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Removing The Dead, Feeding The Living

Missoula Grain and Vegetable Company
Parker Beckley
Missoula Grain and Vegetable Company

Many people work a day job to keep money coming in while they start a new business during evenings and weekends. But 26-year-old Max Smith does just the opposite. To support his day job as a farmer, he works weekends and nights for a funeral home.

Max Smith: The death industry has a phrase for this. It’s called a “remover.”

Chérie Newman: This evening, after receiving a call, Smith walks across the parking lot behind Garden City Funeral Home, heading toward a white van. His destination:

MS: Saint Patrick’s Hospital, intensive care unit. I’m going to pick up a recently-passed human being and bring them back to the funeral home.

Max Smith
Credit Chérie Newman
Max Smith

CN: Smith opens the driver’s side door and slides inside.

MS: Everybody else that works here is really short, so I have to adjust the old seat.

CN: St. Pat’s is only a few blocks away, so he returns in about 15 minutes. Smith backs the van up to one of the garage doors on the rear of the building. He gets out, walks around to open the back door of the van, and reaches inside to pull a folding cot out toward him. On top of the cot, enclosing the body, is what looks like a colorful, quilted sleeping bag with a full-length zipper on the top. The cot’s folding legs have lots of joints.

MS: This is the part that scared me when I first started. Taking people from the van into the garage involves, uhm, not really a complex procedure of snapping the cot into a different position. But it’s critical that a couple of things happen. You’ve gotta listen for them and it’s nerve-wracking, especially when you’re first starting out.

CN: Starting out as a farmer was also nerve-wracking for the first few years. After Smith graduated from Montana State University with a Bachelor of Science degree -

MS: Sustainable Foods and Bioenergy Systems is the mouthful of a degree.

CN: he started Missoula Grain and Vegetable Company on leased land near Lolo. Mid-season he recruited a partner: Kenny Myers, who was, at the time,

Kenny Myers and Max Smith
Credit Parker Beckley / Missoula Grain and Vegetable Company
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Missoula Grain and Vegetable Company
Kenny Myers (left) and Max Smith loading their trailer with fresh produce for delivery to CSA members

Kenny Myers: Managing a golf course. And I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do, and so I found an ad on Craigslist and it said 50 percent share profit. And so I quit my job and came to Montana from Utah, that week.

CN: Smith and Myers are now farming a few miles southeast of Stevensville in the Bitterroot Valley, on land owned by Marta Meengs and Tim Scufca. When I go there, Smith extends his arm and points to something that looks like a railroad car without wheels.

MS: I like saying that we have an architect on staff now because Tim is a retired architect. He helped design our wash station, he re-designed a shipping container for us to live in. So it’s kind of like a modified tiny house with 3 compartments: one for Kenny, one for myself, and one for an office for us.

CN: Directly in front of us are rows and rows of green plants surrounded by trampled weeds that crunch under our feet as we walk out to take a look. "What’s growing out here?"

MS: So we’ve got right here the red Russian kale, the Brussels sprouts, savoy cabbage, the red cabbage. And then some broccoli here. And then we’ve got our lettuce beds, our squash section.

CN: And how many acres of land?

MS: It’s 15 acres total, of which about 2 acres is growing vegetable right now. And we actually received an NRSC grant -

CN: NRCS stands for Natural Resources Conservation Service -

MS: to expand to 3-and-a-half acres next year and to put it under drip irrigation. So the federal contract obligates us to use water conservation measures and basically stitch out drip tape across the landscape. So that’s really going to be helpful so we don’t have to bring in our own hand lines and basically, in the process, water weeds.

Montana farm field.
Credit Parker Beckley / Missoula Grain and Vegetable Company
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Missoula Grain and Vegetable Company
Rows of corn growing on Missoula Grain and Vegetable Company land southeast of Stevensville, Montana

CN: At the end of August, the crops are bountiful, and these hardworking guys are delivering truckloads of healthy, organic food to their weekly customers. And they have big plans for the future.

MS: We are not just farmers. We are solar energy commodities brokers. You know, that’s where I want to take this is to really participate in the transformation of the land.

CN: While that transformation is underway, Smith’s night job as a remover is still necessary to help pay the bills, and he has a good attitude about funeral home work.

MS: It’s just like farming in the sense that you really feel alive doing it. Like you’re very present. There is no distraction when someone is weeping in front of you. You’re not on your phone. You’re in the moment.

CN: But Kenny Myers’ farm moments are sometimes challenging while his business partner is away.

KM: I just think I need more help. It’s really hard when I don’t have another person here to help every day, because then all the work gets on me.

Missoula Grain and Vegetable Company on the Web

Kenny Myers and Max Smith
Credit Parker Beckley / Missoula Grain and Vegetable Company
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Missoula Grain and Vegetable Company
Kenny Myers (front) and Max Smith

Chérie Newman is a former arts and humanities producer and on-air host for Montana Public Radio, and a freelance writer. She founded and previously hosted a weekly literary program, The Write Question, which continues to air on several public radio stations; it is also available online at PRX.org and MTPR.org.
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