ResoluteReader: Liz Carlisle - Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Liz Carlisle - Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America

Ahead of a trip to Montana I was intrigued to find Liz Carlisle's book Lentil Underground. Montana is known for it's agriculture, with thousands of farms farming almost 60 million acres of land. That farming is dominated by highly industrial agriculture, high in inputs likes fertiliser and pesticide, vulnerable to drought, and highly carbon intensive - while producing a huge percentage of grain for the United States. It is a model of farming driven from the very top - encouraged by successive US governments, and linking food production to the massive corporations that buy the wheat, and sell the tractors, combines, chemicals and fuel needed by the farmer. But as Liz Carlisle's book shows, the consequences were not good for farmers, food or the land. In the early 1980s:

Their fields looked good, at least early in the season, but the "For Sale" signs popping up amid Conrad's garin were proving a more serious menance than any weed. Behind every bankruptcy was the heatbreaking story of a good farmer undercut by dought or rising fertilier costs or poor commodity prices... Conrad's farmers tried even harder to control what they could-spraying more herbicides, cultivating more acres. But instead of solvign their provlems, these efforts just sunk the despeartae farmers further into debt.... Farmers were paying so much for the sophisticated machinery and chemicals that made their extraordinary sixty-bushel grain possible that they couldn't afford a dry year or a depressed commodity market-the margins were too tight. Meanwhile, the American heartland wasn't just losing people; it was also losing topsoil, at the rate of 3 billion tons a year.

Intensive, industrial agriculture was undermining the basis of agriculture and the viability of farming. Carlisle points out that this favoured (and highly subsidised) farming was driving pollution, climate change and cancer.

Lentil Underground tells the story of how a small group of farmers recognised the problems and began to adapt their agriculture. These farmers were sometimes progressive thinkers, on the left of the US political spectrum. But not always. One of the things I was reminded of while reading Lentil Underground is that the farmers, often with deep family roots in their farming communities, have a close knowledge of their land, love farming and hate the way they have become trapped by the logic of the industrial system. Even those with less progressive ideas were seeking ways out.

The way out turned out to be two-fold. A return to an older form of farming, that broke with the high-intensive, chemical driven agriculture and a change to new crops. The new crops included the lentils of the book's title but also more traditional or heritage grains like spelt, or oats were also added. These, the farmers found could be grown with less inputs, mixing crops together and crucially breaking from the favoured no-till system.

The wide open prairies of Montana are very vulberable to soil loss. To prevent this, US agriculture encouraged (and subsidised) forms of farming that did not use ploughing to turn over soil. This meant the extra application of chemicals to kill weeds. But it saved topsoil. But the Lentil Underground farmers discovered that ploughing, if combined with mixed crops that protected and fertilised the soils, had the same effect - while reducing costs and pollution.

The small network of farmers that began to develop into a group of farmers essentially were returning to a more traditional approach to farming. It was less costly, was less vulnerable to external shocks, and produced better food - not least because it could be certified as organic. Quickly the farmers were able to tap into a growing market for organic foods.

It is important to point out though that this was not an automatic win for the farmers who made the switch. They still had to cope with the vicissitudes of the free market. A massive contract with a health food chain proved disastourous when the company suddenly pulled out. They also found that other farmers treated their efforts with disdain, which is why the Underground of the title became so important - the network of self help and support that developed among the farmers and families that chose to make the leap. Interestingly this network goes far beyond Montana:

Another hallmark of the lentil underground is their openness to new people and ideas. They aren't bound by an unquestioning loyalty to the way that Granddaddy did it, or by a suspicious wariness of outsiders. The heritage and heirlook crops they grow manifest deep relational ties and long experience, tbut these carefully chosen plants are certainly not xenophobes. Black medic [a type of legume that is a green fertiliser, adding nitrogen to the soil as it grows] made its way to Monatana from the American Southeast. Ley cropping came from Australia. Lentils were domesticated 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, and breeders like Al Slinkard borrowed liberally from international collections.

Lentil Underground is a remarkably interesting book. It tells the story of how US farming turned into an ecologically and socially destructive method of producing food precisely because it was transformed by industrial capitalism - profits before people and planet. A similar process took place in the British Isles. At the same time it shows that it is possible to rapidly change things in a positive direction using the inherent skills and knowledge of existing farmers and labourers. The farmers who've made the transition are still trapped by a capitalist logic, at the whims of a much larger system. But they give us an indication that things can change - and that the people who will build a future sustainable farming system are the ones who work in the existing unsustainable one.