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NATURALLY HEALTHY GOURMET NEWS FEBRUARY 2019 www.gourmetnews.com 1 4 Donaldson said. "It only grows in a 90-acre area in South Africa that has the perfect cli- mate," he said. "You can't actually grow it anywhere else in the world." The iced teas are sold in 12-ounce cans retailing for $1.99. The cans are decorated in the bright colors of South Africa to com- municate a sense of fun. "We're not trying to be a stodgy, good-for you brand; we want it to be fun," Donaldson said. "We are really focused on making healthy fun." If the botanical flavors of the BOS Sparkling Iced Tea suggest cocktails to you, you're not alone, and the company is pro- moting their use as cocktail mixers as well as refreshing beverages for any time of day. In addition, rooibos is considered a functional ingredient that's thought to be an anti-in- flammatory and anti-oxidant agent with pos- itive effects on blood sugar and digestion. The company's newest product for the U.S. market is BOS Red Rooibos Tea, tea bags for the hot tea drinkers who want to try something different. "They can have it at any time of day, whether or not they'd cut themselves off from caffeine late in the day," Donaldson said. "People like that this can be an all-day drink and not just when they want caffeine." The BOS Red Rooibos Tea bags are pack- aged in a collectible tin that contains two sleeves of 20 tea bags and retails for $14.99, while the 40-tea bag refill for the tin (also containing two sleeves of 20) retails for $10.99. Adding to the appeal of the brand, BOS Brands has an active sustainability program in which the company plants a tree for every 2,000 cans of the iced teas that are sold. "So far, we've planted about 22,000 trees in South Africa, working with an or- ganization called Greenpop," Donaldson said. Greenpop is a South African non- profit organization focused on sustainable urban greening and forest restoration across Sub-Saharan Africa. For more information, email hello@ bosbrands.com. GN BOS Brands Continued from PAGE 1 that it comes from that's only grown in South Africa." All of the BOS Brands products are or- ganic, and rooibos (pronounced ROY-BOSS) is caffeine free. It's an indigenous plant that grows as a spiky bush, rather like a Scotch broom, in a tiny area of South Africa where the soil is sandy and the climate is dry with moderate temperatures. At harvest time, the stalks are pulled from the bush and dried in the sun to make a tea that South Africans have been consuming for hundreds of years, Dryland Farmers Prosper with Organic Specialty 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 rebuild- ing soils sub- jected to a century of indus- trial monoculture wheat produc- tion. "We are not alone on this planet, and we have an obliga- tion for steward- ship, 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 re- ally have been instrumental in supporting many other farmers around Montana to convert some or all of their acreage to cer- tified organic production to allow their family farms to survive." Oien grew up on his family's wheat farm in north central Montana's Golden Trian- gle before heading off to college for a de- gree 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 farm- ers and to the land than conventional wheat farming. Today, Montana farmers like Oien in- herit the state's history of dryland agricul- ture, 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 assur- ances 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 New- lands Reclamation Act of 1902. With the newly opened land, irrigation projects across the American West, improvements in farming technology, and the introduc- tion of hard red winter wheat in the 1870s, American wheat production took off. The country's annual wheat produc- tion more than tripled in the 50 years be- tween 1871 and 1921; increasing from about 250 million bushels during the pe- riod of 1869–1871 to more than 750 mil- lion 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 Roo- sevelt Administration's Agricultural Ad- justment Act, which paid farmers to fallow some of their acreage when the nation had a grain surplus. New Deal agricultural policies that controlled na- tional grain supplies and stabi- lized 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 agricul- ture, bigger equipment, more acreage. That was the farming economy that Oien returned to in 1976. His father had resisted that temptation to get big even as neighbors around him were deciding that, presented with a choice that wasn't really a choice, they were getting out and putting their farms up for sale. "One of the pieces of wisdom he left me was that he'd rather have the neighbors than the neighbors' land," Oien said. "That meant we needed to make our small farm viable in a different way." 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 pro- duction 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, get- ting better meant converting the farm to organic produc- tion," 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 develop- ing the infrastructure to process our crops has allowed the farm to survive another generation." Practicing organic agriculture meant finding a means of replenishing soil de- pleted by nitrogen-hungry wheat crops without the use of synthetic chemicals. "The challenge with monocropping, mono- culture 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-build- ing crops by their very nature," Oien said. "They're legumes that have the power to capture the atmospheric nitrogen and con- vert it into nitrogen in the soil that's acces- sible to crops." In 1987, Oien joined three fellow organic farmers: Bud Barta, Jim Barngrover and Tom Hastings, in a company called Time- less Seeds to introduce those leguminous crops to other farmers in the northern Great Plains and spread the gospel of or- ganic 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 capi- talized on that demand to grow the infra- structure they needed to turn their raw crops into marketable organic food prod- ucts. In 2001, the company created its Timeless Natural Food retail line of pre- mium 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 or- ganic 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 man- ufacturers." Visit www.timelessfood.com for more in- formation about Timeless Seeds and the company's Timeless Natural Food retail product line. GN "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." —TIMELESS SEEDS CO-FOUNDER DAVID OIEN "My approach has always been, 'Get better and you can stay in.' For me, getting better meant converting the farm to organic production." —TIMELESS SEEDS CO-FOUNDER DAVID OIEN

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