A new community of millers joins the revival of America’s regional grain heritage, connecting farmers with a market eager for fresh, local flour.
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A new community of millers joins the revival of America’s regional grain heritage, connecting farmers with a market eager for fresh, local flour.
November 20, 2024
Cedar Creek Grist Mill, built in Skamania County, Washington, in 1876 and now a museum. (Photo credit: Alan Majchrowicz, Getty Images)
Two hefty, 7-foot-tall machines stand in a corner of the airy, white-walled Carolina Ground warehouse in Hendersonville, North Carolina. One framed in light pine wood, the other in gleaming stainless steel, they project an aura of massive force—especially once they start to move.
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These gristmills use a pair of huge cylindrical stones, each about four feet wide, two feet thick, and weighing close a ton apiece, to pulverize wheat and other grains. With a dull roar, like the sound of heavy rain and hail on a metal roof, they gradually crush the kernels between them into a cascade of flavorful flour.
Like the thousands of small processors that once dotted the American landscape, Carolina Ground founder Jennifer Lapidus buys her wheat from nearby growers, grinds it whole at low temperatures to preserve the nutrients in the grain’s flavorful, rich germ, and sells the flour to area bakers seeking a delicious, locally sourced foundation for their products. Although September’s Hurricane Helene disrupted operations temporarily, the mill was up and running within a couple of weeks and could get flour to customers quickly, supporting their businesses in turn. That’s how mills once operated: as mainstays of their own small communities.
“Every town in the U.S. probably has a road that has ‘mill’ in it,” says Michelle Ajamian, who owns Shagbark Seed & Mill in Athens, Ohio (and in fact happens to live on a Mill Creek Road). But the era of the neighborhood mill disappeared long ago.
Carolina Ground founder Jennifer Lapidus with her pinewood Osttiroler gristmill. (Photo credit: Rinne Allen)
The Craft Millers Guild is working to change that. Ajamian and others established the guild in 2020 to provide a community for a new generation of millers who draw inspiration from historic practices and try to help restore regional grain economies that have been lost to industrialization. Through networking, education, and advocacy, the group hopes to help small millers get established and grow their share of the market. Their success, says Ajamian, will mean bringing back a grain system that supports local businesses, provides fresher and more nutritious flour, and preserves biodiversity by using a variety of grains.
“From the beginning, it’s been an open source-group,” Ajamian says of the guild. “We’re not competing with each other. We’re helping each other, because the competition is really with Big Ag.”
Her comment reflects a history going back at least a hundred years. The first formal count of American gristmills, conducted in 1840, found over 28,000 in operation. Back then, the high cost of transporting grain meant all milling was local. Farmers would bring wagonloads of grain to the modest mill in their community, often paying for its services with a portion of the product, and receive flour back to sell themselves. Different areas used unique local varieties of wheat, like White Sonora in the Southwest and California, and Fulcaster in Pennsylvania. In comparison, when Ajamian started her business in 2010, she estimates there were as few as five small-scale mills serving local farmers left in the country. (Carolina Ground launched in 2012.)
Carolina Ground’s Osttiroler (right) and New American Stone Mill gristmills sit in the corner of the mill’s Hendersonville warehouse. (Photo credit: Daniel Walton)
The rise of railroad transport enabled mills to source grain from farther away and bring in more of it, allowing them to expand. These big facilities adopted new steel roller technology that could process wheat more quickly and easily separate the bran and germ, yielding a flour that was much cheaper to produce and kept longer on the shelf, but had far less flavor and nutrition. Wheat breeders focused on yield and ease of processing, pushing local varieties like White Sonora out of favor. By the early 1900s, industrial wheat mills prevailed.
Today, although local mills have been gaining traction as part of the regional grain movement, they are still relatively rare. Just three companies—Ardent Mills, ADM Milling Co., and Grain Craft—own 57 percent of the country’s wheat processing capacity. Of the more than 21.5 million tons of wheat flour milled domestically in 2022, over 96 percent came from the 21 largest millers and entered the commodity market that fills supermarket shelves across the country.
The Craft Millers Guild began with a peer-to-peer Zoom learning group that Ajamian helped organize in the early days of the pandemic, responding to the needs of new millers inspired by the surge of demand for flour.
“A lot of what we’re doing isn’t backed by big corporations.”
By 2023, those casual monthly meetings had coalesced into an organization modeled on similar professional groups such as the Bread Bakers Guild of America and Craft Maltsters Guild. The Craft Millers Guild now boasts about 50 members from across the country. Together, they develop best practices for small-scale mills in areas like food safety and regulatory compliance, assist beginning millers as they gain their footing, and champion local grains in the public sphere.
At a recent online meeting, the Guild’s collaborative spirit was on full display. As veteran millwright Tass Jansen shared his tips for maintaining mills in top condition, about 20 millers kept up a lively side discussion in the chat. Members swapped advice about how to keep their grindstones from getting too hot, the advantages of different furrow depths in millstones, and where to buy food-grade mill grease in bulk—the kind of shop talk that would have been commonplace at community mills hundreds of years ago but is hard to come across today.
