Outside the taut supply chains of industrialized food, small flour mills are working double-time to fill fresh flour orders for dedicated fans and a new crowd of bakers. And while these local millers have been around for generations, it took a pandemic to reveal them as alternatives to the dominant grain system. Today, having a relationship with nearby grain farmers seems like a more secure route to bread than it was just a month ago

Industrial milling and factory baking set the standards for what gets grown, and the global marketplace sets the price. Farmers are servants to massive debts they’ve had to take on to purchase equipment, and each year they borrow more money just to pay for inputs, labor, and other expenses.

The Trump administration’s trade wars tanked commodity prices, but agricultural economics have been fragile for decades. The price for a bushel of wheat in November 1980 was $5.34. Right now, it is $5.40 a bushel—and falling steadily.

Outside of this industrial baking complex, there exists a world of farmer-cultivated grain systems that not only address the limited choices farmers face inside the conventional system, but also produce delicious, fresh flour, which is generally stoneground and full of the fat and flavor that industrial processing strips away. And it is as different from its supermarket cousin as a tree-ripened peach is from a can of cling peaches.

From my first bite 10 years ago, the flavor of whole-grain, stoneground flour was so vibrant that I was compelled to investigate. I learned about Farmer Ground Flour, a mill started by two farmers in Ithaca, New York, who wanted a place to sell their crops. I visited Maine Grains, a mill built in a former jail, started by a group of neighbors who wanted to create opportunities for farmers to rebuild the Maine breadbasket. I wrote a book about these projects, and am a cheerleader for the regional grain movement, as evidenced by the 75 pounds of flour I just got in the mail. (This is a normal amount for me, not apoca-shopping.)

Photo courtesy of Carolina Ground in Asheville, North Carolina.

People who are just awakening to the promise of regional grains will be surprised to see just how many exist, how well-rooted they are—and how they’re ready to supply you with grains that will change your life.

Amber Waves of Regional Grain

There are many community grains, produced, processed, and distributed within local and regional value chains that remain intact despite the pandemic. Community Grains is the brand name of a Northern California grain system, and the informal term adopted by other grain pioneers, including legendary Montana farmer Bob Quinn and beginning farmers Halee and John Wepking.

By adapting food systems to a regional scale, farmer-leaders like Bob, Halee, and John are taking risks to better support and care for the land they steward from the ground to the bank. They’re giving consumers an opportunity to buy staple crops that invest in soil health, water quality, and carbon sequestration while offering skilled jobs that employ local folks—on the farm, at the mill, and in craft bakeries.

The WSU Bread Lab breeds wheat for taste and place, not the demands of the industrial food system. Director Stephen Jones speaks of growing grains outside of the grain belts, and of keeping farm products and dollars circulating within a region. Globally, groups are working to rebuild grain farms and grain-based enterprises rooted right where they are. One of these groups, the Colorado Grain Chain, describes it as “community, not commodity.”

A few projects in the major wheat-growing region of eastern Washington illustrate these two faces of grains. Most of the state’s crops are sold at harvest and often head for the Asian noodle market, but direct-marketing alternatives also exist. One of these, The Grain Shed in Spokane, is a bakery, mill, and brewery that started with a single farm. A few larger farms are selling some of their production in the standard fashion, but have built cleaning and storage facilities to sell some grain directly to customers, ton by ton.

The pandemic is creating opportunities to strengthen emerging local supply chains, in grains and every other food sector.

That may sound like a lot, but in the grain business it’s a drop in the bucket. And although providing (relatively) small amounts of barley and wheat to brewers and bakers in Seattle and Portland may be a pricey trickle of their output, these farmers find it worth the trouble—and a way to avoid at least some of the punishments of the uncontrollable markets and invisible consumers the commodities market has created.

The Rise of Regional Mills, Everywhere

More mills are answering such insecurity. Existing companies like Meadows Mills, Osttiroler Getreidemühlen, and Jansen Grist Mills are already serving community-scale grain systems, and so are two new ones. The Danish company Quartzmill has a handful of mills built or already in the works in America and Europe. New American Stone Mills, a Vermont company that started in 2015, already has 77 mills in North America, Australia, and Europe, as well as eight more underway. Right now, they’re getting daily inquiries as bakers watch the existing supply chain falter.

The pandemic is creating many similar opportunities to make changes that will strengthen emerging local supply chains, in grains and every other food sector, too. Empty supermarket shelves have meant less surplus bread, and food pantries have been out of this basic food for weeks. In response to this crisis, as we’re seeing in every corner of the food system, bakers’ groups are stepping up.

For instance, the Artisan Grain Collaborative (AGC) recently launched a bread donation project Neighbor Loaves, which gives eaters the chance to purchase extra loaves of bread for food pantries. The bread is baked with flour from neighbor farms and mills, and fills in some of the holes in the currently gutted food system.

