This dissertation examines a values-based supply chain in Montana that supports approximately twenty family farms by marketing their heritage, organic lentils. Despite their location in an isolated, low-income region, characterized by low and erratic rainfall and short growing seasons, this network of farmer-scientists has managed to simultaneously improve their land and their livelihoods by transitioning from commodity wheat monoculture to diversified farming systems based on legume fertility and value-added markets. This study explains how a regenerative approach to agriculture has arisen in this place, and identifies both opportunities for, and barriers to, scaling up such resilient food systems, focused on three broad themes: social and ecological "slow variables" critical to resilience, agrarianism and agrarian moral economy, and transformative social learning.

The first chapter analyzes the value chain and its larger network through the lens of socioecological resilience, identifying the "slow variable" processes that underpin these farmers' ability to successfully weather drought and other shocks. The second chapter describes the governance of this value chain as a form of agrarian moral economy, recommending a policy approach focused on facilitating such networks of mutual aid and peer review. The third chapter considers the processes of transformative social learning that led value chain members to transition from commodity grain monoculture to low-input diversified farming.