, as well as even more experimental tools like virtual fences. In these cases, RSA leverages relationships with other partners to bring in funding from other sources.

With these limitations, it’s key to prioritize, said Marni Thompson, who last year became Montana’s first state soil health specialist. 

“When you can’t fund everybody, it’s better to target rather than to do just random acts of conservation,” Thompson said. “When you’re targeting a certain resource concern or a certain watershed, you want to address that issue in that watershed before you move on to the next one,” she said. 

Well-respected in Montana soil health circles, the straight-talking Thompson grew up in Townsend in a farming family, and now lives in Fort Benton. In her previous position as an area resource conservationist, she consulted many producers around Great Falls, including the Myllymakis. Her current position was created as part of a new Montana soil health strategic action plan, which has a stated purpose of creating “healthy, functioning soil as the foundation for all working lands in Montana.” 

Among Thompson’s responsibilities are training the 250-plus NRCS staffers in 56 offices around the state. And 55 of those employees were new last year, many replacing retiring career employees hired under the 1985 Farm Bill, which included the bill’s first provision dedicated entirely to conservation. These new staff are having to learn the ropes quickly with producer involvement in NRCS programs on the rise. She also helps facilitate outreach and education, including an annual soil health symposium co-hosted with the Montana Association of Conservation Districts. 

This year, starting on Tuesday, Feb. 8, full-size pickups, some pulling empty stock trailers, filled the parking lot at the Billings Hotel and Convention Center for the three-day event. More than 300 people, a mix of older farmers and ranchers and young families, listened as agricultural consultant and regenerative grazing pioneer Allen Williams spoke on day two about a sixth regenerative principle to augment the NRCS’s list: context. Context, Williams said in a keynote address, means considering the climate, the producer’s life and the history of the land.  

“Even your beliefs, your philosophy, your goals and objectives, your family dynamics, your employee dynamics — all of those things make up context and are critical for us to know.”

On day three, it was 62 degrees outside the convention center, and just west of town, 40 mile-an-hour gusts blew dust from bare, tilled fields across I-90. In standing-room-only breakout sessions, producers learned about measuring biological activity in soil from Nick Ward of Ward Labs in Nebraska, and heard from a panel of Montana producers who’d switched their operations to regenerative. In another breakout, keynote speaker Dan Kittredge, an organic vegetable farmer in Massachusetts and founder of the Bionutrient Food Association, answered questions in dynamic metaphors, drawing on ecology, chemistry, quantum physics, economics and culture. Repeatedly, he spoke to the importance of listening to Indigenous and traditional knowledge. 

“If you’ve got the wisdom of humans who lived in close proximity to land in various parts of the world at various points in time — if they’re all doing the same thing — then that maybe is a good guidepost for us,” Kittredge said. 

THE DIVERSITY PRINCIPLE 

In Montana, members of the Blackfeet Nation have led efforts to increase access to NRCS programming by underserved communities, starting with Blackfeet rancher Ross Racine’s work with the Intertribal Agriculture Council in the 1990s. Now, an emerging NRCS-funded program is laying groundwork to support local Blackfeet producers, research cutting-edge regenerative and Indigenous practices, and create a framework for how the agency can better work with tribes.  

Grazing for Soil Health is a five-year pilot project of the Piikani Lodge Health Institute, a Blackfeet-led nonprofit founded in 2018 that works to connect community well-being, conservation and food systems. With a $2.6 million national NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant, the project will fund on-farm trials conducted by Piikani Lodge in partnership with Blackfeet Community College, Montana State University, Western Sustainability Exchange and the National Center for Appropriate Technology. 

The Blackfeet, or Amskapi Piikani, have stewarded bison and grassland ecosystems for millennia, said Latrice Tatsey, a Blackfeet tribal member whose graduate research at MSU focused on how bison reintroduction affects soil. Tatsey explained that modern regenerative grazing practices mimic the natural behavior of bison. 

“How do we take this knowledge base that the ancestors knew when working with these animals, [and] make that applicable in ways to work with ranchers?” Tatsey said via Zoom from her home in Badger Creek. 

The project, she said, aims to answer that question by studying techniques not currently included under existing NRCS cost-share programs, like compost applications, temporary fences and portable water. 

Piikani Lodge first established its regenerative grazing initiative in 2020. Over the past two summers, Tatsey has managed 14 interns, all from Montana tribes, to collect baseline soil samples for the initiative. She’s had support from MSU soil scientist Tony Hartshorn and MSU agroecologist Bruce Maxwell, as well as the Grassland Soil Health Restoration Lab at Cornell University. 

Having grown up in a ranching family within the Blackfeet Nation, Tatsey is pivotal to another element of the project: building trust among local ranchers. With the new funding, the plan is to work with 10 to 15 producers a year to conduct on-farm trials and reach another 200 through educational workshops and technical support. Tatsey believes that by weaving together tribal culture and ecological health, Piikani Lodge will be able to increase adoption of the practices, helping producers improve their soil, profits and well-being. 

Those three threads are intricately entwined for all farmers and ranchers, but too many have lost that connection, said Kim Paul, a Blackfeet tribal member and Piikani Lodge’s founder and executive director.

“There’s been this huge disconnect between us and the land,” said Paul, who has an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in biochemistry, biomedical science, and community and public health from the University of Montana.

Paul co-authored the Blackfeet Climate Change Adaptation Plan and the tribe’s Agricultural Resource Management Plan, and her organization fights on the front lines against the incredible hardships many tribal members face. Implementing regenerative land management is part of the fight, she said. For Paul, caring for the land is one way to help protect her people. 

“We’re reconnecting,” she said. “We’re rebuilding that relationship to the land, rebuilding that relationship to the biosystems — Sspomitapi, Ksahkomitapi, Sooyiitapi, ​​ ​​the ones that live in the air, the ones that live on the land, the ones that live in the water, the water, the land, the air, itself. … We’re reclaiming identity. We’re reclaiming hope and focus, and it’s just such a huge movement towards positive.”

The post Common Ground, Part III: Rebuilding soil by building relationships appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Wind and water have eroded Montana soils since the first plow turned earth on the Northern Plains more than 150 years ago, taking with them one of the state’s most important resources. Since then, tillage, plus the fertilizer and pesticides common in industrial agriculture, have continued to degrade the soil that agriculture depends on. With climate change threatening almost 25,000 Montana agricultural jobs in the next 50 years, many farmers, ranchers and researchers believe the status quo is no longer adequate. And though conventional farming continues to account for the overwhelming majority of Montana’s $4.6 billion ag sector, things are shifting. 

Organic has been a USDA certification since 2002, while regenerative lacks a codified or even consensus definition but generally includes a suite of techniques like cover cropping, crop rotation and livestock integration that decrease erosion, improve biodiversity and capture carbon. 

Supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, this series reports on how Montanans are using organic and regenerative agriculture to revitalize rural economies. Part 1 introduced producers who are using these methods to build topsoil, drought resilience and profits. Part 2, set in Big Sandy, explores how farmers can add value to their operations by investing in soil health, reinvigorating both their farms and the rural communities that depend on them.

Bob Quinn is sitting on his front steps, pulling on a pair of worn work boots. 

Small lilac bushes surround his brick house, their blooms months past. The lawn is tidy and green, kept neatly cropped by Quinn’s wife of 50 years, Ann. 

Quinn stands, puts on his cowboy hat, and walks down the concrete driveway. At its end, he turns right on the dirt drive parallelling the shelter belt of spruce, pine, ash and lilac his father planted in the 1950s to protect the homestead from the prevailing west wind. To his right, beyond the white picket fence surrounding his backyard vegetable garden, Rattlesnake Butte is visible four miles to the east, a hazy blue outline through the smoke of early August wildfires. The brownish-white air obscures the rest of the Bear Paw Mountains. 

At the end of the shelter belt, Quinn, 73, steps off the road into his dryland vegetable and crop experiment. 

“So, this is a disaster,” he says, looking out over the plot. “This is an experiment that didn’t work very well.” 

The son and grandson of farmers, Quinn grew up here, 13 miles south of Big Sandy, population 605. A half-hour drive north of Judith Landing on the Missouri River, his family’s farm is located in the Golden Triangle, a region in north-central Montana known for producing high-protein wheat. Quinn ran a diversified organic cropping operation here from 1986 to 2018, and like most farmers, he’s always looking for new ways to do things. Unlike many farmers, he has a doctorate in plant biochemistry from the University of California, Davis. 

He walks over to the safflower plot and kneels. The plants look like spindly lollipops sticking out of bare dry earth, their green, ball-shaped seedheads the only thing left on the tan stalks. Grasshoppers, which destroyed crops across Montana this summer, have eaten the leaves and flowers and are starting on the heads. 

Quinn breaks one off and, having forgotten his knife, uses a rock to split it. He spreads the halves, showing the triangular white seeds. 

“Even though the plant is completely denuded, the seeds are maturing,” he says. “It might not be a great crop, but there is a crop.” 

Instead of seeding the safflower in April or May, per usual, Quinn planted this plot during a warm spell in January. The crop was far enough along that it had bloomed and begun forming seeds before the grasshoppers got to it. While still unusual, thawed winter ground is becoming more common, Quinn says, noting that several years ago he successfully seeded winter wheat in January.

Quinn started this research pilot plot in 2007 as part of another experiment. Like more than 300,000 acres in Montana, portions of the Quinn’s land are high in saline, and the common practice of keeping ground fallow to preserve water for the following season has caused salinated ground water to seep up to the surface in places. There, it dries and leaves a salt layer that sterilizes the soil. Quinn and his father planted alfalfa around seeps, gradually shrinking them as the deep roots captured the water. 

Knowing there was still extra water beneath the surface of a reclaimed seep, Quinn was curious if he could grow vegetables normally grown in Montana with irrigation. He planted potatoes, squash and onions at various distances from the middle of the seep, seeking a sweet spot low enough in salinity with just enough subirrigation. For the experiment’s control, he planted the same vegetables in a dryland crop field. While the seep-planted vegetables grew poorly, those in the control plot did surprisingly well. 

Since then, he’s continued experimenting with the dryland vegetables as part of what he now calls Quinn Organic Research Center. The research plot totals four acres and includes a dryland vegetable plot, his irrigated vegetable garden, an orchard, various crop trials, and a type of intermediate wheatgrass trademarked as Kernza, an experimental perennial grain crop that can improve carbon sequestration and reduce erosion. To replenish soil nutrients, he seeds a cover crop “cocktail” of peas, grains, lentils, vetch and barley on half of the plot each year, tilling it in as green manure in June, when the legumes have maximized their nitrogen fixation, and before the cover crop has used much of the soil’s water. Quinn’s experiments produced the highest yields when the dryland vegetables had three times more space than the corresponding irrigated vegetables, allowing them to absorb enough water from the soil and rain. Most years, the dryland potato and tomato net yields equal their irrigated counterparts. 

Quinn stands and walks through a patch of knee-high kochia, a weed that’s reducing crop yields across the Great Plains, especially as it becomes resistant to herbicide. Grasshoppers spring out with each step.  

“Every flag here was a melon or a cantaloupe, or a squash,” he says, pointing at blue flagging. “[After the grasshoppers took them out], I didn’t really keep up with the weeds and just let it go.”

Half the potato plants are gone, demolished by grasshoppers before they could form tubers. Colorado potato beetles dot the remaining plants, bright orange larvae and black-and-white striped adults eating leaves and stems both. Ragged cornstalks bear almost no fruit, but beside them, a few watermelon vines hold six-inch melons. 

As with the majority of Montana and much of the West, drought conditions this summer meant harvests were smaller and earlier than usual. At Quinn’s farm, May brought a huge snowstorm, but then only 3.56 inches of rain fell between April and July, as compared to the mean of 7.14 inches in Big Sandy over the last 100 years. On July 12, a severe hail and wind storm west of town upended semi trucks, dented grain bins and destroyed barley and wheat crops. By late September, his yields in this plot were around 20% of normal. 

In a year like that, harvesting any crop at all is a success. And looking forward, dryland crop research like Quinn’s could become an increasingly valuable part of food production as drought and a volatile climate continue to make Montana’s growing season drier and less predictable.

But it’s not a magic bullet. 