Milling wheat at Ibis Bakery in Kansas City. (Photo credit: Ryan James Carr)

The bakeries offering Neighbor Loaves are charging full retail price for the donation bread. This ensures that these businesses will be able to pay rent, staff, and most critically, be able to afford the more-expensive flour from local mills, which supports nearby farms. The program is two weeks old and has already resulted in production of more than 3500 loaves, establishing temporary security for all layers of the local grain supply chain. AGC is working on launching a local tortilla donation program, too, and groups in the Northeast, Northwest, and Mid-Atlantic are starting their own Neighbor Loaves platforms

You can help, too: Join the fresh flour revolution! Order a bag of flour from a small mill or milling bakery, and make some pancakes with your family. (I keep a running list of mills on my website, and Grinder Finder offers another, international list.) Ask your local bakery if they want to start a Neighbor Loaves program. Buying from, and getting your local baker to support, regional mills and farms will keep these essential businesses going strong—and will drive home the fact that flour, just like other fresh foods, can come from nearby.

Top photo: Sparrow Bush Farm’s Neighbor Loaf. (Photo courtesy of Sparrow Bush Farm)

The post Flour Shortage? Amber Waves of Regional Grains to the Rescue appeared first on Civil Eats.

“I saw all our scheduled parties disappear and, at the same time, this need for food in the community blossoming,” Mullen said. Her immediate instinct was to call Second Harvest Heartland, the local food bank she often sent leftover food after large events. Chowgirls had also worked with Second Harvest and Hennepin County to address food-handling rules that could help the company salvage otherwise-wasted food. Changing these rules helped Chowgirls rescue 1,200 pounds of food when Minneapolis hosted the Super Bowl in 2018.

Through that process, Mullen gained an understanding of how restaurants and catering operations are perfectly situated to feed people, quickly and at scale. And during this unprecedented crisis, she’s begun putting that knowledge to work.

In mid-March, Chowgirls teamed up with local restaurants and food-assistance programs to create Minnesota Central Kitchen (MCK), a community-focused effort that is quickly ramping up to serve 10,000 meals a week. Modeled after Chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, MCK is using rescued food from now-shuttered restaurants to cook hot meals delivered to 35 distribution sites in the Twin Cities area.

Andrés, who was featured on TIME magazine’s cover late last month, has been leading the charge in feeding communities in crisis worldwide, and converted five of his D.C.-area restaurants, and his outlet in New York City, into what he calls community kitchens. “Today an army of American cooks stands ready to serve our most vulnerable citizens, at a time when those cooks are themselves in desperate need of support,” Andrés wrote in a recent op-ed for the New York Times.

As states take dramatic action to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, and the hospitality industry—which employed more than 12 million people pre-pandemic—tries to find a path toward survival, Mullen hopes that projects like hers and Andrés’s will set useful examples for the ways the system changes can adapt in the wake of the pandemic—and in the long run.

“There is a huge, immediate need for people who couldn’t stockpile at the grocery store,” Mullen said. But, she added, even if they scale up their own production, and inspire other groups to follow suit, “this is a long-term issue that we as a community will have to figure out.”

A National Movement

While many restaurants have closed, some owners have shifted gears to take-out models, and others are operating like grocery stores. Many restaurants are delivering food directly to hospital workers on the frontlines, some are being funded by wealthy tech donors to help feed the needy in the Bay Area, and some have been feeding laid-off restaurant workers, like Mozza Pizzeria in Los Angeles, which was helping address non-food needs such as unemployment claims, until Chef Nancy Silverton herself was diagnosed with coronavirus.

Chef Rick Bayless in Chicago announced on Twitter that he received a $250,000 donation to hire 15 of his laid-off restaurant workers to sort grocery boxes, distribute groceries to employees at his restaurants, and partner with Chicago chefs to pick up groceries for their staff.

Some, like MCK, are using their skills to keep feeding people during the crisis. As community food needs and stay-at-home orders expand, restaurants are moving quickly to reconfigure their work. And for many chefs, in order to continue supporting restaurants’ shift to provide nutritional and economic support for their communities, policymakers are going to have to step up their support, or at least stay out of the way.

“The opportunity now is for the government to affordably contract with restaurants, procure local food, and make sure citizens get healthy food,” said Robert Egger, the founder of DC Central Kitchen and LA Central Kitchen. Egger and other advocates are calling on governors and municipalities to link small and sustainable farmers who once sold what they produced mainly to restaurants and the swelling population of economically vulnerable people.

“Congress and the administration took a good first step for small business relief in the CARES Act, and when Congress comes back we’ll all be looking for additional loans, tax relief and potentially, access to even more cash grants,” said Katherine Miller of the James Beard Foundation, which helped create the Independent Restaurant Coalition, an advocacy group voicing the necessity of these measures.

Policy solutions are likely to be slow in coming, but restaurants, entrepreneurs, and organizers are creating their own rapid-response solutions. WCK, along with Feeding America, last week announced the launch of America’s Food Fund on GoFundMe to address the nation’s food access crisis, with $12 million in funding from Leonardo DiCaprio, Laurene Powell Jobs, Apple, and the Ford Foundation. And others are already building bridges between restaurants and emergency feeding programs. MCK relies on Second Harvest to raise funds for operational expenses and soup kitchen Loaves & Fishes for its distribution expertise.

