Common Ground, Part I: How organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies.
New seedlings come up through last year’s crop residue at Happy Steer Ranch near Shelby. Because Korey and Wendy Fauque want to maintain soil structure, they use a “no-till drill” to plant directly into the soil. Instead of tilling to fight weeds, they spray herbicide, albeit smaller amounts than most conventional systems. Credit: Jason Thompson / MTFP
By Emily Stifler Wolfe, Montana Free Press
This story appears in full at Montana Free Press.
A slight haze hangs on the blue horizon above Ledger Road, 50 miles north of Great Falls in north-central Montana. Rectangles of spring crops and native grasses glow green alongside the dried straw of last year’s fallow. Forty miles north, the Sweetgrass Hills rise 3,700 feet above the high plains.
A mile down a side road, past another farm, the home place at Tiber Ridge Farm is an oasis of trees, farm buildings and birdsong. The farm sits in the geographic center of the Golden Triangle, a 4,000-square-mile area between Great Falls, Havre and Cut Bank best known for producing high-protein wheat.
In the driveway, John Wicks starts his semi, a Freightliner with 800,000 miles he bought used in 2007. That was right after his dad died and Wicks left Montana State University in Bozeman to help his mother on the farm where he grew up.
“It’s got a [fuel] leak, a pinhole somewhere that’s sucking air,” Wicks says, stepping away from the truck while it warms up. “So when I let it sit for a couple days, it’s hard to start.”
While he waits, Wicks talks to his wife, Gwyneth Givens, who’s building new raised beds for their summer garden with the hired hand, Peyton Cole.
Once the truck is warmed up, Wicks climbs back into the cab and pulls left out of the driveway. As he descends toward Pondera Creek, the eastern end of Tiber Reservoir emerges into view between crumbling sandstone bluffs. In front of it, across the drainage, wind blows dust off a hilltop.
Wicks frowns. He and Givens planted those hilltop fields with winter wheat, but some of it died in a cold snap, making the ground susceptible to wind erosion. Like the majority of their neighbors in the Golden Triangle, they are dryland farmers, meaning they don’t irrigate.
“The tillage we’re doing is 2” deep — trying not to get in there and mess with our microbiome,” Wicks says. Traditional tillage, he explains, rips four to five inches down, destroying the interconnected web of plants, animals and microorganisms that make up a healthy underground ecosystem, which in turn provides nutrients for crops. Used for weed control and to loosen the soil for planting, tillage combined with drought caused the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and continues to cause severe erosion in Montana and elsewhere on the Great Plains.
Located 26 miles from Chester, population 1,099, Tiber Ridge Farm is in one of Montana’s most significant agricultural areas. The nine counties that roughly form the Golden Triangle grew 61% of the state’s winter wheat and 58% of its barley in 2019, and were second only to northeastern Montana in lentil production. In 2018, producers here grossed $1.16 billion, more than a quarter of the state’s annual $4.4 billion gross farm and ranch income.
As in the rest of Montana, most Golden Triangle farmers use the “conventional” techniques of modern industrial agriculture. Aiming for the highest crop yield possible, these are generally monocropping systems reliant on pesticides (including herbicides, insecticides and fungicides), synthetic fertilizers and genetically modified seeds.
In contrast, Wicks and Givens are borrowing methods developed by indigenous farmers millennia ago. They fight weeds and pests by rotating which crops they seed in a plot each year, for example, and by planting cover crop mixes of vegetables, grasses and clover that also return nitrogen and biomass to the soil and protect against erosion. They also lease land to neighboring ranchers, whose grazing cattle aerate the soil with their hooves and add organic matter and nutrients via manure.
“When I was farming [before], I sprayed, and I liked what I thought was a really clean field. It took me a little mind-changing to realize that [the] soil was just dead … And I think that’s one of the things a lot of farmers struggle with, is admitting that maybe you weren’t doing the best practices.”
JOHN WICKS
With climate change threatening almost 25,000 Montana agricultural jobs in the next 50 years, many farmers and ranchers are realizing the status quo is no longer adequate. And as a movement toward ecologically based agricultural practices gains ground nationwide, an increasing number of Montana producers are building topsoil, drought resilience and profits by integrating practices like organic or regenerative systems.
Both approaches are expanding in the state. Because organic is a USDA certification, it’s easy to measure its growth in Montana, which is second only to California in certified organic acreage. Regenerative, meanwhile, lacks a codified or even consensus definition, but generally includes techniques like cover cropping, crop rotation and livestock integration. Although regenerative approaches are harder to track, one likely indicator, cover cropping, is up by 489% over the last 10 years in programs supported by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.
For producers working to improve their farm’s soil health and economic stability, transitioning to an organic or regenerative system is a long game. They’re investing not only in this year’s yields, but in the future of their farms, their communities, and the system that produces food for both U.S and global consumption. A growing body of research also points to regenerative agriculture’s ability to sequester carbon, although how much is yet to be determined.
But farmers and ranchers can’t overhaul America’s food system themselves, and they might not need to. On June 8, the USDA announced a more than $4 billion investment in the nation’s food system aimed at strengthening supply chains, creating new market opportunities, responding to climate change, helping underserved communities and supporting good-paying jobs. Depending on how those funds are allocated, they may allow more Montana farmers to build soil health and add economic resiliency to their operations.
TRANSITIONING TO ORGANIC
Wicks was 21 when he left MSU and returned to the family farm. At first, he and his mother farmed about 1,300 acres, all wheat.
“A lot of years, we were going backwards and rolling our debt over, just building up our long-term debt,” said Wicks, now 36. “It was really scary.”
Wicks had considered transitioning to organic for years, but he and his mother knew it was a risk. When Givens moved to Tiber Ridge, her support gave him the extra push to make it happen.
Givens, 35, grew up on a seed-cleaning operation in Big Sandy, 90 minutes east of Tiber Ridge. After attending culinary school in Denver and working as a pastry chef at a yacht club in Florida and the Northern Hotel in Billings, she moved to the farm in 2015. That year, they planted a home garden and cleaned up the farmyard. She got jobs cooking at a bar in Hingham and a coffee shop in Fort Benton, but quickly realized it didn’t make sense to drive an hour each way to work for minimum wage when there was plenty of farmwork to do. It just had to pencil out.
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