The Timeless Value of Organic Pulses

By Lorrie Baumann

Timeless Natural Food offers a gourmet line of heirloom certified-organic lentils, peas, chickpeas and specialty grains. Grown in Montana and its neighboring states, the pulses that Timeless offers in both retail packaging for specialty grocers and in 10-pound and 25-pound packages for foodservice use come from a group of organic farming pioneers on a mission to preserve Montana’s family farms by rebuilding soils subjected to a century of industrial monoculture wheat production.

“We are not alone on this planet, and we have an obligation for stewardship, not only to our fellow human beings, but also for the environment,” says company co-Founder and President David Oien. “Through the business that my three friends and I have created, called Timeless Seeds and the brand name Timeless Natural Food, we really have been instrumental in supporting many other farmers around Montana to convert some or all of their acreage to certified organic production to allow their family farms to survive.”

Oien grew up on his family’s wheat farm in north central Montana’s Golden Triangle before heading off to college for a degree in philosophy and religious studies that still informs his farming mission today. After several years of working and traveling in Europe following his college graduation, he came back to the family farm in 1976 determined both to repay his parents for the upbringing and education they’d given him and to practice a system of agriculture that’s kinder to family farmers and to the land than conventional wheat farming.

Today, Montana farmers like Oien inherit the state’s history of dryland agriculture, which began with the 1877 Desert Land Act that drew settlers to homestead in arid lands across the American West. These new homesteaders relied on assurances from agriculturists like Charles Dana Wilbur that “Rain follows the plow,” and when the climate refused to obey those prognostications, the development of modern irrigation assisted by the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902. With the newly opened land, irrigation projects across the American West, improvements in farming technology, and the introduction of hard red winter wheat in the 1870s, American wheat production took off. The country’s annual wheat production more than tripled in the 50 years between 1871 and 1921; increasing from about 250 million bushels during the period of 1869–1871 to more than 750 million bushels during the period of 1919–1921.

Then came the Great Depression and the collapse of agricultural markets that led to the paradox of huge national grain surpluses and widespread hunger. The New Deal followed, with the Roosevelt Administration’s Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to fallow some of their acreage when the nation had a grain surplus. New Deal agricultural policies that controlled national grain supplies and stabilized markets remained in force until 1971, the beginning of Earl Butz’s tenure as Secretary of Agriculture. Butz’s policies, encapsulated in his decree that farmers needed to “Get big or get out,” reversed the New Deal’s protections for family farmers in favor of industrial agriculture, bigger equipment, more acreage. That was the farming economy that Oien returned to in 1976.

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Inspired by Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Frances Moore Lappe’s “Diet for a Small Planet” and the connection between Earth and humanity explicated in “Black Elk Speaks,” Oien set to work to convert the family farm to organic production just at the time Lappe and others were helping Americans understand that there might be a connection between what they were eating and their own health as well as the planet’s. “My approach has always been, ‘Get better and you can stay in.’ For me, getting better meant converting the farm to organic production,” he said. “Our farm is 260 cultivated acres, while the average farm in Montana is about 2,400 acres, nearly 10 times larger. There are some farms in my county that are 20,000 acres, so our farm is not only small – in a sense, it’s obsolete. But on the other hand, converting it to organic and developing the infrastructure to process our crops has allowed the farm to survive another generation.”

Practicing organic agriculture meant finding a means of replenishing soil depleted by nitrogen-hungry wheat crops without the use of synthetic chemicals. “The challenge with monocropping, monoculture within a given field, is that it makes those crops more susceptible to disease, to insects, and also requires input of chemical fertilizers. The crops that we grow, such as lentils, chickpeas and peas, are soil-building crops by their very nature,” Oien said. “They’re legumes that have the power to capture the atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into nitrogen in the soil that’s accessible to crops.”

In 1987, Oien joined three fellow organic farmers: Bud Barta, Jim Barngrover and Tom Hastings, in a company called Timeless Seeds to introduce those leguminous crops to other farmers in the northern Great Plains and spread the gospel of organic production. Their experiments with pulses, the edible seeds of legumes like peas and lentils, coincided with the growth of the natural food industry in the early 1990s that created a demand for organic grains and seeds, and Timeless Seeds capitalized on that demand to grow the infrastructure they needed to turn their raw crops into marketable organic food products. In 2001, the company created its Timeless Natural Food retail line of premium lentils, peas, chickpeas and heirloom grain.

To supply that line, the company now works with about 50 certified organic family farms, primarily across Montana with a few in neighboring states as well. “We provide them the opportunity to grow crops that diversify the cropping rotation and to grow crops that are higher value,” Oien said. “I think one of the things that’s most promising is that we are not only supporting these farms, but we’re also having a greater and greater environmental impact across the northern Great Plains. As the market for high-quality plant-based protein grows, farmers can convert some or all of their land to certified organic production, and Timeless is part of the infrastructure to find or create high-value markets for family farms by distributing to food retailers, restaurants and chefs, institutional food service and food manufacturers.”

Visit www.timelessfood.com for more information about Timeless Seeds and the company’s Timeless Natural Food retail product line.