In Boston, Forge Baking Company is making meals for Community Cooks, an organization that usually runs on volunteers. Forge is able to absorb the cost of labor and food through their GoFundMe campaign, which has raised more than $25,000.

In Westchester County, just outside New York City, chefs partnered with the Feeding Westchester food bank to launch a Million Gallons project to make soup for the suddenly unemployed hospitality sector. They are also crowdfunding support and have challenged other chefs to join the effort.

Nationwide food bank network Feeding America’s MealConnect digital logistics program helped match perishable food and staples from recently closed restaurants to food shelves and meal programs. Ad hoc collaborations are in place, too, as chefs band together to make sure food doesn’t go to waste, whether that involves renting moving trucks to create mobile markets, or funneling food from closed restaurants to ones that are staying open.

That’s what happened with Hope Breakfast Bar in St. Paul, Minnesota. Chef Brian Ingram has cooked in food trucks, popups, bars, and even during disasters: Ingram set up a barbecue and fed aid workers in New York City for a couple of days after Hurricane Sandy. When the coronavirus shutdown started, there was no question in his mind what they’d do.

“We decided to pivot to become a community restaurant. We never even thought of doing curbside service,” Ingram said. Even though this situation will last much longer than the hurricane response, Ingram and his wife, Sarah, are prepared to keep giving away food until they can’t anymore.

Hope Breakfast has 20 people on staff, and for the moment, employees are still getting paid. One couple is minimizing contact with others by cleaning overnight. Other restaurants that closed donated food, and people are donating food and money. One food supplier switched the restaurant’s account to a nonprofit category and began funneling them food to help keep the project rolling.

In Seattle, Filipinx restaurant Musang felt the impact of the pandemic earlier than most. After shutting down operations in mid-March, chef-owner Melissa Miranda switched to take-out for one day only, but immediately realized it didn’t suit her community-driven vision. Musang began as a popup four years ago, a project to educate people about Filipino food. Giving space and attention to Filipino culture, and connecting to social justice efforts such as FareStart, YouthCare and FEEST Seattle has always been a key part of the work. Using the restaurant’s resources to help others addresses some of the fear and insecurity that belong to this moment felt right.

Musang is one of several restaurants that make up the Seattle Community Kitchen Collective, which is preparing free meals and using social media and word of mouth to make sure people know they are available daily in the city’s South End.

At Musang, Miranda and several of her staff are making about 150 meals a day. They send the food to the nearby Filipino Community Center, and provide free meals and groceries to anyone who calls. (They schedule individual pickups 15 minutes apart to keep proper spacing.)

Food donations are keeping the process rolling, and Miranda is looking ahead to regular business resuming, when she hopes to offer a community day every week at a revived Musang. For now, however, Miranda encourages people to work within their own communities to help those in the most need. For her, that means feeding people, setting up a relief fund to help former Musang staff, and organizing with other restaurants to demand more than loans from the government.

“It’s hard not to be angry. It’s hard not to be sad. We’re only doing what we can,” said Miranda. “How can we make change now for the future?”

The post Can Restaurants Survive the Pandemic By Feeding Those in Need? appeared first on Civil Eats.

While the reporting included baker Roxana Jullapat and flour miller Nan Kohler, it reflected the media’s habit of treating men in the industry like rock stars and overlooking women doing similar work. This lopsided approach to story telling has become standard as artisan baking has grown hip and regional grain systems have developed over the last decade. But there are plenty of women at the forefront of the movement re-imagining grains, flour, and bread.

A Flavorful Conversation

Just one week after the Times article ran, a group of women gathered for a panel discussion in L.A. that had been planned for months, but also functioned as a kind of response to the story. “Bread Winners: A Conversation with Women in Bread” was organized by the California Grain Campaign to salute the work of women during Women’s History Month.

“Zoe Nathan has been baking bread for years [at Huckleberry Bakery and Café and Rustic Canyon], but when people talk about [artisan] bread, they act like it started three years ago at Clark Street Bread,” said Jullapat, co-owner of Friends And Family, the bakery and restaurant that hosted the talk.

And the event had bigger fish to fry than gender parity. The talk was just one of several in the California Grain Campaign, a grassroots push to get more bakers using 20 percent whole-grain, California-grown and -milled flours by 2020. At farmers’ markets and bakeries, the campaign creates opportunities for fresh flour to speak for itself, and for bakers and other grain advocates to explain what’s going on with this “new” ingredient.

The California Grain Campaign catalogue with Mai Nguyen’s grains in bread. (Photo by Jessica Blackstock)

Heritage whole-grain flours have very different flavor profiles than off-the-shelf flours, and while they have been creating a buzz in the baking community for years, the campaign’s advocates also hope to help consumers understand why they’re worth the added cost at $2 to $4 a pound.