“He’s finding varieties, general crop spacing and those kinds of things that work on his farm, [but] when you’re growing these things organically, you’re depending on a lot of ecological processes, and they might operate quite differently on a farm down the road, especially farms that are out toward the edges of his region that have a different climate than he does,” said Montana State University agroecologist Bruce Maxwell, who’s worked with Quinn over the years. A leading researcher in weed biology and the intersection of agriculture and climate change, Maxwell is currently studying how small grain growers in the Northern Plains can improve farm profitability and sustainability by gathering data on their own farms. 

Maxwell explained that ecological processes exert a heavy influence on organic systems in particular due to climate, land management history and biology both above and below ground. 

“But it’s at least a starting point, that’s the beauty of it,” Maxwell said, noting that Quinn is exploring a spectrum of food crops unlikely to be tested or experimented with on MSU’s research center farms, which tend to focus on commodity crops. 

“Ultimately, it takes really local testing and doing repeatedly what he does in the way of experimentation in a lot of places,” Maxwell said, “because you’re dependent upon ecological processes, and ecology is time-specific, site-specific and history-specific.” 

Quinn aims to grow this pilot plot into a full-fledged research center that will create jobs, dovetail with local markets, and help farmers become more resilient in the face of what he calls “climate chaos.” It’s already spawned a sister project that plans to provide more locally produced food to Big Sandy and surrounding Chouteau County.

He’s been through this process several times before. The research center is the latest in a series of projects Quinn spearheaded over the past 35 years, working with partners both locally and around the world. Built largely on organic agriculture, they range from his own organic farm to the creation of a new international grain market, a grain processor and elevator, an oilseed press, and the snack food business Big Sandy Organics, which is expanding rapidly under new ownership. Each has encountered roadblocks and failures, and all have grown beyond Quinn. Now they’ve evolved into a loosely connected ecosystem of markets that are benefitting small town farmers and their communities, including Big Sandy.

Both on and off the farm, Quinn’s career exemplifies how investing in fundamentals — soil, business and community — can spark entrepreneurial innovation that helps producers access new markets, create jobs and, increasingly, rebuild local commerce in rural Montana. 

A tractor drives by the research plot, kicking up dust, followed by a semi truck with a load of hay. The semi honks. 

“Those are the guys who are leasing my farm,” Quinn says. 

Now retired from large-scale farming, he rents most of his 4,000 acres to two former employees, Seth Goodman and Chad Fasteson. They’ve bought Quinn’s machinery and are running their own organic operation here, and also lease another 4,000 acres nearby, 1,000 of which they’ve been unable to farm organically due to decades of poor management and the resulting weed pressures, Goodman said. 

Another young couple doing business as C&S Produce leases a smaller parcel where they grow organic potatoes and squash for local and regional markets. 

“What I’m trying to tell and show is that there are lots of ways to make a living in agriculture besides coming back to the farm and buying [out] the neighbors,” Quinn said. “That’s been the model the last 50 years … rather than make more with what you’ve got by diversifying your markets and your products.”

A TOWN THAT ‘LIVES AND BREATHES FARMING’

It’s a quiet summer morning on Johannes Avenue, Big Sandy’s main street, a 20-minute drive north of Quinn’s farm. A string of multicolored balloons from last night’s bank-hosted barbecue spill out of the bed of a pickup in the parking lot north of Pep’s Bar, Cafe and Lanes. 

On the north wall of Pep’s, a brightly painted mural captures the spirit of this small town: Seven red combines line up in a wheat field at sunrise, ready to harvest a local farmer’s crops after he was diagnosed with cancer. 

Across the street, school district principal Heather Wolery and her kids are in the new public library picking out books for summer reading. 

“You know, people just stand up and help each other here,” Wolery says, recounting stories of neighbors teaming up to fight fires, host fundraisers and offer support in the wake of accidents. 

Though Big Sandy’s population has mostly declined for decades, K-12 student enrollment has generally risen in the last 10 years, even as other schools in north-central Montana consolidated for lack of students. In addition to the library, there’s a new fitness center and a new machine shop, and another organic farmer, Mary Merrill, recently opened a bakery and coffee shop offering pastries made with flour milled from Golden Triangle-grown grains. The Class-C high school football team, the Pioneers, is the biggest game in town, and a skatepark donated in 2010 by Pearl Jam bassist and Big Sandy native Jeff Ament has drawn skateboarders from around the state and beyond. 

Big Sandy is a community whose past and future are built on soil. 

“Big Sandy lives and breathes farming,” said librarian Darlene Cline, who grew up in the ranching town of Choteau on the Rocky Mountain Front, 118 miles west. Cline lives on her husband’s family’s 2,000-acre farm west of town, which was organic for five years and opted out in 2009 due to decreasing market prices and mounting paperwork. Since 2019, she’s worked with the county extension office and one of the farmers renting Quinn’s land, Charley Overbay of C&S Produce, to offer gardening classes at the library. That same year, she also started a seed exchange library, and provided free seeds to more than 40 local gardeners this past spring. 

Big Sandy’s population grew at a healthy clip from 1950 to 1960, when it peaked at just over 950. Back then it was thriving, with a department store, a hardware store, a movie theater, an ice skating rink and five operating grain elevators. 

By the late 1970s, many local businesses had shuttered and residents had moved away, pushed out by an industrial agriculture system that essentially exported wealth alongside commodities. As Quinn described in his 2019 memoir, “Grain by Grain,” co-written with UC Santa Barbara assistant professor of environmental studies Liz Carlisle, the increased mechanization of industrial agriculture, the “get big or get out” policies of the Nixon era, and the farm credit crisis of the 1980s forced farmers to either sell and leave the business or buy their neighbors’ land and dig deeper in.

Today, Big Sandy’s elevators sit empty along a railroad spur that’s used to store train cars, and the 20 or so jobs the elevators supported are gone. Local farmers selling into commodity markets now haul their grain to centralized elevators in Fort Benton, Rudyard, Havre, Chester or Great Falls, 35 to 80 miles away. At the same time, land prices in Big Sandy have continued rising. 

“That means it’s almost impossible for a young person to begin farming or ranching without family help,” said Shane Ophus, a real estate broker and farm and ranch auctioneer in Big Sandy. 

Commodity farmers play a major role in Montana’s economy and in international food production. Because margins can be thin in the commodity market, economies of scale are usually what allow farms to stay profitable. But a growing number of producers in Big Sandy and around Montana are exploring another strategy for keeping degraded agricultural land in production: They increase their soil fertility, reduce operating costs, and try to sell into higher-value markets. Some are organic, like Quinn. Others continue to spray weeds and pests while taking steps to reinvest in ecological resilience by implementing regenerative soil-building systems like no-till, cover cropping, crop rotation and livestock integration. Quite a few farmers in Big Sandy have tried organic, but only a handful have stuck with it. 

“I would admit that I’m not an organic total believer yet,” said Big Sandy Mayor Shaud Schwarzbach, who’s also the vice president and loan officer of the local bank branch and a farmer himself.

While 80% of the loans Schwarzbach processes are agricultural, he estimates that only about 10% of the area’s production acreage is certified organic. He also says there’s still a cultural divide between organic and conventional producers. 

“I think [organic is] the way it should be, and the economics have been there,” Schwarzbach said, explaining that his hesitancy comes from knowing organic growers who’ve struggled with weeds and insect pests, incurring huge costs to transition to organic only to surrender their certification when they can’t make it work. On larger operations in the range of 20,000 acres, he’s seen farmers have success cycling sections in and out of organic, spraying pesticides when needed and then taking the required three-year break from spraying to recertify.

“On a smaller operation like ours, because there’s a lot of cost to [organic] conversion and a lot of risk to that, it’s not quite as feasible,” Schwarzbach said of the 3,000 acres he and his wife, Melanie, farm on her family’s land. They have, however, reduced their pesticide costs by inoculating their pea, chickpea and lentil seeds with bacteria that helps prevent root rot and protects against pests. 

Like so many in Big Sandy, farming is a way of life for Schwarzbach, who moved here from Havre as a child, worked for farmers during high school, and studied ag operations technology at Montana State University in Bozeman. 

“I got the bug, or the disease, sometimes it’s called. My great uncle farmed north of Gildford, which is on the Hi-Line, too, and spending weekends and weeks in the summer out there with him, he taught me how to drive and drive tractor when I was 5 years old, so he kind of implanted that love in me.” 

KING TUT’S WHEAT AND THE BLEEDING EDGE

Framing the entrance to Quinn’s driveway is a set of spiraling brick columns he designed after seeing the work of modernist architect Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona, Spain. When he wasn’t farming, Quinn’s career took him around the world to market his businesses, promote organic agriculture, develop policy and participate in research. It all started with the literal seeds of Golden Triangle lore.  

As the story goes, U.S. Air Force pilot Earl Dedman was stationed in Portugal in 1949 when a fellow serviceman gave him a bag of wheat kernels he claimed to have taken from an Egyptian tomb. The seeds were almost three times larger than the wheat Dedman knew from Montana. He sent them home to his father, a farmer in Fort Benton, who planted them and found the grain to be drought resistant and high in protein. Six years later, with 1,500 bushels of the stuff, the elder Dedman sold it as feed and shared it with friends. 

As he recalled in his memoir, Quinn first saw the giant grain at the 1964 County Fair in Fort Benton as a high school student. 

“Hey, Sonny, would you like some of King Tut’s wheat?” an old man called from a booth. Quinn took a handful, amazed at its size. 

Nearly 25 years later, Quinn and his father began growing and selling that same grain, having found a jar of it in a friend’s basement. The Quinns trademarked it under the brand name Kamut and launched Kamut International in 1986. Through the business, they paid farmers well above commodity prices and provided resources for growing the crop and caring for the soil it was grown in, ensuring supply. Lab tests later showed it was actually a strain of khorasan wheat originally cultivated in Mesopotamia, and research indicated it has numerous health benefits. 

Alongside Kamut International, Quinn and a cousin expanded another company, Montana Flour & Grains, which they’d originally established in 1983 to broker the Quinns’ wheat to specialty bakeries in California. At the time there was no national organic certification, so when customers wanted organic, growers signed affidavits confirming that their practices met California organic regulations. As demand for Kamut and organic grains in general grew, the brokerage added elevator and milling facilities in Fort Benton, becoming a hub for organic processing and distribution. A longtime employee bought the business in 1999, and it now has 13 employees and is still mainly organic. 

Seeing the market for organics through those early customers is what convinced Quinn to convert the family farm. After he and his father began transitioning to organic in 1986, they typically harvested less than their conventional-farming neighbors, but gleaned higher profits than their own conventional crops produced due to lower costs and higher prices. Instead of using fertilizer and pesticide, they rotated both cash crops and nitrogen-fixing cover crops like alfalfa, creating soil fertility and competing against weeds. 

​Also in the mid-1980s, Quinn and a group of other Montana organic pioneers including David Oien from the lentil processor Timeless Seeds helped establish Montana’s organic statute, making it the fourth state to have an organic law. In the 1990s, Quinn sat on the USDA’s first National Organic Standards Board, which built a framework for the eventual implementation of the program in 2002.

None of it happened in a vacuum. Both he and his wife, Ann, are quick to say that while Quinn was farming and growing his businesses, Ann did most of the work raising their five children. And their faith community, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also contributed to his success. While many farmers struggle to find hired hands, Quinn has mostly recruited at Brigham Young University-Idaho, and the majority of his former employees who’ve stayed in Big Sandy belong to the church, which owns farmland around the West, including elsewhere in the Golden Triangle. The church counsels maintaining a long-term supply of healthy food, so organic agriculture is a natural fit for many members. 

As with the dryland research plot, these ventures also came with challenges and failures. 

In one example, Kamut spent three decades building a network of more than 200 organic growers, mainly in Saskatchewan and Montana. By 2017, the company was selling 75% of its grain to Italian food manufacturers, and the entire market was worth millions. That year, new European Union regulations resulted in the discovery of residue from the herbicide glyphosate on imported Kamut. At 20 parts per billion, the grain was well within U.S. organic standards of 1,500 ppb, but above Italy’s allowable 10 ppb, so the shipment was rejected, causing losses for the company, manufacturers and farmers. 

Out of concern for the issue, the company had conducted research on environmental glyphosate in 2014 with German consulting chemists, finding the herbicide so prevalent in dryland grain-growing regions that it can drift on the wind and show up in rainwater.  

“I sat on that crop for three years,” said Dick Nicholson, a Chinook farmer who grows Kamut for Montana Flour & Grains, noting that the company helped him eventually find a market for it in the U.S., albeit at a much lower price. In the 20-plus years Nicholson and his wife, Nellie Joe, have been farming organically, they’ve seen niche markets come and go and prices fluctuate. This fall, Nicholson said, organic prices are considerably higher, mostly due to the limited supply caused by this summer’s drought. 

