New West Book Excerpt

“Blue Man in a Red State”: An Excerpt

By Greg Lemon, 8-01-08

New West contributor Greg Lemon is a Montana journalist specializing in politics, and he recently published his first book, Blue Man in a Red State: Montana’s Governor Brian Schweitzer and the New Western Populism (Globe Pequot Press, 150 pages, $22.95).  The following is an excerpt from the book, covering the time Schweitzer spent in the Middle East in his mid-twenties. Lemon will discuss his book at the Borders in Bozeman on September 6 (2 p.m.).

Montana’s Gov. Brian Schweitzer knew in college that he wanted to see the world. Given the fact that he was a farm kid from Geyser, Mont., Schweitzer figured his best chance to see the world was through farming. He majored in international agriculture at Colorado State University and earned his Master’s degree in tropical soils from Montana State University. His first job out of college at the age of 25 took him to the Middle East to work as an agronomist on the massive project to farm the desert for the Libyan government.

Even taking into account Schweitzer’s energetic personality, his (college) professor Larry Munn said it was still a shock when he announced that he was headed to the Sahara to grow wheat for Muammar al-Qaddafi. “It was very unique for Brian to take off like he did.”

In Libya, Food Development Corporation was taking on a massive project—farming the desert. In 1980 Qaddafi had been dictator for more than a decade. Given his strained relationships with the West, he feared that Libya was too dependent on foreign food and that this dependence could cost them greatly if international sanctions were instituted against the country. He contracted with FDC to develop a farm in the Sahara, five hundred miles south of Tripoli. The contract was for five years, after which FDC would hand the farm over to the Libyan government.

Henry Kartchner, who started FDC, took up the contract and began hiring. His company eventually developed farms and agriculture projects throughout the Middle East. And while Kartchner hasn’t paid attention to Schweitzer’s political career (he wasn’t even aware that Schweitzer had been elected governor of Montana), his company now has a sister venture, Fuel Development Company, which is developing small biodiesel plants in Texas—a venture right up Schweitzer’s alley.

At the time of the Libyan project, FDC had major farming projects in America. But developing farms in the Middle East was a new venture. No one was really doing it at that time. Along with the agricultural startup, the contract stated FDC had to train Libyans to farm, as well as send one hundred Libyans to college in America to learn agriculture.

The obvious problem with farming in the desert is water.To overcome that, FDC drilled wells a thousand feet deep and installed center pivot sprinklers. The undertaking was enormous. At one time FDC had about six hundred men on the project. “When you went in the desert, there wasn’t anything there so it was like an invasion,” Kartchner said. “We had to ship over everything from toothpicks to D8 caterpillars.”

And the environment was hostile. Temperatures would climb to more than 130 degrees in the summer and drop below freezing in the winter. “Sometimes the wind would blow a whole field away,” Schweitzer recalled. “Forty acres would just move, become a dune a half mile away.” But they could grow crops year around, corn or sorghum in the summer and wheat in the winter. “To farm the desert is completely different than trying to farm normally,” Kartchner said.

“My job was to build and maintain the lab where we did soil and plant tissue testing,” Schweitzer said. “We did it all on the farm. I trained people to work in the lab and then designed the irrigation scheduling and fertility scheduling and pesticide management.” There was little precedent for the work he was doing—the area had no log of weather data to assist in the schedules for sowing or irrigation—so it was like starting with a blank slate.

Other countries sent in companies to farm the region, but they struggled. “Some of the foreign companies had a hell of a time,” Kartchner said. “We were really the only American company in there and we were of course the best.” Despite the challenges the crop yields were good.

“If you can get water to it, the desert is actually a fertile place to farm,” Schweitzer said.

Kartchner remembered Schweitzer as one of his first hires on the project. Schweitzer’s starting salary was $2,000 a month. “I figured that was a pretty good wage, considering I was only making $300 a month in grad school,” Schweitzer said. The men at the farm worked ninety days in country (seven days a week) followed by thirty days at home. The company provided housing, food, and entertainment, usually in the form of movies. They wouldn’t allow women or alcohol. Kartchner had a hard time holding on to men for more than a year: “But that was normal. The Americans really don’t like to be over where there’s no women, whiskey, or song.”

But they were pioneers, which appealed to Schweitzer. He was on land that no one had farmed, in a country that was in a constant state of political and military turmoil. He was seeing the world, by God. He was helping lead a monumental farming project in, of all places, the Sahara, and he wasn’t even twenty-five years old.

This first tour in the Middle East was a benchmark for Schweitzer. He had set out with a goal and he had succeeded. He was making his mark. “I relish the opportunity wherever it is, whatever I’m doing, to try something that no one ever has—to try and climb a mountain that nobody thought you could. I don’t have a fear of failure. If I try something and give it my best and it doesn’t work, then I say, ‘Well, I learned something from that.’ Some folks aren’t wired that way. I’m willing to go in and try something that nobody else would.”

Excerpted from the book Blue Man in a Red State by Greg Lemon.  Copyright (c) 2008 by Morris Book Publishing, LLC.  Used by permission of The Globe Pequot Press, http://www.globepequot.com.

Greg Lemon will discuss his book at the Borders in Bozeman on September 6 (2 p.m.).

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