The first Bread Winners event was intended to be an extension of the conversation Jullapat often found herself having with Kohler when picking up heritage grain flour at Kohler’s mill, Grist & Toll; the two women wanted to tap into that creative exchange and foster a broader dialogue about baking and fresh flour.

Soon they invited other speakers to join them, including grain farmer and California Grain Campaign organizer Mai Nguyen and baker Kate Pepper. The topic hit a chord, and 100 free tickets were snapped up in days. On the day of the event, many people were turned away at the door.

Nguyen, who grows heritage wheat in California (and was featured in a video series from King Arthur Flour and the National Young Farmers Coalition on the next generation of grain farmers), framed the talk with a poetic evocation of seeds and grains.

“We know from the historical record that women saved seeds,” said Nguyen. In the case of women entering and escaping slavery, persecution, or oppression, she added, “women carried seeds for futures they might not even [be part of].”

Many in the crowd were excited about the alternative grains, flours, and baked goods at the center of the panelists’ work. “The word that kept coming up was ‘inspiration.’ Our community is really hungry for that engagement about grains,” Kohler said after the event.

At the Bread Winners event (Photo credit: Ashley Payne)

Participants asked questions like: Where do we buy it? How do we use it? What makes it different—and so expensive?

Recognizing an Expert

The audience wanted to understand what it takes to generate flavorful fresh flour, and how heritage wheat travels from the farm to their croissants.

Nguyen told the story of two California women who were not in the room, Sally Fox and Monica Spiller. Key protagonists in the emerging regional grain revival, Fox is a cotton breeder, and Spiller is a chemist with a strong interest in grains. The women have worked in tandem on multiple seed projects at Fox’s farm, with Spiller growing out teaspoons-full of heritage varieties from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Small Grains Collection in Idaho.

This initiative helped get white Sonora wheat included in Slow Food’s Ark of Taste. Native Seeds/SEARCH also included Sonora wheat in their seed conservation work in Arizona, and Spiller has shepherded it and other grains from sample size to volumes farmers could plant. Sonora wheat is now a relatively familiar food because of the way these women worked behind the scenes. Because Spiller’s name is still unknown, Nguyen wants to change that.

At the Bread Winners talk, Nguyen invited the crowd to write thank you notes to Spiller for her work and vision—and the audience did just that.

“I’m very grateful that they noticed my work,” Spiller said in a phone interview after the event. She’s the founder of the Whole Grain Connection and while the organization is dedicated to understanding and supporting landrace grains, whole-grain baking and nutrition are where her heart is.

Spiller’s curiosity was piqued when she learned about the superior nutrition of whole grains in the 1970s. “Why on earth do we not eat our grain foods whole?” she wondered at the time. Spiller trained as a chemist, and then worked first in teaching and then in pharmaceuticals. This background applied well to her investigations of whole-grain sourdough baking.

She wanted to know what bread was like before the 1880s, when refined flour became widely available, so she studied sourdough. Her interest in old-fashioned wheat varieties began in the early 1990s, as she began to consider how contemporary wheats reflect the needs of industrial milling and factory baking, not the stone-ground flour she saw as superior. Her fascination with grains eventually became her study and profession.

“I wanted to grow the [wheat] varieties I had read about in history books, and I realized that the USDA Small Grains Collection would give you samples,” said Spiller. She grew out Sonora, Pacific Bluestem, Baart, Foisy, and other varieties. Collecting her annual selections from the plants that did well, she noticed that these varieties grew taller than modern wheats, and would shade out the weeds, making them perfect for organic farming.

In baking with early landrace varieties, she also found culinary traits worth pursuing. She started the Whole Grain Connection in 2000 with a view toward promoting a small selection of varieties and providing farmers with seeds.

“Sonora was so attractive because we know its history. It might have been the first wheat introduced on this continent, and it was very successful in the southwestern region of North America,” she said.

There are no native wheats in the Americas—corn is this land’s native grain. Many groups of immigrants brought their own varieties, and the ones that survived did so because they thrived where people settled. Sonora, a Mediterranean type of wheat, grows well in Mediterranean climates. Heartier Russian wheats were planted in the Midwest. The Amish brought spelt to Ohio.

These grains began to disappear as production and milling centralized, and plant breeders targeted traits that were best for refined flour. America let go of the grains that had been our amber waves, and 125 years of white flour—farming, milling, baking and eating—won’t go away overnight.

The Conversation Continues

The multiple dialogues that began at Bread Winners are continuing. People see the need to speak up for these new old-fashioned flours, and for women who are championing these grains.

Miller Nan Kohler already works hard on the education aspect, creating online and instore materials that detail how her flours perform. The Bread Winners talk also demonstrated the need to host more classes at her mill in Pasadena. The bread classes she runs sell out immediately, and she knows she has to help people get to know her product.

“I want to change people’s baking repertoires, and that takes a lot of dialogue because each grain and each grind is unique,” said Kohler. She wishfully joked about having a weekly wheat radio program dedicated to answering questions about alternative grains and flours.