Five years later, Kamut International is slowly regaining market share, with prices and domestic demand on the rise, according to Trevor Blyth, Quinn’s nephew, who has been president of the company since March after a decade as CEO. 

“It’s not a straight line,” Blyth said after an early September trip to meet with customers in Europe. “In the last couple of years, we’ve had a strong resurgence in interest, so it was disappointing to be telling our customers we’ll be short next year [because of this summer’s poor harvest]. That’s definitely going to have some ripple effects we’ll have to build back from.”

Since the European market fallout, the company has worked to help farmers meet regulatory standards, and has increased its own testing regimen, Blyth said. It has also diversified beyond Europe, growing into new markets in the U.S., Canada and South Korea. 

There’s broad public interest and government support in Montana for value-added ag, which the USDA defines as “produced in a way that increases value, for instance, according to organic certification requirements, and those that were physically altered, for instance, strawberries that were made into jam.” The state agriculture department doesn’t track small business growth in the value-added sector. Anecdotally, though, it’s said to be expanding, especially since the pandemic supercharged demand for local food. 

But building a business can be hard, especially in rural Montana, where there is often a more conservative attitude toward the risks that come with entrepreneurship, and a less robust network of entrepreneurial support, said Tara Mastel, who runs the MSU Extension Reimagining Rural program. 

“You need the supports around those rural entrepreneurs to help them see the vision, develop the skills and move forward with their projects,” Mastel said.  

The state’s Agricultural Development Council — where Mastel sat on the board for several years and whose Growth Through Agriculture Grant Quinn has received several times — is one such support. This year the grant has $1 million in funding to offer for development of new agricultural products and processes. The USDA also awards grants for value-add, community facilities, pandemic response and small processors, and a portion of Montana’s 2021 American Rescue Plan Act funding is appropriated for value-added ag. For producers seeking more comprehensive support, the University of Montana’s Accelerate Montana program helps rural and Indigenous innovators and small business owners with coaching, networking and connection to investors. 

Adding value may be a challenge for individual operators, but the rewards can travel well beyond the farm through a ripple effect of community benefits. 

“Any time we have somebody that’s on the cutting edge, it’s a really bloody place to be, because you’re going to catch all this other stuff about whether this innovation is going to work,” said MSU agricultural economist George Haynes. “But this is the dynamic you need to push an economy along, because they’re willing to take those risks. It all comes from being willing to take what hurdles are in front of them and jump right over them and show people it’s going to work.” 

BUILDING A LOCAL FOOD MARKET 

Back at his research plot, Quinn walks from the few surviving melon vines and cornstalks to the tomato plants. 

“These are the Sungolds,” he says, kneeling again. He picks one of the small, yellow tomatoes and puts it in his mouth. “These are really yummy. It’s even better than what I get out of the garden, because of the dryland. It’s not watered down at all.” 

In 2021, the federal Farm Bill set aside $25 million in USDA funding for organic research, and by 2030 that number will cap out at $50 million. It’s a small percentage of the $3.3 billion the agency budgeted in 2021 for all agricultural research. In Montana, multiple MSU affiliates are doing organic vegetable and dryland crop research and education, including the Western Agricultural Research Center in Corvallis, the Horticulture Farm at MSU-Bozeman, and the Central Ag Research Center in Moccasin. Still, that research is minimal compared to university research on conventional ag, so there’s much less knowledge about how to fight drought, weeds and pests in organic systems. But as weeds become increasingly herbicide-resistant and climate change intensifies, the knowledge gained from organics may be key to sustaining food production and security in the future. 

“[With organic systems] you have to react quicker to problems that are coming, because you just can’t have a spray plane come in and solve something that you didn’t take care of earlier,” Quinn said. “You have to be ahead of the disaster and hope you can mediate it. And you need to be diversified. Really, completely diversified. Because some years there’s just nothing we can do right now.”

Those lessons in diversification and risk reduction are why Quinn and Thomas Dilworth, who bought Quinn’s snack food business Big Sandy Organics with his wife, Heather, are working to provide more locally grown food to their community. 

“It’s going to be needed soon if the drought continues,” Dilworth said. “These big cities where people really believe that groceries come from the grocery store shelf, they’re going to suffer, and we have to have active solutions in place.” 

Like much of Montana, Big Sandy grew a large portion of its own food as recently as the mid-20th century. Today, some residents raise backyard gardens and the grocer carries local food from Pearson’s Big Sandy Cantaloupe and C&S Produce, as well Krackin’ Kamut snacks from Big Sandy Organics and safflower oil from another of Quinn’s businesses, The Oil Barn. Still, budget limitations and food safety regulations combined with convenience, culture and consumer preference mean the only way local food service entities can operate in the current market is to receive regular deliveries trucked in by large distributors. 

Under Quinn’s proposal, the research center and other local producers would establish a year’s supply of long-term storage items already grown locally, like wheat, barley, cooking oil and storage vegetables, for the approximately 1,200 residents of northern Chouteau County, starting in 2022. He and Dilworth are seeking grant funding to establish irrigated plots and hoop houses for fresh vegetables in 2023. Meat, dairy, eggs, honey, berries, fruits and nuts would follow. The goal is to match the prices people pay for food now. 

They’re in conversation with potential partners including the school, medical center, grocery store, senior center and two local restaurants. Several were already considering something similar, and all were open to the idea, but many also had concerns and questions.  

Still, Quinn sees progress. 

“Thirty years ago, I wouldn’t have gotten this kind of reception,” he said. “I’m not pushing uphill quite as hard against so much tradition that says there’s no reason to change anything. Thirty years ago, fewer people had already gone broke. Everything was really rosy with industrial ag.”

Back then, the organic market wasn’t well-defined, similar to the emerging regenerative industry today. 

“What’s transpired in organics is that when we first started out there wasn’t a market,” said U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, who farms organically on his family’s 1,800-acre T-Bone Farms west of Big Sandy. 

“If you’re starting a new enterprise, or if you’re raising a crop,” Tester said, “you’ve got to have some infrastructure behind it to be able to make it and allow it to be successful and permanent.”

For a rural ag town like Big Sandy, that infrastructure has already created jobs and economic vitality. Since taking over Big Sandy Organics in early 2021, Dilworth has secured large national deals and begun planning a several-million-dollar expansion. He’s also now manufacturing custom products for other Montana farmers, both organic and conventional, aiming to help them establish value-add facilities in their own communities. The business has already grown from three to five full-time employees, and the plan is to have 15 or more by 2023. To get there, Dilworth is working with the town to secure more land and water, both of which are in short supply.

Quinn imagines the research center and local food project as models ripe for duplication around the state, adjusted for different growing conditions, resources and local culture. For now, as with all his projects, he’s testing the water.

“My philosophy is to start small enough so that if it does fail, it doesn’t sink your whole ship,” he said. “The farm was the ship, and these little boats we launched, if one went down, you still had the ship.”

This story is published by Montana Free Press as part of the Long Streets Project, which explores Montana’s economy with in-depth reporting. This work is supported in part by a grant from the Greater Montana Foundation, which encourages communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans. Discuss MTFP’s Long Streets work with Lead Reporter Eric Dietrich at edietrich@montanafreepress.org.

The post Common Ground, Part II: Building on soil in Big Sandy appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Wind and water have eroded Montana soils since the first plow turned earth on the Northern Plains more than 150 years ago, taking with them one of the state’s most important resources. Since then, tillage, plus the fertilizer and pesticides common in industrial agriculture, have continued to degrade the soil that agriculture depends on. With climate change threatening almost 25,000 Montana agricultural jobs in the next 50 years, many farmers, ranchers and researchers believe the status quo is no longer adequate. And though conventional farming continues to account for the overwhelming majority of Montana’s $4.6 billion ag sector, things are shifting.

Part I of this series, supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, explores two responses to soil degradation in the age of climate change: organic and regenerative farming systems. 

Organic has been a USDA certification since 2002, while regenerative lacks a codified or even consensus definition, but generally includes a suite of techniques like cover cropping, crop rotation and livestock integration that decrease erosion, improve biodiversity and capture carbon. Both systems have challenges and shortfalls, which are considered here, but a growing number of Montana producers are using them to build topsoil, become more resilient to drought, capture carbon and increase profits. 

A slight haze hangs on the blue horizon above Ledger Road, 50 miles north of Great Falls in north-central Montana. Rectangles of spring crops and native grasses glow green alongside the dried straw of last year’s fallow. Forty miles north, the Sweetgrass Hills rise 3,700 feet above the high plains. 

A mile down a side road, past another farm, the home place at Tiber Ridge Farm is an oasis of trees, farm buildings and birdsong. The farm sits in the geographic center of the Golden Triangle, a 4,000-square-mile area between Great Falls, Havre and Cut Bank best known for producing high-protein wheat. 

In the driveway, John Wicks starts his semi, a Freightliner with 800,000 miles he bought used in 2007. That was right after his dad died and Wicks left Montana State University in Bozeman to help his mother on the farm where he grew up.

“It’s got a [fuel] leak, a pinhole somewhere that’s sucking air,” Wicks says, stepping away from the truck while it warms up. “So when I let it sit for a couple days, it’s hard to start.”

While he waits, Wicks talks to his wife, Gwyneth Givens, who’s building new raised beds for their summer garden with the hired hand, Peyton Cole.

Once the truck is warmed up, Wicks climbs back into the cab and pulls left out of the driveway. As he descends toward Pondera Creek, the eastern end of Tiber Reservoir emerges into view between crumbling sandstone bluffs. In front of it, across the drainage, wind blows dust off a hilltop. 

Wicks frowns. He and Givens planted those hilltop fields with winter wheat, but some of it died in a cold snap, making the ground susceptible to wind erosion. Like the majority of their neighbors in the Golden Triangle, they are dryland farmers, meaning they don’t irrigate.

“The tillage we’re doing is 2” deep — trying not to get in there and mess with our microbiome,”  Wicks says. Traditional tillage, he explains, rips four to five inches down, destroying the interconnected web of plants, animals and microorganisms that make up a healthy underground ecosystem, which in turn provides nutrients for crops. Used for weed control and to loosen the soil for planting, tillage combined with drought caused the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and continues to cause severe erosion in Montana and elsewhere on the Great Plains.  

Located 26 miles from Chester, population 1,099, Tiber Ridge Farm is in one of Montana’s most significant agricultural areas. The nine counties that roughly form the Golden Triangle grew 61% of the state’s winter wheat and 58% of its barley in 2019, and were second only to northeastern Montana in lentil production. In 2018, producers here grossed $1.16 billion, more than a quarter of the state’s annual $4.4 billion gross farm and ranch income. 

As in the rest of Montana, most Golden Triangle farmers use the “conventional” techniques of modern industrial agriculture. Aiming for the highest crop yield possible, these are generally monocropping systems reliant on pesticides (including herbicides, insecticides and fungicides), synthetic fertilizers and genetically modified seeds. 

In contrast, Wicks and Givens are borrowing methods developed by indigenous farmers millennia ago. They fight weeds and pests by rotating which crops they seed in a plot each year, for example, and by planting cover crop mixes of vegetables, grasses and clover that also return nitrogen and biomass to the soil and protect against erosion. They also lease land to neighboring ranchers, whose grazing cattle aerate the soil with their hooves and add organic matter and nutrients via manure. 

With climate change threatening almost 25,000 Montana agricultural jobs in the next 50 years, many farmers and ranchers are realizing the status quo is no longer adequate. And as a movement toward ecologically based agricultural practices gains ground nationwide, an increasing number of Montana producers are building topsoil, drought resilience and profits by integrating practices like organic or regenerative systems. 

Both approaches are expanding in the state. Because organic is a USDA certification, it’s easy to measure its growth in Montana, which is second only to California in certified organic acreage. Regenerative, meanwhile, lacks a codified or even consensus definition, but generally includes techniques like cover cropping, crop rotation and livestock integration. Although regenerative approaches are harder to track, one likely indicator, cover cropping, is up by 489% over the last 10 years in programs supported by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. 

For producers working to improve their farm’s soil health and economic stability, transitioning to an organic or regenerative system is a long game. They’re investing not only in this year’s yields, but in the future of their farms, their communities, and the system that produces food for both U.S and global consumption. A growing body of research also points to regenerative agriculture’s ability to sequester carbon, although how much is yet to be determined. 

