Free Lentil Underground by Liz Carlisle Page B

his audience that he knew what they were up against.
    â€œWe’ve got low, erratic precipitation, which is another way of saying drought,” the squarely built Sims pronounced, his deep voice spurning theatrics as he got right to the point. “We’ve got a hot, dry July and August, which is another way of saying drought.” Sims ticked off a long list of the other challenges Montana’s producers faced: short growing seasons, surprise frosts, harsh winters, isolation from markets. “Add to that nonbeneficial insects, disease and weeds, nutrient deficiencies, few crop species (mostly a monoculture of wheat and barley), the saline seep hazard, the erosion hazard,” the folksy scientist continued. “I got tired of trying to list them so I quit.”
    Sims’s assessment wasn’t exactly encouraging, but his frankness got farmers’ attention. They were sick of hearing about chemical solutions that worked wonders on test plots in the relatively rainy Gallatin Valley, where the state university was located. At least this straight-shooting character appreciated the conditions they were facing out here in farm country.
    Sympathetic to farmers’ woes, Jim also appreciated the harsh conditions
he
was facing, in the similarly spartan environment of the land grant university system. Public research dollars had dwindled significantly over the past decade, so plant breeders and agronomists had increasingly come to rely on private funding from chemical manufacturers and commodity groups. That wasn’t a problem for most of Jim’s colleagues, whose research programs were well aligned with the prevailing cash-grain system. But Jim had to invent a clever means of supporting his unorthodox studies.
    â€œWe had some grants from the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee for fertilizer research, but not anything else,” herecalled, “so we bootlegged research with pulse crops. We satisfied the requirement for working with small grains and fertilizer, but on the side we did a lot of work with cropping systems. The bootleg system; that was really very important.”
    After a quarter century of bootlegging, Jim was eager to bring his underground research to the forefront and help Montana’s farmers address all those challenging conditions he so palpably understood. “We’ve got to build a cropping system that fits in our environment, in our water resource, in our soil resource, and get around all these problems at the same time,” he told the packed audience at the Lewistown conference. The Earl Butz approach to farming, Jim explained, treated soil fertility as a matter of chemistry: a balance of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium (NPK) that could be achieved with the correct application of fertilizer. Among the reasons this strategy wasn’t working was that soil fertility was also a matter of biology. Soil was alive. Or at least it once had been. By now, industrial agriculture had systematically killed off much of the diverse community of microorganisms in the living fraction of the soil—soil organic matter—which was just as essential to crop health as N, P, or K. To restore the fertility of their land, farmers would need to bring this community back.
    This was one of the most underappreciated benefits of crop rotation, Sims continued: Diversity aboveground supported diversity below it, too. When farmers planted legumes after wheat, they weren’t just replenishing nitrogen, but cultivating a whole new society underground: symbiotic bacteria, soil-aerating worms, soil-aggregating fungi. It wouldn’t happen overnight, Sims cautioned. He had been studying and working on this approach for more than two decades before getting to the point where he was ready to trial black medic on cooperating farms. Even after all that, the black medic system wasn’t an out-of-the-box solution. Each producerwould need a good ten years to build the soil and adapt a