Journey to redemption: former rancher Howard Lyman crisscrosses the country praising a meatless diet

Vegetarian Times, May, 1995 by Steve Lustgarden

It's no ordinary evening at the China Pepper Restaurant in Ketchum, Idaho, a posh ski town nestled in the Sawtooth Mountains. The 70 attendees, who have paid $25 each for dinner and a lecture, look up from vegan spring rolls and rice noodles and fix their gaze on the speaker, a burly man with gray hair and glasses. No one - not even the event's organizer, Idaho Animal Advocates - knows what to expect.

My name is Howard Lyman, and I'm a fourth-generation farmer, rancher, feedlot-operator from Montana," he begins. "At one time in my life not too long ago, I owned 7,000 head of cattle and 12,000 acres of crop and pasture to feed them." Though he looks like he's spent more time herding cattle than standing behind a lecturn, Lyman's intonation draws listeners in. "I have been personally responsible for the demise of scores of animals," he says. "And I am here tonight to tell you that the proper amount of animal products in your diet..." he links the tip of his index finger to his thumb and holds his big hand out to the audience, "...is zero." Lyman pauses to let the surprise of his statement sink in.

How did a cattle magnate from Montana with nearly two decades invested in animal production and consumption become a staunch vegan committed to convincing Americans to go meatless, milkless and eggless? How did he come to view the fork as "the most dangerous weapon in the human arsenal," and make it his personal crusade to disarm this threat by promoting vegetarianism? In front of his audience, Lyman recounts his epiphany with the intensity of a evangelist, punctuating his words by pounding the lectern. Offstage, Lyman is quieter, but not without passion, as he recalls the events that brought him to the China Pepper on this snowy night.

Given his zeal and oratory skills, it's not surprising to learn that Lyman, 57, spent most of his early years with his grandfather, a congregational minister, on his dairy farm near windswept Great Falls, Mont. Lyman credits his grandfather, who had passed his organic dairy farm over to Lyman's father, with teaching him the blessings of rich, healthy soil and instilling in him a desire to take over the family business.

But during his training at Montana State University, Lyman's love of the soil was eclipsed by the temptation of economic grandeur and technological mastery of the land. When he got out of school, his ambition was clear: to transform his parents' modest enterprise into an agribusiness and to reap the wealth. "And I did," says Lyman with bravado. "I became the Donald Trump of agriculture, " boasting 30 employees, seven combines, 30 trucks, 17 tractors and 7,000 cattle.

When Lyman wanted to expand his business, he simply bought out this neighbors. When he needed more bushels of crops and more pounds of flesh on the hoof, he applied extra fertilizers and pesticides, and injected his animals with growth hormones. His chemical-intensive strategy appeared to work, and his cash flow increased exponentially. "I can't tell you what a thrill it was the first time I wrote a check [covering an operating loan] for a million dollars," he says. "I thought, `Man, I have arrived. I have all the answers.'"

In 1979, an illness prompted Lyman to begin asking new questions-questions for which he didn't have all the answers. That year, he sprained his ankle repeatedly until he was unable to put this foot down flat. One morning, he woke up and found he could hardly move his legs. For two weeks he lay in a hospital-bed, paralyzed from the waist down. His doctors discovered a thumb-sized tumor lodged inside his spinal chord. They told Lyman that he would likely never walk again.

In the days before this surgery, Lyman dwelled on the fertile soil of his boyhood, which had long since deteriorated. "It dawned on me that my grandfather and father had been farmers, but I was a chemical junkie. My priority was basically making money, having a big farm and all of the trappings."

Lyman realized he had been going down the wrong path. "It was the stark reality that I was probably never going to walk again that let that genie out of the bottle," he recalls. "And once I admitted to myself that I was absolutely killing the soil, there was no way I could put that genie back into the bottle."

Miraculously, Lyman's surgery restored his mobility. And while he recuperated, he set about his conversion. He started by reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a landmark book exposing the environmental damage caused by agricultural pesticides. Then he read Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America, about the disintegration of rural areas as family agriculture was replaced by agribusinesses, and Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet, which exposed the waste of resources caused by the production of animal products.

He knew that acting on what he was learning could ruin him financially and - perhaps worse - cause him to be ostracized by his fellow farmers, but he knew he had to change his ways. "My neighbors thought the surgeon had removed my brain as well as the tumor," he says.