Baker Roxana Jullapat left the event in Los Angeles fired up to create a professional network to share baker-to-baker questions, and get recipes out to help people bake with heritage flours in their homes. Now is not the time to be proprietary about recipes, she said.

The bakers and farmers all agree on the importance of supporting women-owned grain and bread businesses. Leyna Lightman, also from the California Grain Campaign, started a Google doc with names in the L.A. area after the event.

Of course, finding women-run bread businesses isn’t easy. Many appear at farmers’ markets or as subscription-based community supported bakeries (CSBs). This is because the same dynamics that restrict women from advancing in other entrepreneurial spaces are at work in baking. Panelists Kate Pepper of Kate’s Bread, Christine Nelson of Demeter Bread & Pastry, and Crystal White of Wayfarer Bread have all turned to alternative venues like these when they couldn’t find the funding to establish a brick-and-mortar business.

“Many of us are thirsting for more representation, more visibility, and more kinship in the food world,” said Lightman. To that end, future events are in the works, including ones in cities like Portland, Oregon. The goal is to stretch beyond women, too, and amplify all new voices in the artisan baking community, including people of color and gender non-conforming folks.

“We want to create real-life solidarity, and opportunities to repeat the sparks that happened at the first Bread Winners talk,” said Lightman.

Kris Kohler recorded the Bread Winners event; the audio is embedded below and available on Soundcloud.

The post The Women Reviving Heirloom Grains and Flour appeared first on Civil Eats.

As a nation, we’re making too much bread. Exactly how much is hard to say, but some estimate that one-third of all the bread made in America goes to waste. In their roadmap to less food waste, ReFED reported that grain products constitute 19 percent of food waste in our country. In New York City, City Harvest redistributed 5.1 million pounds of bread in 2016, or almost 10 percent of the food they collected.

This surplus breaks my heart. I like baking so much that I wrote a book about flour, and spent years learning about how much work goes into getting grain from the field to the mill. That work is not reflected in the cost of flour, which is insulated by economies of scale, the pennies game of milling, and government subsidies ($40 billion between 1995 and 2014). No wonder this ingredient seems disposable.

There’s also the fact that, except in the most exclusive bakeries, a bare shelf is a no-no. Customers expect fresh bread and lots of it. Sugar and fat are also relatively inexpensive, so it is safer to make too much and donate the leftovers than it is to risk running out.

The problem of plenty isn’t exclusive to America. In France and Germany, small bakeries are closing, partially because of the ubiquity of supermarket bread. Baker Pascal Rigo, who reinvented the baked goods at Starbucks, is now building a network of microboulangeries in France, hoping to revive the traditions of local baking. I think we should take a page from this model, and scale back bread production, too.

I’m not saying we should harken back to another era entirely. Before factory bread was the norm in America, many women spent their only day off baking large batches of bread. Yet the solution, which began with horse-drawn carts delivering factory-baked bread, has ballooned, bringing with it all kinds of industrial-scale problems. Even in the manufacturing process, this kind of bread can generate great waste. If one machine on the line breaks down, 90,000 pounds of dough can suddenly go “off-track,” destined to be sold into animal feed or other secondary markets.

Managing excess dough and baked goods in smaller-scale bakeries is not as clumsy, but still a part of business. And these businesses expect charities to absorb the extra. But people living in poverty already have access to easy calories, and even large operations like mine limit what we accept. Our shelf space is limited, and produce is heavy, perishable, and needs a lot of handling.

For instance, I recently sorted through a case of clementines, removing the ones that had burst, and rinsing the rest. The task didn’t take long but it did take time, and not all of our volunteers know how to look at dubious fruit and decide what’s worth saving. But the bread and sweets we pick up are always attractive and ready to serve.

What would happen if we made a lot less bread—and fewer donuts?

What if supermarket bakeries shrank their offerings, creating a sense of abundance in tighter real estate? What if independent bakeries baked only what they thought they could sell and no more? Some high-end bakeries sell out of their legendary treats, and they survive customer disappointment. Some even thrive on it.

What if we had to order bread like we order birthday cakes? In some circuits, this is the standard. Community supported bakeries (CSBs) sell subscriptions to loaves, just as community supported agriculture (CSA) farms sell seasonal subscriptions to a farm’s products. Sarah Owens, a James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, ran BK17 Bakery from her Brooklyn apartment that way. Many microbakery enterprises like hers only bake the loaves that people pre-order. I know these models can’t replace the way most of us buy our bread, but they suggest efficiencies that can help trim production and shift the burden of excess food further upstream.

As a home baker, I can’t bear to let any of the bread I bake go to waste. The remnants become breadcrumbs, and end up in mac & cheese, inside fish cakes, and even in sweet cakes, between berries and whipped cream. Such frugality is evident in old cookbooks, which use breadcrumbs galore. One baker who was trained in Germany once told me that his first task as an apprentice was grinding leftover bread to use in more dough.

Here’s another solution: Toast Ale, the brainchild of food waste activist Tristram Stuart. Launched in England, and now coming to the United States via Chelsea Brewing, the beer is made using 40 percent surplus bread. It replaces fresh grains in the brewing formula, so it preserves resources that would normally go into growing and malting barley, in addition to keeping bread out of the waste stream.