But farmers and ranchers can’t overhaul America’s food system themselves, and they might not need to. On June 8, the USDA announced a more than $4 billion investment in the nation’s food system aimed at strengthening supply chains, creating new market opportunities, responding to climate change, helping underserved communities and supporting good-paying jobs. Depending on how those funds are allocated, they may allow more Montana farmers to build soil health and add economic resiliency to their operations. 

TRANSITIONING TO ORGANIC

Wicks was 21 when he left MSU and returned to the family farm. At first, he and his mother farmed about 1,300 acres, all wheat. 

“A lot of years, we were going backwards and rolling our debt over, just building up our long-term debt,” said Wicks, now 36. “It was really scary.” 

Wicks had considered transitioning to organic for years, but he and his mother knew it was a risk. When Givens moved to Tiber Ridge, her support gave him the extra push to make it happen. 

Givens, 35, grew up on a seed-cleaning operation in Big Sandy, 90 minutes east of Tiber Ridge. After attending culinary school in Denver and working as a pastry chef at a yacht club in Florida and the Northern Hotel in Billings, she moved to the farm in 2015. That year, they planted a home garden and cleaned up the farmyard. She got jobs cooking at a bar in Hingham and a coffee shop in Fort Benton, but quickly realized it didn’t make sense to drive an hour each way to work for minimum wage when there was plenty of farmwork to do. It just had to pencil out.

“But the farm had to make money to support a family, so that’s where that transition started to really make sense,” Givens said. 

The couple began experimenting with organic crops in 2016. They planted 700 acres of organic red lentils and spring wheat. Wicks didn’t think they’d stick with it, but he wound up having fun farming that way, and at year’s end his books showed the organic crops were the most profitable. 

Plus, he was getting tired of dealing with the chemicals, mostly the herbicide commonly known by the brand name Roundup. In 2015 he contracted chemical pneumonia, caused by inhaling toxins. He knew cancer was a concern (“most farmers just assume that’s what’s going to get them,” he said), but it was still several years before the class-action lawsuit against Roundup’s manufacturer, Bayer, which is now paying out $10 billion in a settlement to farmers who contracted cancer after extended use.  

Soon after they began experimenting with organic on part of the farm, weeds became so resistant to Roundup that chemical companies instead suggested Paraquat, which is lethal to humans in even small amounts. At that point, Wicks and Givens decided they were over it. In 2018 they went cold turkey on both pesticide and fertilizer, reducing their operational costs by $200,000 from the previous year, even with an added 1,000 acres in production. 

Wicks and Givens earned organic certification for their entire farm this year, and they’re now applying for the new regenerative organic certification. Established in 2017 by a group of farmers, soil scientists, nonprofits and private businesses, the certification’s goal is to create “long-term solutions to the climate crisis, factory farming, and fractured rural economies.” Two other producers in Montana are also applying for the certification. 

In the five years since they started down the organic road, Wicks and Givens have encountered obstacles. Insurance isn’t available for some specialty crops like Einkorn, for example, and they have to truck their barley to Anheuser-Busch’s organic grain elevator in Idaho Falls, rather than dropping it off at the company’s elevator an hour away in Conrad, which accepts only conventionally grown crops. And because organic takes more time and management overall, they had to really work for it. 

After growing up on the farm and studying conventional agricultural practices at MSU for a year, the toughest thing, Wicks said, was changing his mindset.

“When I was farming [before], I sprayed, and I liked what I thought was a really clean field,” Wicks says over the rumble of his tractor. “It took me a little mind-changing to realize that [the] soil was just dead. So, starting over from that, realizing what I was doing wasn’t great. And I think that’s one of the things a lot of farmers struggle with, is admitting that maybe you weren’t doing the best practices.” 

INVESTING IN RURAL COMMUNITIES 

A couple of miles west of the home place as the crow flies, Wicks parks the semi in a field. There he begins the half-hour process of loading 230 bushels of barley seed from the trailer into an air cart, a giant seed tank on wheels that he’ll tow behind a tractor. 

Barley pours out of a funnel below the semi into a small basin, where a boom arm with a fill auger resembling a giant drill bit spins them up into the air cart. Sweat soaks Wicks’ shirt. It’s early June, and the temperature is 85 at 1 p.m. 

Once the cart is full, Wicks starts the tractor, drives to where he left off the day before, and sets a GPS track. He starts a fan on the air cart, which pushes seeds through a set of tubes to another piece of machinery Wicks tows behind the air cart, a 50-foot-wide hoe drill that drags 50 pointy hoes through the soil and inserts seeds every 12 inches.  

Between cash and cover crops, Wicks and Givens are planting about 4,500 acres this year. Some of that land is leased from Wicks’ mother, who retired in 2019, and the rest they lease from neighbors. They’ve contracted most of the barley to Anheuser-Busch, though they’ll sell some to nearby Hutterite colonies for chicken feed. They’re also growing lentils, chickpeas, Kamut and Einkorn for smaller mills including Timeless Seeds and Montana Flour and Grain, both based in Montana. 

Their yields are smaller than their conventional ones were, but Wicks said it’s worth it. Previously, they were at the mercy of international commodity markets, as well as ever-increasing seed, chemical and fertilizer prices. Organic producers often have more leverage, because they usually grow a diverse range of crops and sell directly to processors. Plus, many Montana organic grain and pulse growers forward-contract their crops, meaning they lock in a per bushel price before even planting. Wicks and Givens often sell their organic crops for two to three times the price of conventionally grown ones. 

In turn, they spend locally, buying groceries in Chester, beef from a neighbor and equipment from local dealerships. Their equipment dealer, Gary Blonde, sees the economic ripples of organic and regenerative, too. An organic farmer himself, Blonde sells farm machinery for Tilleman Equipment in Havre, where he says more people are buying tools specific to organic and regenerative farming.  

“I’m seeing a huge increase in [equipment] purchases as guys get more experienced, because they’re finding different tools that can do jobs they once thought were impossible,” Blonde said. “And they’re just getting on their feet at this point to [make those investments].”

Wicks and Givens also invest in their community in other ways. Wicks serves on the Liberty County Farm Service Agency and Montana Organic Association boards, as well as the state Agriculture Development Council in Helena. He says they pay Cole, their hired hand, competitive wages and provide room and board. Originally from Chester, Cole moved back to the area when she lost her job in Missoula during the pandemic, and this is her first season on the farm. In addition to her wages, she’ll also earn a harvest bonus based on the farm’s 2021 profit.

In rural communities like Chester, it’s increasingly important to keep money circulating locally, said MSU agricultural economist George Haynes. More money in rural agricultural communities not only means more jobs, Haynes explained, but also a larger financial base that supports economic development, community investment and infrastructure improvements. 

In the Chester of Wicks’ childhood, the town had a baker, three butcher shops and a factory that built cultivator parts. “Everyone shopped more locally,” Wicks said. “Now there’s no jobs like that.”

JOURNEY INTO REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE

Lack of jobs and loss of soil fertility in the Golden Triangle run parallel to each other. Once incredibly healthy, the soil here formed during the 11,000 years after the last Ice Age. As the prairie sod thickened, it absorbed water and carbon, becoming ever richer, said Tim Seipel, an MSU agricultural ecologist and extension specialist. Seipel compared that original sod to old-growth forest.

“We cut the prairie sod, and then we basically mined the soil the sod had made, and now the mine is starting to go dry,” Seipel said. That phenomenon is occurring on farmland worldwide as erosion, salinization, acidification and nutrient loss degrade the soils humans need to produce food. 

“Now we’re presented with the opportunity to rebuild the soil and put it back together,” Seipel said. “Soil is our livelihood and we better protect it, or we’re screwed. The writing is on the wall.”

While soil health is codified into organic regulations, not all organic farmers control erosion effectively, and tilling too often or at the wrong time can have devastating effects. Just this year, dust blowing off an organic farm field in Chinook filled a fairway on the local golf course three feet deep with dirt, according to Greg Jergeson, a retired farmer and former state legislator who sits on the Blaine County Conservation District board. The farmer had plowed right before a 75 mph wind event. He also described driving through white-out conditions on a road south of town, caused by dirt blowing off the same farmer’s fields. 

Enter regenerative agriculture. 

Fifty miles northwest of Tiber Ridge, gray clouds hang high over Happy Steer Ranch. The air is uncharacteristically calm, and lightning flashes a few miles off. 

Set between Interstate 15 and the Sweetgrass Hills, Korey and Wendy Fauque’s 5,000-acre operation is a landscape of contrasts. From the ranch headquarters, four miles south of Sunburst and 23 north of Shelby, you can see oil rigs, wind turbines and the sharp rise of the Rocky Mountain Front.

In the closest pasture, a herd of 70 cow-calf pairs laze in the grass. Wendy paces 50 steps beyond a temporary electric fence and unspools a hot wire. Willow Wieskamp, the hired hand, stamps in fence posts. Wendy seeded a rye-wheat hybrid called triticale here last October, and the ungrazed grass is already over knee-high. Between the three of them, they move the fence daily, aiming to graze roughly half of the grass before moving on. The cows ramble over, lowing for the new feed.

As Wendy and Wieskamp set up the fence, Korey pushes a shovel into the ground and pries up a blade of soil.

“These roots are extruding sugars to feed the [soil] biology … like mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria,” he says, breaking apart a mass of roots and earth with his hands. “We’re really short on the fungi part, because we killed all that with the chemicals over the last 40 years of farming. We just hammered and hammered and hammered on it.”

The Fauques (pronounced “Fauks”) are using regenerative practices to turn that around. The tiny world of roots, earthworms and insects crumbling through Korey’s fingers is evidence it’s working. Aiming to improve fertility and biodiversity and capture carbon, they use many of the same techniques as Wicks and Givens, with one main difference: Instead of tilling to fight weeds, the Fauques spray herbicide, albeit much less than a typical conventional grower. 

Korey, 43, grew up on the ranch, and attended school in Sunburst, population 360. After graduating from MSU Northern in Havre, he worked as an agronomist at an agricultural co-op in Cut Bank, scouting farmer’s fields, sampling soil and advising on fertilizer ratios and herbicides. That’s where he met Wendy, 44, then the co-op’s finance manager and commodities broker. Raised on a Nebraska cattle ranch, Wendy moved to Montana after earning a masters degree in agricultural economics and agribusiness from the University of Wyoming. They married in 2003, purchased a crop insurance business, and soon added agrochemical sales and consulting to their portfolio. When Korey’s dad retired in 2012, they took over what’s now Happy Steer Ranch.

Starting out, they followed the standard practice of alternating wheat and barley with “chem fallow,” which means they grew a crop one year and then killed everything with Roundup and left it unplanted the following year. After that, they planted directly into the old crop residue with a “no-till drill” that slices diagonally into the soil and inserts seeds directly into old crop residue. Because there were no live crops using water during the fallow year, the method preserved soil moisture, essentially giving the next year’s crop two seasons’ worth of water. 

No-till has been common on dryland farms in Montana since Roundup became readily available in the state in the 1990s. It replaced tilled fallow, in which farmers plowed last year’s crops under and left a field of bare dirt. At the time, chem fallow/no-till was considered revolutionary because it reduced erosion by leaving the dead straw in place and eliminated plowing. 

At first, the Fauques sprayed 16 ounces per acre, but as the weeds became resistant they bumped up to 24 ounces, and then a quart. Like Wicks and Givens, they drew the line at Paraquat. 

Around that time, their neighbor Griff Bye was one of the first in the area to experiment with cover crops and integrating livestock, and he often stopped by to talk about what he was trying. In those conversations, the Fauques realized they could improve the soil by planting pulses or cover crops, and make money by grazing those same cover crops, instead of spending so much on Roundup. After attending a Natural Resources Conservation Service training and watching soil health videos on YouTube, they stopped fallowing and began planting legumes and cover crop, and reducing pesticides and fertilizer. Five years in, soil sampling showed increased organic matter and microbial life. Next they devised a mobile water trough that pumped water to their cover crop plots and native pastures, allowing them to move their cattle daily, a practice known as intensive grazing. In 2019, they switched to a smaller, hardier breed, Aberdeen Angus, and began calving in late spring instead of winter to reduce stress on the animals. Now, they’re planting pollinator strips to attract birds and insects like bees, which are integral to crop farming but in decline, in part due to pesticide use.

