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put on Montana’s first major sustainable agriculture conference in 1984. It was AERO’s bimonthly
Sun Times
that had published Dave’s sustainable agriculture column, “Down on the Farm,” in which the legume advocate first touted black medic to his fellow farmers in 1983 under the heading “This Weed Is Good News.” Even Scott Sproull—the teacher of the 1976 alternative energy workshop in which Dave had schemed the solar retrofit of his parents’ farmhouse—was now an enthusiastic AERO member.
    By the time Timeless Seeds opened for business in 1986, the renewable energy nonprofit was well on its way to becoming one of the preeminent voices for alternative farming in the West—and indeed the entire country. AERO was, as the Timeless founders put it, “a clearinghouse of information on sustainable agriculture.” While the land grant universities, formal agricultural organizations, and government agencies of the northern Great Plainsremained reluctant to embrace ecological approaches to growing food, members of the grassroots group had taken it upon themselves to develop the region’s agroecological knowledge base.
    Newcomers to the effort—who began showing up to AERO conferences in significant numbers—didn’t immediately understand the connection between the organization’s agricultural activities and its mission. Why was a renewable energy group so involved in farming? Dave Oien found himself fielding this question so frequently that he’d published a response in his
Sun Times
column:
    Why agriculture? Because it is Montana’s primary industry, certainly. Because it is a primary energy and resource user. That, too. But the reasoning goes deeper. Agriculture is concerned with ultimate wealth—the ability to provide food and fiber—and it depends in a direct way on natural energy sources—on sun and water and wind, on photosynthesis, on the biology of the soil. Agriculture can be the model for a sane and a safe lifestyle, for an economy that depends on local resources and appropriate technologies, for a close and proper relationship with Nature. Agriculture can be a paradigm for sustainability.
    Or, as things stood in Montana in 1986, agriculture could be a paradigm for death and destruction. Aware that statutorily supported economic incentives were working against them, both Dave Oien and Jim Barngrover spent a fair amount of time at the state capitol building in Helena, two hours south of Conrad and a fifty-five-mile drive from Jim’s job at the Deer Lodge prison. Determined to knock down the barriers that stood in the way of organicfarming, they put on their nicest clothes and scoured the halls of the legislature for like minds.
POLITICAL ROOTS
    â€œI was a slick, highly paid political operative,” Jim Barngrover recalls, jokingly reflecting on his history as AERO’s official lobbyist. Sporting an unruly Afro and speaking from what appeared to be, quite literally, a soapbox, the gangly young man looked more like a student protester than a power broker. But although Jim didn’t
look
like a VIP, he was nonetheless effective. Aided by Dave and the strength of the AERO membership, the volunteer lobbyist made surprising headway with state representatives in Helena.
    Thanks to Jim’s behind-the-scenes organizing, the Montana legislature passed a joint resolution in 1985, calling on the state university system to establish a program in sustainable agriculture. The nonbinding resolution could have amounted to nothing more than lip service, but AERO made sure the lawmakers put their money where their mouths were. Six years later, Jim and company would successfully carry a bill to fund the first weed ecologist position at the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station. In an earthshaking move, the state university would hire forest ecology PhD Bruce Maxwell—a Peace Corps alum whose first peer-reviewed publication