Once upon a time, bread was valuable because it was hard to make. Wheat was tough to grow and mill. Baking bread took time and resources.

Breaking bread remains a symbol of the shared labors involved, and of the necessity of our cooperation. If we could see the work invested by bakers, millers and farmers, whether small-scale or industrial, that symbol might gain real meaning again. And feeding each other, especially the poorest among us, would mean more than disposing of surplus foods.

The post Bake What We Knead: Solving the Problem of Excess Bread appeared first on Civil Eats.

Now, he would like to write an epilogue. And he has been composing that imaginary piece of writing as he speaks in front of various groups, most recently 40 people working in the local grain world who gathered for a meeting at the Paicines Ranch in California.

Lazor wore red suspenders over his plaid shirt and ample belly and showed pictures of machinery. He talked about his tractors and seed cleaners like a parent, with equal parts fondness and frustration.

“We started going forward by going backward,” Lazor said of his beginnings with grains. While his wife Anne was finishing college in Wisconsin, he observed how Amish farmers worked. Once the couple had their farmstead in Vermont, they “stooked” or cured their wheat in an old-fashioned style, and people came from miles around to see what no one had done since the 1950s.

Lazor has collected information from generations of farmers, from the Amish to the Quebecois growers he interrogated, 30 miles north of his home. He has gathered equipment that was very old and abandoned, and replaced those machines with newer ones.

Lazor talks and writes about his trials and errors as a grain grower in an engaging, accessible style. Perhaps this is because, at his core, Lazor is a communicator, eager to convey what he’s learned. The Organic Grain Grower allowed him to share the knowledge entrusted to him, and mentor a new wave of farmers.

Yet being a mentor doesn’t mean Lazor has stopped learning. At 65, he is just as curious as ever and ready to try new methods—and a recent period of illness gave him a lot of time to reflect on the big picture of food, farming, and the environment.

“I want to move to a much more grass and legume-based type of agriculture with our dairy herd,” he told the farmers, millers, and bakers at the California event. Given the purpose of this particular meeting—to enable more small-scale grain projects around the country—his announcement was surprising. But he wanted to bring his audience up-to-date.

“As lovers of grain we really need to think about the health of our soils. We have to get over the glory of all this iron,” he said, pointing to his heavy equipment.

Each piece of machinery seems to ask for another, Lazor said. It is easy to get wrapped up in seeking one more screen for the seed cleaner and a better way to dry a crop for storage. In organic production, tillage is the workaround for chemical weed control, and perfecting your tools for the task can become an obsession.

“I’ve got 27 tractors,” Harold Wilken, an Illinois farmer in the audience that day, confessed with a laugh. “I know I’ve got a problem.”

Wilken runs Janie’s Farm, an organic grain farm in an area dominated by large, conventional corn and soy operations. Wilken has moved into into milling and other seed processing, as small-scale grain growers often do. Most grains—food and feed grade—are grown for commodity markets, and regional storage and processing facilities don’t exist. The idea of growing staple grain crops for local use is just reappearing, because most of the markets and infrastructure vanished by the 1930s or so. Consumers are hungry for alternatives to common grain products, but commodity grains are so inexpensive that developing those alternatives is taking time.

As farmers consider feeding that growing consumer appetite, Lazor is cautionary. “We have to think beyond bushels and bins to think about this little mantel of soil that covers the earth,” he said. “There’s more to farming than tilling and planting and harvesting.” As more and more scientific research shows, no-till farming and well-managed grassland both build healthy soil, and that soil retains water in times of drought and absorbs carbon dioxide that would otherwise warm the atmosphere.

Lazor urges people to raise animals as a complement to grains and other row crops.

He also advises farmers to let the land go “back to sod” as often as possible. Grain crops are “heavy feeders,” meaning they deplete soil nutrients that sod crops like alfalfa, timothy, and clover can help restore. He advises long rotations, cycling through different plant families to throw off fungal, bacterial and other plant and soil pests. He also recommends looking into low- or no-till methods, to help protect soil structure and prevent erosion.

For farmers in New England interested in food grade grains, Lazor recommends growing hulless oats because they are one of the grain crops the climate favors. And instead of growing soy or barley for animals, he says, grow animals the best forage grasses you can. Really well-tended grassland supports both animal health and soil health. Photosynthesis is a more direct tool to harvest energy from the sun than growing grains to feed animals, he points out.

That said, Jack Lazor is still planting grains. The granary dominates his farmscape, high atop a hill. Inside, stone mills make Early Riser corn, an open pollinated variety, into cornmeal, and grind wheat into flour.

But right now, he’s also conducting field trials at Butterworks Farm with Heather Darby from the University of Vermont Crop and Soils team, to find out how to grow nutrient dense forage—or the plants present in a pasture. Ultimately, this small-scale grain afficianado wants to short circuit the need for grains as animal feed.