“The more you start trying stuff, the more you want to try stuff to get it turned around,” Wendy said.

AN IMPERFECT SOLUTION 

Even when used minimally, tillage and pesticides both come with clear downsides. But no one has figured out how to completely eliminate either at scale and over time, a goal Korey calls the “Holy Grail.” With new technology and research — including a current MSU study on naturally occurring weed pathogens based on a similar biocontrol project in Kenya — a no-till organic system might one day be possible.

In the meantime, public interest in regenerative agriculture is growing rapidly. Around since the 1970s, the term only recently became part of the lexicon. 

Mainstream media coverage has increased dramatically in the last two years, as private companies and now the Biden administration consider paying farmers to capture carbon as part of carbon markets. Alongside that rising profile come critiques. Skeptics are raising concerns ranging from the limited scientific proof of carbon capture rates to the potential for greenwashing and the barriers to Black, Indigenous, migrant, women and other minority farmers who are integral for regenerative agriculture to thrive in the long run.

As the movement lurches forward nationwide, the Fauques are a decade into their own regenerative experiment. They say they’re growing more crops with less rain and applying 70% less pesticide. This year they replaced granular fertilizer with compost extract, though they’re still using liquid nitrogen. (“Soil is like an addict,” Wendy said. “Once it becomes dependent on nitrogen and you’ve killed all the good bugs, you can’t grow a crop without nitrogen.”) They have fewer weeds than ever and went from doctoring more than 10% of their calves to almost none. By direct-marketing their grass-finished beef, they make a better profit than they did when they shipped calves to a feedlot. 

But it’s not all bumper crops and roses. 

It can be harder to find used equipment for regenerative practices, and as with all agriculture, equipment costs are astronomical. When they try something different like intercropping, in which they plant two or more symbiotic crops together, they often can’t insure it because of strict federal crop insurance regulations, even as owners of their own crop insurance agency. They also get negative comments on social media, usually when a more traditional operator takes offense at the Fauques comparing their new practices to conventional ones.

“We all did the same thing, [but] if you’re the person still doing those practices, it’s hard to not get offended,” Korey said. 

Regenerative systems are known for building topsoil quickly. But it’s slow going in an arid environment like the Golden Triangle, which historically averaged 10 to 15 inches of moisture a year. Happy Steer Ranch, which is dry even for the Triangle, has averaged eight inches annually during the Fauques’ tenure. While they saw noticeable improvement of their soil structure in 2020, they’re predicting less improvement this year with the drought. 

“It was easier to farm the way we were farming [before],” Wendy said.

Still, they estimate that about 50% of operators in Toole County are adopting regenerative practices on at least part of their land. Some are doing it because they can’t afford synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, Korey said, while others are responding to herbicide-resistant weeds. In addition, Korey says, a new generation of young farmers recently returned to the area, and many are open to trying new things.

Ultimately, the Fauques want to retool the framework of their direct-market beef business for crops. They sell 90% of their beef to local customers in Sunburst and Shelby, and their new idea is to market legumes and grains directly to consumers as well, using nutrient-density as a selling point. But they suspect finding demand to match their large supply will be a challenge, and they’ve yet to find a reliable nutrient test. They also hope to stock organic biological supplements in place of the fertilizers and pesticides they currently sell out of their retail warehouse, employing their salesman to sell compost extract, humic acid and worm castings instead.

“I think ag is headed that way, but there’s so much money in the chemicals and fertilizer and in the way things are done that it’s hard to get away from that and figure out how to find those markets,” Wendy said. “At least right now we’re figuring out a way to improve our ground and our animals’ health. And I think it’ll eventually pay us back — even if it’s not financially — if we can just keep making a living and producing better products.”

The post Common Ground, Part I: ‘Soil is our livelihood and we better protect it, or we’re screwed.’ appeared first on Montana Free Press.

WEST YELLOWSTONE — Yessika Vega has lived in Montana for 17 years. She left home in Villa López, Chihuahua, Mexico, after high school to learn English in El Paso, Texas, and attend college. That’s where she met her husband, who was born in Idaho to immigrant parents.

“We were supposed to come to West Yellowstone and just work for two summers and save money and go back and buy a house,” said Vega, now 40. Instead, they decided to stay in Montana, and Vega soon became a naturalized citizen. She now has four kids between the ages of 3 and 14 and works in customer service at First Security Bank. 

“We like it here,” she said. “It’s a small town, you know everybody.”

Local public school records indicate that 30% of the students enrolled in fall of 2020 are Latino and, anecdotally, the total percentage of Latinos in the town of 1,300 is closer to 40%. Vega said that pre-pandemic, hundreds if not thousands more arrived seasonally to work summer jobs in restaurants and hotels, both in town and in Yellowstone National Park. Many Spanish-speaking people approached Vega regularly for help with things like translating a medical appointment, applying for social services or registering a car.

That’s why the nonprofit medical clinic Community Health Partners brought her on when it launched a promotoras de salud program in 2015. Promotoras — Spanish for “health promoters” — are lay health workers, usually women, trained to advocate for their families and communities through education and outreach.

First developed in mid-20^th-century Mexico, the promotora model then spread throughout Latin America and into the U.S., where promotoras have served as liaisons between their own culture and the Western medical system for more than two decades. From Texas to California, in Washington and the Midwest, promotoras address issues including chronic disease, domestic violence, child abuse, mental health and worker rights, helping Latinos navigate the complex, potentially unfamiliar U.S. health care system in the face of a language barrier, lack of insurance and threat of deportation. Some work in institutional health care settings, while many, like Vega, provide services as trusted community members.  

For CHP, which provides sliding-fee-scale health, dental and behavioral services through clinics in Bozeman, Belgrade, West Yellowstone and Livingston, the promotora program was a response to a shift in patient demographics. 

“All of a sudden [in 2006] we were hearing Spanish being spoken in our waiting rooms almost daily,” said Buck Taylor, CHP’s director of community development and administration, and a co-founder of the promotora program. While Latinos had worked on potato farms and dairies in the Gallatin Valley for a number of years, many more moved to the area during the Big Sky construction boom of the mid-2000s, according to Bridget Kevane, a Latin American and Latino Studies professor at Montana State University, director of MSU’s Liberal Studies program, and co-founder of the promotora program with Taylor.

After conducting focus groups in West Yellowstone and Belgrade in 2015, Taylor and Kevane recruited six volunteers, including Vega, from Gallatin and Park counties. The women received training from health professionals, and then hosted community workshops to discuss topics like nutrition and mental health. They also connected people to doctors, psychologists, health screenings and social services. In 2016, the program received $60,000 in combined funding from the Montana Healthcare Foundation and the Montana State University INBRE (IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence) program funded by the National Institutes of Health. 

When that funding ended in 2018, the Gallatin City-County Health Department, which was also actively recruiting bilingual staff, adopted the promotora program. Today, there are three promotoras in West Yellowstone and one in Belgrade. They receive an annual stipend to act as a bridge between the health department and the Latino community. In addition to their advocacy and education work, they have trained to help with the census and work to increase Latino access to the free preventative screenings and immunizations offered by Bozeman Health.  

When clusters of coronavirus cases began to emerge in the Latino community in West Yellowstone in late June, the health department hired Vega and another promotora, Ana Nascimento, a teller at First Security Bank, as part-time health department employees. The job is in addition to their regular promotora responsibilities. At the time, they were integral to stopping the spread, said Liz Aghbashian, the department’s health promotion specialist and manager of the promotora program. 

Latinos, even those who live and work here legally, can be reluctant to accept medical or social services, according to Randall Caudle, an immigration attorney in Missoula. That includes COVID-19 testing or treatment and unemployment benefits. 

Some fear that drawing attention could lead to deportation or harassment for themselves or their loved ones, Caudle said, pointing to ICE-conducted raids in Western Montana in 2018. That same year, two women in Havre were interrogated and detained by Customs and Border Protection because they were speaking Spanish in a convenience store, and the Gallatin County Sheriff made an agreement with ICE this past January that allows his office to hold someone they’ve arrested on criminal charges and suspect of being in the country illegally until ICE arrives. People without documentation may also fear that using medical or social services will prohibit them from acquiring legal immigration status in the future, Caudle said. 

But even during a coronavirus outbreak, people still have to feed their families and pay rent. In West Yellowstone, many Latinos work in either the service or construction industry, where paid sick leave isn’t usually an option. Early on, some went to work sick, ignoring quarantine and isolation directives, Aghbashian said. Others who were working illegally sometimes wouldn’t admit to a nurse where they had been, which made contact tracing investigations ineffective.

When it was a promotora on the other end of the line, things were different.

“We are not interested if you’re illegal or not,” said Nascimento, a Brazilian who moved to Big Sky in 2013, and then to West Yellowstone, where her husband had been one of the first Mexican kids to attend school. “We don’t ask that. We just want to help people get healthy.”

After public health nurses completed a contact tracing investigation, Vega and Nascimento made daily calls to anyone in isolation or quarantine, coordinating food and mail deliveries and medical care, helping people apply for rent and utility assistance and unemployment benefits, and making sure they understood the instructions and had the resources to stay home.

Daniela Lopez-Morales, a nurse at the health department who investigated many of the West Yellowstone cases, was born in Mexico and grew up in Colorado. She said that in many cases she was able to develop the rapport needed to do a proper investigation because of her Spanish and cultural fluency, but that the promotoras had still another leg up.

“Because they’re part of the community, the people that were talking to them knew them, so they felt safe to be able to give them the information they needed,” Lopez-Morales said. 

For the health department, the promotora connection also meant critical hands on deck. 

“They were the ones that kept track of people and kept asking about symptoms after my initial call,” Lopez-Morales said. If something was amiss and they were concerned about anything, [the promotoras] would call me or one of the other nurses for direction.”

Community health workers are becoming more common in Montana and around the country because they’re an affordable, holistic way to improve health outcomes for marginalized populations. With promotoras’ proven track record nationwide and the Gallatin County program’s early success, the model is a culturally appropriate and effective means of supporting the state’s growing Latino population, said MSU’s Kevane, who is still an adviser to the Gallatin promotora program. In the current moment, promotoras can help vulnerable community members who might otherwise avoid coronavirus testing or treatment understand its importance, especially in the face of cultural fears exacerbated by the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies.

As the number of Gallatin County coronavirus cases rises, including a cluster in West Yellowstone in October, Aghbashian said, the promotoras remain vital to the health department’s efforts to halt the spread through contact tracing.  

“I told my manager, ‘Thank God we have the promotoras in West [Yellowstone],’” Aghbashian said. “They’re worth their weight in gold.” 

Latinos are the fastest-growing minority population in the country. They make up 18% of the total U.S. population, and are forecast to reach almost 30% by 2060. Of Montana’s million residents, an estimated 4.1% are Latino, which is roughly 43,800 people.

Latinos have been here since before Montana was a state, first as fur traders, cowboys and railroad workers, Kevane said. Starting in 1942, many Latinos came to work in the sugar beet fields of eastern Montana as part of the federal Bracero program, which brought millions of low-paid Mexican laborers to fill U.S. farming labor shortages during WWII. The program ended up lasting more than 20 years, and descendants of those braceros still live in the Billings area today. 

Elsewhere in the state, Latinos have found agricultural niches, Kevane said, like the migrant workers who come from Washington every year to pick cherries in the Flathead Valley, the sheep shearers and potato farmers who live year-round near Dillon, and the dairy workers who are a critical part of the milk industry in Manhattan and Amsterdam.

The most concentrated growth, however, has been in Gallatin County, where tourism-related service jobs in West Yellowstone and a booming construction industry in Big Sky and Bozeman have drawn many young families. 

They come from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Peru, Venezuela and other countries, as well as other parts of the U.S. 

While it’s impossible to know exactly how many Latinos live in Gallatin County or how quickly the population is growing — which makes it hard to provide or fund services — it’s clear they are supporting a portion of the region’s economy, and that their numbers are growing. Public records show the number of Latino students enrolled in Gallatin County schools has increased about 1% annually for the past five years, with 13.9% of the students currently enrolled self-identified as Latino. 2019 census estimates put the county’s Latino population at 4% overall. 

The promotora program in Gallatin County is not the first effort to meet Latinos in Montana on their own turf. The Billings-based Montana Migrant and Seasonal Farm Workers Council, a nonprofit founded in 1972, provides health care to agricultural workers and their families on a sliding payment scale.

