Iâd just keep on seeding, and I couldnât tell where Iâd run out.â Unconvinced that he needed to use seed treatment, Russ had a similarly skeptical position on herbicides. âI didnât have the money to buy the chemicals, for one thing,â Russ explained. âI mean, I could have done it, I could have borrowed it or something, but I didnât want to, and I didnât like putting it on. So if the weeds werenât too bad, I just didnât see them.â
Unlike Dave and Bud, Russ hadnât had to transition his place, because it had never been âconventional.â Russ followed a different set of conventions. Live simply and live off the land. Donât borrow money, and donât use any inputs. Let the farm limit production, and for Godâs sake, donât pollute this splendid five miles of Missouri River stream bank with chemicals.
âThe landâs got its limits on what it can make,â Russ told Dave, âso if I have a bad crop, it doesnât really bother me any. We paid the land off and weâre not borrowing money on it. When you borrow money maybe you worry about whether the bankerâs going to come banging on your door. Everybody in the system wants big numbers. Itâs the biggest numbers, the highest yieldsâpounds per acre or something. I quit pushing for that a long time ago.â
Russ had flatly refused Earl Butzâs brand of agribusiness. He didnât 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, heâd overcome his distaste for college classrooms to attend AEROâs 1984 Sustainable Agriculture Conference.
As out of place as heâd 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 âagroecology.â 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. âThatâs why I invited you out here,â Russ said to Dave. âI want to hear more about this black medic.â Dave looked at Russ like a poker player whoâd had his bluff called for the first time. Heâd carefully orchestrated this barley deal to surprise Russ with a casual offer of medic seed. But apparently, this had been Russâs 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. Russâs 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 âorganicâ: the Alternative Energy Resources Organization.
PEOPLE POWER
A âcitizensâ renewable energy organizationâ 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 nonprofitâs flagship project. A few years later, AERO members Dave Oien, Russ Salisbury, and Jim Barngrover had helped launch the organizationâs Ag Task Forceâthe same task force that had
Unlike Dave and Bud, Russ hadnât had to transition his place, because it had never been âconventional.â Russ followed a different set of conventions. Live simply and live off the land. Donât borrow money, and donât use any inputs. Let the farm limit production, and for Godâs sake, donât pollute this splendid five miles of Missouri River stream bank with chemicals.
âThe landâs got its limits on what it can make,â Russ told Dave, âso if I have a bad crop, it doesnât really bother me any. We paid the land off and weâre not borrowing money on it. When you borrow money maybe you worry about whether the bankerâs going to come banging on your door. Everybody in the system wants big numbers. Itâs the biggest numbers, the highest yieldsâpounds per acre or something. I quit pushing for that a long time ago.â
Russ had flatly refused Earl Butzâs brand of agribusiness. He didnât 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, heâd overcome his distaste for college classrooms to attend AEROâs 1984 Sustainable Agriculture Conference.
As out of place as heâd 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 âagroecology.â 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. âThatâs why I invited you out here,â Russ said to Dave. âI want to hear more about this black medic.â Dave looked at Russ like a poker player whoâd had his bluff called for the first time. Heâd carefully orchestrated this barley deal to surprise Russ with a casual offer of medic seed. But apparently, this had been Russâs 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. Russâs 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 âorganicâ: the Alternative Energy Resources Organization.
PEOPLE POWER
A âcitizensâ renewable energy organizationâ 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 nonprofitâs flagship project. A few years later, AERO members Dave Oien, Russ Salisbury, and Jim Barngrover had helped launch the organizationâs Ag Task Forceâthe same task force that had
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