If you climb to the top of the skinny steep stairs in the farm’s mill and look out the cupola, and you will see some farms, but mostly forest and mountains. The Northeast Kingdom, as that edge of the earth is known, might feel like the end of civilization, but the farm is at another beginning. And Jack Lazor is holding the past, present, and future in mind as he tries to cultivate the best ways to live and work with both kinds of grasses—the ones animals can eat directly and the ones that make the edible seeds we call grains.

The post An Elder Statesman of Local Grains is Having Doubts About the Crop appeared first on Civil Eats.

“You have to be reading your dough all the time,” Senders says to students. “This is a romantic question: What does the dough want?”

While local flours are just coming on the radar for mainstream eaters, they’ve been around long enough to earn a bad rap with commercial bakers. Unlike flour sold under national brands, which are a blend of the product of acres of industrial-scale grain fields, local flour is seen as unpredictable. Bakeries are reluctant to gamble with irregularities in protein and moisture content because the losses in time, dough, and product can be considerable.

But wait, didn’t all flour used to be local?

Indeed, before the prairie became the place to grow nearly all our wheat and other grains, all farming, milling, and baking happened close to home. If you ended up with low protein flour, you couldn’t opt not to bake with it. Back then, bakers had to have a deep understanding of flour and a tolerance for the obstacles seasonal variations could present.

Today, these skills are making a comeback. Senders’ one-day workshops, which he co-teaches with two other bakers, are crash courses in understanding the idiosyncrasies of this ingredient.

“One of the great complaints about local flour is it’s too variable,” he told a recent class. “If the baker is not being precise, there’s way more variability on [his/her choices] than in any flour ever milled.”

Some of the students nodded. Day to day, a baker makes lots of tiny and inadvertent changes. Inaccurate measuring, lack of attention to timing, or the chemical and biological processes responsible for bread can add up to bad loaves. Professional and home bakers know how much work it takes to make any flour, let alone local ones untamed by blending, into bread.

“Traditionally, it’s said that the baker plays with time and temperature, but of course there’s plenty more than that,” said Senders. “You can adjust the quantity and vigor. You can play with the length and intensity of the mix … and so on.”

In a sense, the baker, the ingredients, and fermentation process are in conversation. Local flour just requires a little more listening. And that’s not the only dialogue that matters. Fresh flour means the farmer listens to the land, and talks to the miller about what has grown. The miller talks to the baker before the baker begins to chat with dough.

Wide Awake Bakery is now three-years-old, and part of a farmer-miller-baker partnership. Farmer Thor Oechsner co-owner in the bakery, also owns Farmer Ground Flour, which stone mills organically grown New York State grains. Millers Greg Mol and Neal Johnston are in contact with both the baker and the farmer, working in a way that has gone out of fashion. As a well-informed user and interpreter of this particular flour, Senders can also talk to the mill’s commercial customers. He speaks bread.

At the industrial scale, there is little communication between the people who handle grain. Farmers talk to grain merchants, who deliver grain to mills. Both grains and flours are created to hit performance specifications for baking. In effect, numbers talk to numbers. As the food chain shrinks, people have to talk to people again.

Organizations throughout the country are collaborating to foster these conversations. In the Northeast, a number of groups are bringing together key players. Among them are GrowNYC, which runs farmers’ markets throughout the city, and OGRIN, the Organic Research and Information Sharing Network. They are both partners on grant projects, like a recent one from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Microentrepreneur Assistance Program, which led to Senders’ classes.

The classes are a great way to introduce people to local flour. Senders teaches at the bakery and in other settings, like Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York’s winter conference. His classes attract a range of bakers. Some of these people are farmers, too, looking for a way to add value to what they grow. And one man came to Ithaca from Canada, seeking information as he planned a small farming, milling, and baking enterprise.

Other people are looking to build their baking skills. A couple from the Adirondacks came to research a bakery project. And a serious home baker traveled from Maryland to get clues about working with freshly milled flour.

“A lot of people have been baking for years and everything has been hunky dory. Then they taste [local] bread, and they want to up their game,” Senders said. “This thing that appeared to be not mysterious at all was suddenly made mysterious again.”

As a teacher, he then works to remove some of the mystery, beginning with an analysis of what makes a good loaf.

“Bread is like a balloon full of little tiny balloons,” he said recently, diving into a tiny treatise on gluten, how it is formed, and how gluten quality varies with different grains, like rye and spelt. In Senders’ classes, you can sense people’s interest rising like dough as he explains the principles, theory, and science of bread. He covers the structures of grain kernels so people can understand both stone and roller milling procedures, and how the resulting flours work differently.

Everyone gets a chance to calculate desired dough temperature, fussing with water, weighing and mixing doughs, and shaping and baking loaves.

As a hint of the size of the undertaking that is bread, Senders refers to advice he received from Jeffrey Hammelman, director of King Arthur’s Bakery and author of the book Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes: “You can never master bread,” Hamelman told him. “You’re just happy to befriend it.”