With community health clinics in Billings, Dillon, Lolo, Fairview and Powell, Wyoming, plus bilingual outreach workers around Montana, northern Wyoming and western North Dakota, the organization aims to serve about 6,000 people a year, roughly half of whom speak Spanish. Latino ag workers are among the most marginalized Latinos in the region.

“Many of them live in rural, isolated areas, oftentimes without a vehicle, and with language and cultural differences,” said Claudia Stephens, a spokesperson for the council. “They’re not free to just jump in the car and make a medical appointment.”

In the more rural areas, the council deploys mobile medical and dental units to give patients access to care they otherwise wouldn’t have, sending outreach workers to surrounding farms, ranches and orchards to tell ag workers about their services and get them signed up. Like the promotoras, the council’s outreach workers act as liaisons between clinicians and patients.

“We see ourselves as a door into the community,” Stephens said. “Where standard health care providers see people who come through the door, we look for those people that are not coming to the door to find out why.”

Chiara Rossi, a medical assistant and interpreter at the CHP clinic in Belgrade, has been a promotora since 2019, a few years after she moved to Montana from Italy, where she trained as a physical therapist.

Because Belgrade and Bozeman have more resources than West Yellowstone, Rossi’s promotora work looks different from that of the three West Yellowstone promotoras. But she, too, has acted as an interpreter during community events, helped eligible people apply for programs like Medicaid or WIC (the state’s supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children) and helped people sign up for cancer screenings.

At work, Rossi notes which patients might need more help from a promotora, and then she typically spends at least one of her days off each week helping them make appointments and doing whatever else needs to be done.

“It’s challenging, because you have to figure out stuff that you’ve never had to,” Rossi said. “And if you are figuring out stuff, yourself, on a daily basis, can you imagine how confusing it can be for patients — especially if they’re not proficient in English, if they don’t have connections in the area, if they can’t put gas in their car to go to a medical visit or the pharmacy to get medications, or [if] they can’t even read in Spanish?”

“We need our patients to know that if there is a need, they can contact us,” Rossi said. “Sometimes people feel doomed because they don’t know there is a solution. So that’s why we’re there.”

Nascimento, the Brazilian-born promotora, recently helped a friend and her husband with rent assistance paperwork. Both had COVID-19 and had to stay home from work with their four children to quarantine. 

“We work with community that we consider family,” Nascimento said. “I basically don’t consider that work. … I would [do it] if I was a promotora or not. The good thing about being a promotora is that I have the resources and the information to do that now.”

This story is part of continuing Montana Free Press coverage of community responses to COVID-19 supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. 

The post Promoting health — and trust appeared first on Montana Free Press.

RONAN — Jan Tusick used to sell her lamb and vegetables from a roadside farm stand on Highway 93. The year was 1995, and the then-39-year-old organic farmer spent one day a week at the stand, which she shared with other area farmers as part of the Mission Valley Organic Growers Cooperative. She also worked as a school clerk and a program assistant for an investment firm, and spent evenings and weekends tending the flock and 80 acres she and her husband, Will, still cultivate near Pablo National Wildlife Refuge 25 years later.

Figuring there had to be a better way to sell their goods, Tusick approached the local economic development nonprofit, Lake County Community Development Corporation. She wound up volunteering there, and in 1998 led a community assessment as part of the Montana Food Systems Initiative, run by AERO, a statewide sustainability organization. 

“Basically, what the community and the growers said is, ‘We want infrastructure, we want refrigerators, we want to be able to value-add our products,’ and so that’s what we pursued,” Tusick said. “They wanted a place they could process their vegetables. They wanted a place they could chop and dice, because you can’t do that on the farm. And the refrigeration was so they could store their vegetables.”

That same year, with a building provided at no cost by the Salish and Kootenai Housing Authority and funding from the USDA Rural Cooperative Development Program, she founded what is now the primary pillar of local food processing in Montana: the nonprofit Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center.

Unlike other similar facilities around the U.S., Mission Mountain isn’t near a large city. It’s located 12 miles south of Flathead Lake on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Ronan, population 2,088. Without a large pool of local food entrepreneurs or existing businesses using the space, Tusick funded the center’s early days with government grants, which took it only so far. 

“The first 10 years were rough,” she said, explaining that the center needed reliable revenue streams to keep afloat. 

Today, some of that revenue comes from renting the space to entrepreneurs including Silk Road spice blends and Fat Robin Orchard and Farm, which uses the space to make dried and frozen cherries and a cherry reduction sauce. Other revenue streams include consulting for private food businesses as a state-funded food and agriculture center; selling the Montana Lentil Burger, a branded product made in-house; and processing and packing food for clients including the Western Montana Growers Co-op, which Mission Mountain helped establish soon after its own founding. 

Tusick also learned early on that the enterprise center needs to process at least 600 pounds of product at a time to make a production run worthwhile. She now recommends that any new similar centers be located near an urban center and be built for capacity.

That way, she said, “we can compete and be successful.”

Last year Mission Mountain washed, sliced and packaged 30,000 pounds of food for the growers co-op, which distributes Montana products to individuals, grocery stores, restaurants and institutions across Montana and into northern Idaho and eastern Washington. When institutional demand dropped during the recent coronavirus shutdowns, the two organizations received a grant from the USDA Farmers to Families Food Box program. With additional funding from the Montana Farmers Union and the Headwaters Foundation, Tusick and her staff had packed 1,713 9-pound boxes full of Montana- and Pacific Northwest-grown produce as of August 19, which the growers co-op distributed to organizations helping people in need in Kalispell and Missoula, and on the Flathead Reservation. Tusick estimated the program will distribute 6,400 boxes by the end of November. 

On the ladder of Montana food processors, small private enterprises are the first rung, and community-based facilities like Mission Mountain are on the second step. The difference is that on the second tier, the “business model is as much about building community as it is about building a strong business,” said food systems analyst Ken Meter. 

Higher up the ladder are mid-size processors like Montana Gluten Free, Timeless Seeds and Montana Flour and Grain, which export the majority of their products to national and international markets. 

“You have to reach a certain scale before it is economically feasible,” said David Oien, founding and managing partner of Timeless Seeds, a lentil processor in Ulm. With 25 employees and 45 farmers, Timeless Seeds produces so much it could never keep all its products in-state. Even so, Oien called the company a “speck on the windshield” compared to the big agricultural companies at the top of the processor ladder, like the Japanese-owned Columbia Grain or General Mills, both of which operate processors in Montana.  

Together, the lower rungs are key to keeping locally grown food in Montana, so it doesn’t have to be shipped elsewhere to be processed or packaged before returning for consumption. And keeping Montana-grown food in Montana has been in higher demand since the pandemic interrupted national food systems. But without economies of scale and the government subsidies afforded to big ag, it’s hard to survive near the bottom of the ladder, and as a result, local food is often expensive. 

“We want to feed Montana, [but] right now local food is not necessarily that affordable,” Tusick said. “That’s been a tension for years — how do we get local food more affordable?”

As she’s shown through Mission Mountain’s partnerships — whether that’s renting the facility to private clients, collaborating with the growers co-op, or expanding its farm-to-institution programming — partnering with other businesses, nonprofits and institutions helps reduce costs for all parties, which trickles down to consumers and ultimately supports the entire system. 

“Twenty years ago, we started with government money, and we started hitting the wall,” Tusick said. “This place almost closed down, because we needed to go back and forge relationships with community partners. That helped us reestablish a foundation that we could build upon and be sustainable.”

One homegrown Livingston group is forging its own partnerships in an effort to make local food available to everyone in the community, with food processing at the core of its work.

The Livingston Food Resource Center, first founded as a food pantry in 2006 and re-established in its current form in 2015, aims to treat hunger through its root cause of poverty. Instead of purchasing the cheapest food available and handing it out through the usual food pantry model, the center buys most of its vegetables, meat, grains and dairy from Montana farmers, supporting jobs and client health at the same time, according to Director Michael McCormick.

When grocery aisles were bare this spring, McCormick had no problem sourcing food through his regular local channels. For the sandwich bread the resource center bakes for its clients and other Montana pantries, he bought 2,000-pound loads of organically grown flour from Montana Flour and Grains in Fort Benton. Western Montana Growers Co-op continued delivering regular truckloads of produce, and McCormick bought about 1,500 pounds of carrots and beets out of a Rockport Hutterite Colony root cellar near Choteau.

This fall, staff will wash, blanch, chop, slice, shred, vacuum pack and freeze several thousand pounds of Montana vegetables in the center’s 1,500-square-foot commercial kitchen, and then distribute them to its clients this winter, or cook them into meals for the community kitchen.

“Come January or February, if we want to make a cauldron of vegetable soup, we can go to the freezer and pull out veggies we bought last summer from local farmers and processed,” McCormick said. “That does a couple of things. One, it keeps our food acquisition dollars in our local agricultural economy and helps support small family farms that are always struggling. [Two], it distributes [healthy] food to people who, based on all the studies and research we’ve done, are generally wrestling with many chronic illnesses, much of which is brought on by poor diet and nutrition.”

Donations fund 85% of the resource center’s food purchases, with other revenue generated by renting the space to food entrepreneurs and a new bakery selling baguettes and artisanal loaves to the public. The center also sells vegetables and bread to the Livingston hospital, produce to the local school district, and bread to Sage Lodge, and caters lunches for the Rotary Club and other local groups in its on-site meeting room.

Looking forward, McCormick is researching whether it would work to expand the produce processing facility and start a branded line of organic Montana vegetables. Like the bakery, the vegetable line would be a hybrid model with the center’s clients and other pantries receiving produce for free, while vegetables sold retail would generate revenue. 

“I spent 40 years in bottom-line-driven for-profit corporations,” McCormick said. “That’s kind of how I look at nonprofits and how they should be managed. … I’m constantly looking for ways to continue to leverage our role.”

Above Mission Mountain and Livingston Food Resource Center on the ladder, there’s a third rung that exists in the space between direct-to-consumer and commodity markets. These are the mid-size farms and food enterprises that long made up the heart of American agriculture, but that largely disappeared between World War II and the 1980s with the rise of industrial agriculture and cheap food.

It’s a concept known as “agriculture of the middle,” and rebuilding it could make food systems more resilient, said Tommy Bass, a food systems researcher and extension specialist at Montana State University.  

“It’s like [redundancy in] a power grid, but it’s a food grid — they don’t get knocked out,” Bass said. In the same way that multiple generator stations and transmission lines make a power grid less vulnerable to a single tree falling on a power line, multiple smaller and mid-size producers, processors, distributors and retailers strengthen a food system. 

In Great Falls, Montana Eggs is a third rung example made possible by leveraged partnerships. Owned by a number of the state’s Hutterite colonies, the $9 million, 58,000-square-foot egg grading facility opened in 2017 and is operated by Washington-based egg producer and distributor Wilcox Family Farms. 

“One colony couldn’t have done it. Two colonies couldn’t have done it. It wouldn’t have been cost-efficient enough,” said Will Hofer, head gardener at the Rockport Colony, explaining that the plant is the only venture so many colonies are partnered on in Montana. “They needed a lot of eggs, and the more colonies you got together, the more eggs you could move through, and the sooner it would be paid off.”

The facility currently processes approximately 1.2 million eggs a day from 38 Hutterite colonies. Wilcox sells and distributes those eggs to all of the Costcos in Montana, as well as to Costcos and other retail outlets around the Pacific Northwest. This partnership was the key to success, because Wilcox had distribution and sales networks already built in, said Claude Smith, general manager of Montana Eggs. 

Smith has 39 years of experience in the industry, including working as a food and process specialist for the Montana Manufacturing Extension Center, a consultant for many of the entities mentioned in this story, and in operations for Pillsbury. He emphasized that while addressing the lack of small processors is important, it’s only part of what’s needed to keep more locally grown food in Montana.

To do that, he and many others interviewed for this story said, an entire ecosystem of producers, processors, distributors, retailers and customers needs to expand together. This could look like Mission Mountain and the growers co-op developing symbiotically, like the state Office of Public Instruction partnering with MSU and others on the Montana Farm to School program, or the Bozeman restaurant Montana Ale Works helping Gallatin Valley Botanical purchase a root vegetable harvester and washer, a greenhouse and land. 

New efforts to add processing capacity around the state aim to put this collaborative, systems-level approach into practice.

