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I’d just keep on seeding, and I couldn’t tell where I’d run out.” Unconvinced that he needed to use seed treatment, Russ had a similarly skeptical position on herbicides. “I didn’t have the money to buy the chemicals, for one thing,” Russ explained. “I mean, I could have done it, I could have borrowed it or something, but I didn’t want to, and I didn’t like putting it on. So if the weeds weren’t too bad, I just didn’t see them.”
    Unlike Dave and Bud, Russ hadn’t had to transition his place, because it had never been “conventional.” Russ followed a different set of conventions. Live simply and live off the land. Don’t borrow money, and don’t use any inputs. Let the farm limit production, and for God’s sake, don’t pollute this splendid five miles of Missouri River stream bank with chemicals.
    â€œThe land’s got its limits on what it can make,” Russ told Dave, “so if I have a bad crop, it doesn’t really bother me any. We paid the land off and we’re not borrowing money on it. When you borrow money maybe you worry about whether the banker’s going to come banging on your door. Everybody in the system wants big numbers. It’s the biggest numbers, the highest yields—pounds per acre or something. I quit pushing for that a long time ago.”
    Russ had flatly refused Earl Butz’s brand of agribusiness. He didn’t trade in the same currency that the new farm economists did, and he was far more oriented to what he sowed than to what he reaped. But as his neighbors expanded, gambled bigger, and planted more grain, Russ had come to believe he must be the only one who was so stubbornly backward. Until, that is, he’d overcome his distaste for college classrooms to attend AERO’s 1984 Sustainable Agriculture Conference.
    As out of place as he’d felt sitting in a folding chair and staring at a slide show, Russ had been amused to learn from the conference luminaries that his weedy fields were part of a cutting-edge movement, something called “agroecology.” And when a farmer from Conrad got up and started talking about growing weeds
on purpose
? Well, Russ figured he might have finally hit on a form of agricultural development he could believe in. “That’s why I invited you out here,” Russ said to Dave. “I want to hear more about this black medic.” Dave looked at Russ like a poker player who’d had his bluff called for the first time. He’d carefully orchestrated this barley deal to surprise Russ with a casual offer of medic seed. But apparently, this had been Russ’s plan all along.

    In 1986, Russ became the fifth farmer to plant black medic. Both the crop and the business model made sense to the self-taught homesteader, who was accustomed to investing in the long term. He took the lesson of the Australian ley system to heart, integrating livestock so he could plant more of his ground to perennials. Russ’s land was, quite literally, a place with deep roots.
    But to really appreciate the depth of the burgeoning agricultural underground being cultivated by Dave, Russ, and Timeless,you had to understand its equally deep foundation in its social substrate: a long-standing local tradition of agrarian organizing. To unearth that history, the place to start digging was the shoestring nonprofit that first told Russ he was “organic”: the Alternative Energy Resources Organization.
PEOPLE POWER
    A “citizens’ renewable energy organization” founded in 1974, AERO was the ever-present subtext lurking beneath the story of Timeless Seeds. The New Western Energy Show, for which Bud Barta had served as a technician, had been the nonprofit’s flagship project. A few years later, AERO members Dave Oien, Russ Salisbury, and Jim Barngrover had helped launch the organization’s Ag Task Force—the same task force that had