Top photo by Allison Usavage (see more of Allison’s shots of Stephen and his class in this photo essay).

Photo of Stephen within the story by Rachel Louise Lodder.

The post Baking With Local Flour: A 2-Way Conversation appeared first on Civil Eats.

Wheat farmers in the Pacific Northwest export up to 90 percent of their harvest; most of it is used to make noodles in Asia. “We are taking this situation very seriously and have launched a formal investigation,” said Michael Firko, of the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, in a press release.

The issue of genetic engineering of crops has been in the news in Washington state, as I-522, a  GE labeling initiative moves forward to the November 2013 ballot. While the Washington Association of Wheat Growers has been dismissive of claims that labeling would affect farmers’ abilities to export wheat, a response to the announcement of the discovery of the GE wheat in Oregon emphasized the safety of the food, and sought understanding from trade partners as the investigation continues.

Farmers in the east side of Washington grow 2.5 million acres of wheat, much of it the soft white wheat aimed for Asian markets. West of the Cascades, other markets for wheat are being cultivated. Farmers in this area are poised to feed the informed eaters who want grains with more identity than the anonymous products of the state’s grain belt.

Washington State University’s Mount Vernon Research and Extension Station tests 40,000 varieties of wheat each year–none of them genetically engineered. When Stephen Jones, director of the station, was the winter wheat breeder for Washington State University in Pullman, from 1995-2007, he struggled openly with farmer interest in GE crops. He wouldn’t breed anything that took ownership away from farmers and put it in the hands of corporations.

While all seed breeding seeks to develop specific traits, genetic engineering works through gene transfer, and can cross species barriers, which classical plant breeding cannot. Another reason genetic plant breeding is favored is the speed at which desired traits can be grown out. Jones is content to work at the pace of plants.

Plants have been hybridizing without human intervention for millennia. Jones and other plant breeders use classical breeding methods, relying on pollen to achieve results just as their peers did in the 1800s, when hybridization first became a habit.

“We make a cross in a greenhouse, put a male with a female in a dialysis sleeve,” said Jones. “Two generations out we plant test plots.”

However, even hybrids are perceived by some consumers as bad. The lack of transparency about genetic modification is adding to consumer confusion about seed breeding in general. Wheat breeding is taking a big hit from misconceptions promoted in the book Wheat Belly, which attacks modern wheat hybrids, claiming they are addictive and make people fat.

These fears and other concerns about gluten are giving gluten-free products a fierce market presence. On the other side, there is a separate, small but strong movement to relocalize grains, and Jones is part of it.

Across the country, farmers are putting grains in ground that haven’t seen a flour mill or malthouse for nearly a century. Researchers like Jones are working to help farmers find varieties that grow well in these areas, and also serve the needs of bakers and brewers. Conferences on grains and bread–like the Kneading Conference West, which Jones helps organize–are driving the movement forward.

“If you look at Iowa, this is what’s wrong with agriculture,” he said in Vermont in March, showing a 2008 USDA map that highlighted wheat production with green dots. The state was nearly white. “One hundred years ago, Iowa would be bright green. Now it’s wall to wall corn and soybeans. Winter wheat avoids drought. Corn and soy do not.”

The Northern Grain Growers Association had invited him to speak on the topic of growing grains “out of place,” or beyond the regions where the commodity crop is generally produced–eastern Washington and Oregon, Montana, the Dakotas, and Kansas. Jones gave a similar presentation in Tacoma at the Cascadia Grains Conference in January.

In the last century, same as other parts of our food supply, grain production was centralized. A staple food became a commodity crop, and the farmer know-how, and equipment needed to grow grains regionally was lost.

The research station builds on what farmers in the Skagit Valley and elsewhere in western Washington do know–how to grow commodity grains–with a goal of creating a closed loop system to meet the needs of farms and eaters in a region, from animal feed to flour and malting barley.

“These aren’t wheat farmers, these are farmers who grow wheat,” Jones said at his office and labs. Wheat farmers in eastern Washington grow large acres of commodity grains and little else. Farmers in his part of the state can’t afford to grow grains as their main crop. The land is too valuable, and the income from wheat is too low. Still, every few years, tulip, vegetable and seed farmers grow grains to break disease cycles and build up organic matter in the soil.

Growing the same plants year after year courts pathogens and pests. Grains are in the grass family, offering a break from the problems invited by other families of plants. Each family has different biological foes, so rotations help plants handle problems like funguses and bugs. Grains also add organic matter to the soil. Adding value to the grains farmers grow in rotation boosts farm economies as well as soil. Keeping those grains at home is key to Jones for many reasons, and not just because local food is in right now.

“I do like to get beyond the cliché of local and heirloom,” he said, and get to the root of the matter, which is to keep farmers farming in an area facing heavy development pressure.

News of GE wheat may well serve this mission, as consumer interest in non-commodity non-GE wheat could rise. Meanwhile, wheat farmers will have to contend with the risk of cross-contamination from this errant wheat–and the inadequacies of a regulatory system unprepared to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

Photo by Shutterstock

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