Prospera Business Network, a Bozeman-based economic development nonprofit (disclosure: the reporter is a Prospera member), is launching a feasibility study in September for a center similar to Mission Mountain. One big question, said Prospera Executive Director Paul Reichert, is whether there are enough farmers, ranchers and food entrepreneurs in the surrounding area to support a facility, and if so, what resources they would need. 

And in Choteau, flour miller Judy Cornell spent the summer removing tractor parts, welding equipment, tools and supplies from a friend’s unused 70-year-old farm shop, where she’ll expand capacity for her business, Conservation Grains. Since 2018, Cornell has sold locally grown flour to bakeries, wholesale distributors, grocers and individuals around Montana, including the Livingston Food Resource Center, as well as nationally through an online store. 

While the business is still small, Cornell said sales have increased by 400% during the pandemic. Montana Gluten Free recently gave her a grain cleaner, and she plans to buy a grain mixer, conveyor belt and bagger with help from a $10,000 Montana Agricultural Adaptability Program grant. Her goal is to partner with others around the state and region to establish small community mills for which she would source, wash and bag grains. 

Montanans have been reconstructing local food systems since the 1980s, said Meter, the food systems analyst.

“Montana, to survive and be resilient, needs a food system that is really homegrown, and it’s very difficult to do that because wealth has been extracted so systematically out of Montana for so many decades,” said Meter, who has helped establish community-based food systems in six regions of Montana and 40 states. 

“How does Montana build the food system it deserves that pays people well and has healthy outcomes and takes care of the soil and reduces inequality and increases justice? Mission Mountain is an example of what it could look like.” 

This story is part of continuing Montana Free Press coverage of community responses to COVID-19 supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. 

This story is published by Montana Free Press as part of the Long Streets Project, which explores Montana’s economy with in-depth reporting. This work is supported in part by a grant from the Greater Montana Foundation, which encourages communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans. Discuss MTFP’s Long Streets work with Lead Reporter Eric Dietrich at edietrich@montanafreepress.org.

The post Homegrown: Part 2 appeared first on Montana Free Press.

LIVINGSTON — Tim Anthony walked behind a small group of black Irish Dexter cows, moving them along a fence line to new pasture above Black Dog Farm. Slowly, he navigated a steep spot around a juniper, wading through early July’s already-drying grass. To the southeast, snow hung on in the high cirques of the northern Absaroka Range.  

In the gulch below, 500 layer hens chattered and clucked as they milled around the roost and the neighboring pasture. A pair of white Italian Maremma guard dogs swirled through the birds and back to Anthony’s wife, Kira Jarosz, at the farm headquarters. Mug of afternoon coffee in hand, Jarosz was talking to a plumber about the faucets he was installing in the farm’s new poultry processing facility.

“I have one more question, but I didn’t want to bother you,” the plumber said. 

“You’re not bothering me,” she said, following him into the Tyvek-wrapped 350-square-foot building. “The most important thing we’ve got going on right now is trying to get this thing ready to go.”

When Anthony, 34, and Jarosz, 31, bought this 35-acre parcel in 2016, Jarosz was still finishing vet school in Oregon, so Anthony, a welder and Iraq War veteran, moved out a month ahead of Jarosz with a trailer of pigs, chickens, goats and dogs. They spent the following year getting the farm up and running, while simultaneously hauling rundown equipment and garbage off the property, which had been used as a dairy, sawmill and junkyard. 

Other than supplying meat and eggs to Little Star Diner in Bozeman, the farm now sells exclusively to individuals. After the coronavirus reached Montana in mid-March, Black Dog switched from selling mainly at year-round farmers markets to an online store offering weekly home deliveries in Livingston and Bozeman, and community supported agriculture shares. Soon, they were so busy Jarosz had to cut her days at the vet clinic in Livingston from three a week to one. Demand continued into the summer, with about 450 pounds of pork and 100 dozen eggs going out the door weekly. 

On July 8, they had 300 chickens ready to slaughter and butcher, with customers waiting on all of them, but nowhere to do the work. Until this year, they had taken their meat birds four and a half  hours to the Montana Poultry Growers Co-op in Hamilton, which had been the state’s only poultry processing facility aside from the Hutterite colonies, which don’t process birds for other farms. Counting drive time, processing and waiting for the meat to freeze for transport per state regulation, it was a 48-hour round-trip.

As of last winter, the couple’s plan was to raise 2,000 chickens and process them at the co-op, estimating they’d spend about $10,000 between fees, vehicle wear and tear, fuel and lodging. But when they found out the co-op couldn’t process that many birds, they fast-tracked their own five-year-plan to build a processor themselves.

“Knowing that in future years we would want to continue to grow, and that [the co-op] wouldn’t be able to accommodate that, we decided to go ahead and try to get a facility up before this year’s season,” Jarosz said. She applied for grants and then, by happenstance, they met someone who agreed to provide a private loan.

When the shutdown began and they transitioned to the online ordering system, their chicken and pork pre-orders shot up. Because they knew they’d have the processing facility, they went from planning to process 2,000 chickens to about 3,500.

They’ve received just shy of $30,000 in state and nonprofit-funded grants to help with the cost of construction and equipment, and in early August got CARES Act funding through the Montana Department of Agriculture’s Montana Meat Processing Infrastructure Grant. Designed for small and medium-size meat processors responding to the COVID-19 crisis by expanding infrastructure and capacity, the grant program received nearly 150 applications requesting a total of almost $18 million. While only $2 million was originally designated for the program, the department was able to secure and allocate $7.5 million to more than 60 processors. 

“It’s crucial that our producers have viable options for getting their meat to market,” Gov. Steve Bullock said in a press release about the grants, which were announced on Tuesday. “Investing in meat processing infrastructure will help our Montana producers, strengthen local food systems, and bolster food security for Montanans in communities across the state from Plains to Circle.”

The grant relieves a burden for Black Dog Farm, Jarosz said, and because the new facility meets all state and federal guidelines, the potential exists to process birds for other farms in the future. Under state law they can process up to 20,000 a year.

On Saturday, July 18, Jarosz, Anthony and three farm hands processed their first 150. 

With empty grocery meat freezers and flour shelves still echoing in the collective consciousness, reconsidering the system that produces America’s cheap food has become a topic of conversation nationwide, including in Montana. Consumers want more secure food, and they’re looking local, with small producers and processors seeing increased demand. In one example, Wheat Montana had to limit the amount of flour individuals could purchase at one time, while interest in regionally milled flour surged around the country. 

Eating local food seems like it should be easy for Montanans, since the state’s $4 to $5 billion agricultural economy produces more food than one million residents could consume. But most of that economy’s commodity crops — beef, wheat, barley, safflower, lentils and chickpeas — get exported to large out-of-state plants to be processed, and today only 10% of the food Montanans eat is produced here, as compared to 70% in the 1950s. 

“Montana and American farmers have become good at producing cheap food commodities for the world, but ironically the COVID-19 crisis demonstrates we struggle to feed ourselves,” wrote Walter Schweitzer, president of Montana Farmers Union, in an op-ed for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. 

As late as 1970, every major town in Montana had a meatpacking plant and a flour mill and a bakery, Schweitzer said in a phone call, explaining that federal policies favoring large corporate farms and centralized processing facilities have made it hard for such small operators to survive.

“The most glaring example right now is the meat processing industry, but it’s true for bread, cereal, pulse crops — anything that needs to be processed before it’s eaten has the same problem.” 

The irony isn’t lost on locals. 

“Can you imagine living in a state known for wheat and beef production and having limited access to processed flour or paying a premium for beef, when you know your neighbor is a rancher and is losing money on everything they sell?” asked Montana Department of Agriculture Director Ben Thomas. 

To keep more Montana-grown food — and the associated dollars — in-state, the local supply chain needs to expand. That means distribution and storage infrastructure, but mostly the bottleneck is at the food processor level.

“If we want to have good food safety, food security, wages, childcare and all those things you need to have a life, there needs to be more [food processing] infrastructure,” said Julie Foster, director of the Ravalli County Food and Agriculture Development Center, one of eight state-supported nonprofit centers that work to increase value-added production in Montana.  

But because local food chains aren’t subsidized the way the larger system is, prices are higher. Plus, with its low population and poverty rate of 15%, Montana’s market for local products is relatively small.

When Brian Engle started Pioneer Meats in Big Timber in 2004, his wife Kary supported their family with her job while he maxed out two credit cards and spent their savings to build the company’s first 10-by-100-foot shop. Later, a $35,000 Growth Through Agriculture grant and a $35,000 low-interest loan, both from the state, helped Engle kick-start his sausage line.

Pioneer is now one of five USDA-inspected meat processors in Montana, meaning meat processed there can be shipped out of state. But since earning the licensure last year, there’s been so much in-state demand that Pioneer hasn’t exported a single pound of meat, Engle said. Since the pandemic, the facility in Big Timber went from slaughtering and processing 25 cattle a week to 38 and hired four new employees, bringing its roster to 28. Engle is in the middle of a $466,000 expansion that includes adding 1,000 square feet of freezer space to his 12,000-square-foot facility and purchasing an existing facility he plans to dedicate to wild game. He, too, received CARES Act funding from the state’s meat processor grants.

“If you were to ask, ‘Why [are] there not more small plants?’ the answer would be it takes a lot of money,” Engle said. “If you don’t start out with a million dollars, you won’t get anywhere. And that’s a big chunk of change to come up with if you’re trying to just get started, because you have to pay that back.”

Still, people are finding ways to make it happen. Since 2014, Root Cellar Foods in Belgrade has processed locally and regionally grown vegetables for wholesale buyers including restaurants, schools and Montana State University. The only facility of its kind in the state, Root Cellar basically had to create its own market. 

“A lot of people didn’t know they needed it,” said owner Christina Angell. “It was hard to get into the game. … Our hope was that we’d be able to take the guesswork out of people getting a carrot — they [aren’t] used to seeing the way local carrots are, and don’t know what to do with them — and create a finished product that their cooks could use in the kitchen.”

There’s only so much you can charge for vegetables, and the business always had thin operating margins. “We’ve been struggling since we’ve been open,” Angell said. 

Now, the pandemic is complicating long-term plans. When Angell lost almost all of her wholesale accounts as the economy closed down, she pivoted to an online farmers market.

“I probably would have had to shut down if not for that retail market,” she said, standing by an industrial-sized greens washer she bought with help from a Growth Through Agriculture grant from the state. Angell isn’t sure if she should invest in her new model of consumer retail, which would mean downsizing from her 4,200-square-foot space to something smaller, or wait things out until she can again sell to larger institutions. 

In the Flathead Valley, Kalispell Kreamery started its own processing facility 10 years ago out of necessity, said co-owner Jared Tuck. To keep costs manageable, Tuck and his family chose to forgo organic certification, which would have pushed prices up for consumers as well. At the time, it was hard to find and afford the right equipment for a small operation. 

“Most of the equipment is manufactured, designed and priced for large production — tens of thousands of gallons a day, whereas we’re looking at 1,000 gallons a day,” Tuck said. 

In addition to bank-financed loans, the family applied for state and federal grants to establish the creamery, and bought some used equipment. It was the only way they could find to stay on the farm. 

“We were shipping our raw milk to Bozeman, 300 miles, to have a market for it,” Tuck said, explaining that the family had been milking cows for 30-plus years before opening the creamery. “As dairy started to disappear from our area, the processors were less likely to send a truck out for our milk. We either had to get out or find a different route.”

A 300-pound cow hindquarter hung from a trolley in the processing room at Amsterdam Meat Shop at 7:30 on a Thursday morning in July. A man in his 20s cut chunks off the quarter with a handsaw and walked them over to two others, around the same age, working at a counter. One of them removed bones with a knife and set aside the more valuable cuts. He pushed the trim meat to the man beside him, who put it in a Hobart chopper.

Started in 1949, the shop in Amsterdam operated as a custom butcher for most of its existence,  meaning ranchers could process animals for their own consumption there, but neither they nor the shop could sell retail. Harrison rancher Jenny Kahrl bought it in 2014 to have a place to process her cattle, and during the six years she owned it, Kahrl improved and expanded the kill floor, added a large cooler, and earned state licensure allowing the shop to sell retail to individuals and restaurants, and process for others doing the same. 

Kahrl sold the shop to Manhattan rancher Jake Feddes and his family on July 1, and they’ve continued slaughtering and butchering cows, hogs, bison, sheep and other animals for area producers including Black Dog Farm, as well as selling their own Red Angus to retail customers. Even though the pandemic has increased demand so much that slaughter dates are booked into 2021, the revenue from processing really just keeps the lights on, Feddes said. 

