Bangs Family Farm

Jeff Bangs is a 4th-generation farmer running in Montana's Golden Triangle — a stretch of north-central Montana named for the golden wheat that colors it come harvest time. His great-grandmother arrived more than a century ago and started farming this land. Today, Jeff and his wife Katie are continuing that work while confronting something she didn't have to: a climate that's making farming in Montana harder every decade.

The Marvel Chickpea: Small Bean, Serious Work

Among the grains Jeff rotates across Prairie Sun Farms sits a small, dense legume that earns its place in more ways than one.

The Marvel chickpea has a job to do beyond the harvest. Chickpeas are nitrogen-fixing legumes — they pull nitrogen from the air and convert it into a form the soil can use, essentially fertilizing the ground they grow in. Rotating them into fields that have been growing wheat builds soil fertility without synthetic inputs. The chickpea does the work.

Jeff also integrates grazing animals into the farm's rotation — one of the more powerful tools in the regenerative agriculture toolkit for returning nutrients to the soil and stimulating new growth.

Four Generations, One Farm

The Golden Triangle's soils formed over 11,000 years after the last Ice Age, built up by deep-rooted prairie grasses. Most of it was tilled and mined by over 150 years of conventional agriculture. Jeff is among the farmers working to build it back.

There's something clarifying about running a farm your great-grandmother homesteaded. The timeframe forces a kind of thinking that short-term economics don't allow for — and it shows in how Prairie Sun Farms operates.

Jeff and Katie are the partners behind our Marvel chickpeas. Every bag comes from this farm, this family, this land.