“Processing meat is a community service, is the way I look at it,” said Feddes, 37. “I couldn’t even take a paycheck at what we were making on custom processing.”

To increase revenue, he added a dedicated retail space and coolers, and started posting on Facebook, whereas, he said, Karhl had never promoted consumer sales. Demand for in-house products went from $50 a week in February to $1,000 a day in July. Amsterdam also received CARES Act funding, and Feddes plans to use it for equipment purchases and facility modifications that will increase cold storage and processing capacity. Within two years, he aims to open a storefront in Bozeman selling custom cuts of local meat.

“My ultimate goal is for me to be able to make a living operating this place, and to keep it alive so people have a place to take their animals,” Feddes said. “[I want to] pay my employees a living wage in the Gallatin Valley, and provide for my family.”

With increased demand during the pandemic and markets growing as more people move to Montana from larger cities, it’s a crux moment for alternative food systems in Montana.

“This is the window of opportunity,” said Jeff Schahczenski, an agricultural and natural resource economist who’s worked at the National Center for Appropriate Technology in Butte for 15 years. “This is the chance to say, ‘You know, we have examples of how this can be done, and we need to do more of it and support that through public policy, more than the same old. More than go back to the status quo.”

This story is part of continuing Montana Free Press coverage of community responses to COVID-19 supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. 

This story is published by Montana Free Press as part of the Long Streets Project, which explores Montana’s economy with in-depth reporting. This work is supported in part by a grant from the Greater Montana Foundation, which encourages communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans. Discuss MTFP’s Long Streets work with Lead Reporter Eric Dietrich at edietrich@montanafreepress.org.

The post Homegrown appeared first on Montana Free Press.

BOZEMAN — At the trailhead for the college “M” just northeast of Bozeman, the parking lot was almost full at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, May 27. The yellow of arrowleaf balsamroot spread across the hillsides as the morning sun lit the popular trail on the southern end of the Bridger Range. A half mile and 850 feet higher, the flush of spring’s green was visible across Gallatin Valley from the benches beside the white-painted rocks of the M itself. A thrum of cars echoed off the cliffs that guard the entrance to Bridger Canyon, and in the distance snow covered the mountains ringing the valley.   

An hour later and five miles away on North Seventh Avenue, construction workers clocked in at job sites including a new luxury apartment building that will also house offices and commercial space where a mobile home community once sat on Tamarack Street, a new brewery at the corner of Peach Street, and a state-of-the art concert venue. 

Several blocks east, past streets cascading with pink crabapple blossoms and dotted with purple lilacs, Brit Fontenot stood at his standing desk on the second floor of City Hall. Outside his office door, coffee cups dried on a dish rack in a hallway kitchenette. Just before 10 a.m, Fontenot, the city’s economic development director, put on headphones and launched the Webex call he’s held every week during the shutdown. A ping announced each new arrival as representatives from local business development organizations joined the call, as did the mayor, the airport director, school district superintendents, and leadership from the governor’s office, Montana State University, a local bank, and the manufacturing, tourism and childcare industries, among others. About 25 local, regional and state leaders have joined the hour-long call every week. 

When Gov. Steve Bullock announced the shutdown order on Friday, March 13, Fontenot was just getting back into town from a spring break trip to Goblin Valley State Park in Utah, which closed a few days later. He came into the office that afternoon and set up a call with his network. 

“We started talking about, ‘This group we’re pulling together has good information we need to share. We need a place to share information and knowledge, because this is happening really fast,’” Fontenot said. “Instructions and directions were changing all the time. This group came together to sort of anchor this information in somewhere credible. This group became that source of information.” 

The group — which Fontenot calls the Bozeman Economic Recovery and Resiliency Team, or R and R Team, for short — has been involved with everything from supporting grassroots recovery efforts including Bozeman Strong to weighing in on the $50 billion bipartisan RELIEF for Main Street Act, which Montana Sen. Steve Daines proposed with Sens. Cory Booker and Pat Murray, and is now slated for consideration in the Senate. The team members, many of whom know each other from past or ongoing work, have also distributed up-to-date information about the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans, surveyed local businesses about how hard they’ve been hit, and initiated conversations about how to best support childcare operations. To help businesses reopen during phase one of the governor’s Reopening the Big Sky plan, they created and distributed kits with masks, physical distancing decals and hand sanitizer, as well as safety information. 

When it became clear that tourism was going to be hit hard, a subcommittee spun off a similar call focused on that industry. 

While many sectors have been hit hard by the shutdown, others, like construction, have continued full bore in Bozeman. And current trends are showing that the pandemic may accelerate the area’s already rapid growth. With upwards of $1 billion in federal funding still to be distributed to local governments and other entities in Montana, the R and R group is poised to advise elected officials on how to allocate that money locally and regionally.  

“Talking about these things is the best way to understand where we are,” said Fontenot, who is originally from Lafayette, Louisiana, and came to Montana in 1992 with a political science degree from the University of Louisiana. He worked in Yellowstone, earned a master’s in history from MSU, and spent five years working for the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, before coming to work for the city in 2006. Fontenot, 49, has replaced his Cajun drawl with an intense style of information delivery that’s as deliberate as it is fast. 

After a Small Business Administration and bank update opened the meeting, Rob Gilmore, executive director of the Northern Rocky Mountain Economic Development District, a nonprofit that supports economic development in Gallatin and Park counties, explained the team’s recent survey results, noting that 55% of responding businesses said they were concerned their business might may not be viable after the crisis. Gilmore also mentioned a pending $400,000 grant that would go toward business recovery, and said another community in his network had seen a spike in COVID-19 cases after reopening and is now considering another shutdown. Ken Fichtler from the Governor’s Office of Economic Development gave a status update on CARES Act grants, and airport director Brian Sprenger said the airport is continuing its expansion, with forecasts that traffic will be at about 30-35% of normal by July — down from 118% percent in January, but a boost from 3.1% of normal in April. 

With Fontenot facilitating, connections were made and homework was assigned in seconds. “Everybody doesn’t get a swipe at everything,” Fontenot said. “It’s more like, ‘Here’s what’s coming down the pipeline. Here’s where we might have an opportunity to have influence. Are you interested? Is it in your wheelhouse?’” 

R and R team member Paul Reichert, executive director of the nonprofit Prospera Business Network, another Bozeman-based economic development group, described the meetings as a “team sport.” But unlike similar groups in Billings, Great Falls and Missoula, which are multi-agency recovery and resiliency efforts operating under their city-county Incident Command systems, no one in this group has any authority over anyone else.

“It’s just a group of interested professionals trying to [share information and] leverage their networks and resources to try to achieve a larger goal,” Fontenot said.

Fontenot isn’t just winging it, and has in fact previously used a similar method to convene other coalitions of disparate leaders with both success and failure. 

Starting in 2012, he worked with Prospera and ILX Lightwave founder Larry Johnson to convene the area’s photonics companies and form a sector development organization, the Montana Photonics Industry Alliance. The Governor’s Office of Economic Development later contributed funding, and the 30-plus photonics institutions in Gallatin Valley are now one of the industry’s significant clusters in the U.S. and a world leader in innovation.

And in 2017, Fontenot brought together seven community banks to fund installation of a $3.5 million open-access network of high-speed fiber optic cable throughout Bozeman business corridors , also benefiting schools and nonprofit and government entities.

Fontenot’s technique borrows from a method called Strategic Doing, a system for bringing together loosely connected individuals to get things done in a messy, complex environment where nobody can tell anyone else what to do. Modelled after open-source software development strategies, the idea is to teach “people to form collaborations quickly, move them toward measurable outcomes and make adjustments along the way,” according to the website for Agile Strategy Lab, which developed and teaches the method at Purdue University and the University of North Alabama. Fontenot learned about Strategic Doing through Alistair Stewart, a senior business adviser at the Montana Manufacturing Extension Center who teaches a course on it at Purdue and has been using it since 2016 to help grow the Greater Gallatin Valley Manufacturing Partnership, with support from the city.

“If you’re looking for the bigger picture, this is about realizing collaborative advantage,” said Stewart, who is also part of the R and R Team. “Everybody puts aside their ego and agendas [at the R and R meetings], because we have a clear enemy to overcome, and it’s in our best interests to collaborate very effectively.”  

But it doesn’t always work. Before Fontenot started working on the photonics alliance, he attempted to similarly convene Bozeman’s outdoor industry, another economic sector with growth potential and good mid to high wages. 

“I thought it would be easy — collegial people who all share similar interests,” Fontenot said. He gave it a name and a basic structure, but the Bozeman Outdoor Network never gained traction. 

“None of the people I organized were able to participate any longer, and for a variety of reasons, I couldn’t get a leader to commit to the vision. I realized the outdoor sector wasn’t ready to rally around the issues I was trying to rally them around.” (Since then, another group has picked up the outdoor industry collaboration mantle.)

The R and R Team is still in the early stages of what Fontenot believes it could accomplish.

“We’re not taking swings at the home-run ball,” he said. “We’re saying, ‘Let’s get to first right now.’ That foundation will carry us forward toward the bigger ones.”

By which he means that if and when more federal money shows up, the team will be ready with information, direction and ideas for decision makers.

“What are we going to do with that money?” Fontenot asked. “How will we manage it? What are our priorities? Are we thinking about mental health as well as economic recovery? Business is important, but there are many ways to do that, so how are we going to best leverage the dollars that come into this county, and preferably more of a regional approach, so they benefit the community as a whole? [We can offer] technical assistance, education, communication, trying to come up with project ideas that might fit a different budget, infrastructure. … There’s opportunity that presents itself in the midst of destruction. We need to find the ideas and then present them to our businesses as they work through this pandemic.”

Daryl Schliem, CEO of the Bozeman Chamber of Commerce, says there has been continued interest in Bozeman during the pandemic, both from visitors and people looking to relocate. 

“You took an economy that was the fastest start for airlines, business, the largest graduating class from MSU and Gallatin College, enrollment setting records at MSU, and all of a sudden March came and we come to a silent halt,” Schliem said. 

Manning the chamber during the early part of phase one on May 7, Schliem, a former linebacker for the Chicago Bears and the Dallas Cowboys, was clad in a long-sleeved MSU T-shirt and white Nike ball cap instead of his usual suit and tie. “[Now] we have people buying homes from out of state and driving here from out of state. We are getting calls on a regular basis saying, ‘It says 14-day quarantine. Does it mean we can’t go hiking?’ … Houses that were selling for $315,000 yesterday went up to $325,000 [today] — in a down economy.” The Bozeman Convention & Visitors Bureau, which Schliem also leads, received a record number of requests for its visitors guide this January.

For the past 10 years, the 12 largest counties in the United States have seen their populations decline, reported Pat Barkey, a Ph.D. economist at the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research, in yet another Webex organized by the R and R Team on May 20.

“I think areas like Montana and particularly Gallatin Valley are going to be pretty attractive, and [that] could really accelerate some of these population movements that we’ve already seen. So, if you thought you were growing fast before, look out. … That’s very much an opportunity and to some extent a challenge. But I think a manageable challenge — a challenge a lot of other places would like to have.”

The formation of groups like the R and R Team is often spurred by crisis. Once things turn around — say the economy recovers by 2022, as Barkey projects — will the group stay together to work toward that second R of resilience? And what would long-term resilience even look like?

Reichert, from Prospera, said that’s not yet clear. 

“What kinds of things do we want to create in the next three, five, seven years that put us in a place that’s really stronger in Montana going forward?” Reichert said. “It’s not just about getting through COVID.”

At the top of the R and R Team’s list to consider are high housing costs and the limited number of childcare centers. After bringing Tori Sproles from the nonprofit childcare support agency Child Care Connections onto the team a few weeks ago, the group was able to make sure all providers in Gallatin, Park and Madison counties had support in applying for the governor’s $10 million in grant monies, which were part of the first round of CARES Act funding. More recently, they’ve discussed the potential to incentivize expansion of existing childcare facilities or offering small-business loans to create new facilities. At the next meeting, Ellen Beck, the government affairs director at the Gallatin Association of Realtors, will join the team. 

As Fontenot said, “It’s about us, and how we come out of this stronger than we came into it.”

This story is part of continuing Montana Free Press coverage of community responses to COVID-19 supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. 

The post Where do we grow from here? appeared first on Montana Free Press.