Miller Aaron Grigsby at Deep Roots Milling, which grinds grain on a historic water-powered mill in Lowesville, Virginia. (Photo credit: Justin Ide)
“A lot of what we’re doing isn’t backed by big corporations,” Jansen says with a laugh. “There’s a lot of collective knowledge in this group, and you can ask them instead.”
Aaron Grigsby finds that sense of community to be the guild’s biggest accomplishment so far. He joined the group in 2020, shortly after helping to set up Deep Roots Milling at a historic water-powered mill in Lowesville, Virginia, and now serves on its steering committee.
“Millers these days, especially craft stone millers, are so few and far between, and so disconnected by geography, that we hardly have anyone to compare notes with,” Grigsby explains. “Just hearing how people were dealing with mundane issues like packaging was really revelatory.”
Beyond connecting millers, the guild also brings in expertise from those serving the industry, like Andrew Heyn and Blair Marvin of New American Stone Mills. Founded in 2015, their Morrisville, Vermont-based business is a leading supplier of gristmills, producing roughly 45 per year with granite quarried nearby.
Lately, Heyn has been fielding inquiries from people looking to start mills with federal Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure grant funding, which supports the middle of the food-supply chain and bolsters markets for small farms and food businesses. He also talks to aspiring, idealistic millers about the day-to-day realities of milling, such as maintaining mill equipment, adjusting stones to process different types of flour, sourcing grain, and finding buyers.
Heyn compares the craft milling movement to his state’s once-burgeoning hemp farming industry, which contracted by more than 90 percent from 2019 to 2022. “We need to make sure people are doing this safely and effectively so that we don’t have another CBD bust,” he says. “Everybody gets excited about it, nobody knows what they’re doing, and then it all falls apart. So, I think broadening the knowledge base is a big part of it.”
The guild also recognizes that millers, although a critical bridge between farmers and end users, are just one part of the local grain economy. The group regularly partners with other nonprofits working on different aspects of the ecosystem, including the Common Grain Alliance, which builds demand for local grains in the Mid-Atlantic through consumer awareness campaigns and training to help veterans and farmers of color participate in their local grain economies. Similar organizations are active throughout the U.S., from GrowNYC Grains in the Northeast to the Colorado Grain Chain and Golden State Grains in California.
Common Grain Alliance members participate in a grain cleaning workshop at Greater Richmond Grains in Virginia. (Photo courtesy of Common Grain Alliance)
Madelyn Smith, executive director of the Common Grain Alliance, points to her group’s grain stand program as a successful step in building consumer awareness. The grain stand program is a partnership between Common Grain Alliance and FRESHFARM, a nonprofit organization that works to build a more equitable, sustainable, and resilient food system in the Mid-Atlantic region. The stands offer grain-based goods including flour from 11 local producers at FRESHFARM farmers’ markets in Washington, D.C. She says people are surprised to learn that flour can be different from “a white powder purchased in a 5-pound bag at the grocery store” and once they try it, they come back for more.
The Common Grain Alliance’s Mid-Atlantic Grain Stand gives local grains a presence at multiple farmers markets in the Washington, D.C. area, educating consumers and helping producers sell more grain. (Photo courtesy of Common Grain Alliance)
Smith is particularly excited about the Alliance’s effort to educate consumers about less familiar grains like buckwheat and millet. Not only can those plants provide delicious flour, she says; they can also be used as cover crops that develop healthy soils.
“By building a market for these small grains, we’re building in economic incentives to have more diversified and sustainable crop rotations,” says Smith. “We’re not just serving the farmers whose products we’re buying and selling; we’re working to raise the profile of the full diversity of local grains that are produced in our agricultural system.”
Demand certainly seems robust at Carolina Ground in Hendersonville. Lapidus, herself a Craft Millers Guild member, moved from a cramped space in nearby Asheville to the roomy warehouse in 2021, bolstered by pandemic-era sales increases. A long storage space next to the milling room is stacked floor to ceiling with shrink-wrapped grain ready for grinding.
But finding local growers who can supply them isn’t easy. The hard wheat preferred for bread flour is a relatively new crop in the Southeast, with regionally adapted varieties only introduced in 2009. Farmers don’t have a lot of information about how best to grow it here, Lapidus says, and those used to focusing on yield alone might not produce grain with the protein levels discerning bakers expect.
Even in places where local grain production is more established, small-scale farmers can find it challenging to get their crop to market. Grain needs to be cleaned and screened before it’s delivered to a miller. It’s expensive to transport. If a small mill can’t take an entire crop at once, the grower must invest in storage facilities, which require refrigeration if winters aren’t cold enough to suppress pests.
Appalachian White Wheat at Brown Family Farms in Warren Co, NC. (Photo courtesy of Carolina Ground)
The infrastructure costs add up and can discourage all but the most dedicated growers from taking a risk on small-scale grains. Danny Cowan, farmer and co-owner of Red Tail Grains in North Carolina, says he and co-owner George Allen have invested roughly $150,000 in equipment to grow and process grains like Turkey Red winter wheat on about 70 acres. The two have built up that infrastructure over the course of a decade, reinvesting their earnings from the farm and working off-farm jobs to raise further capital.
Machines like dryers and seed cleaners, Cowan says, can each range from the low thousands to nearly $100,000. Red Tail Grains has benefited from a few small local government and nonprofit grants—as well as Allen’s mechanical aptitude, which means he can fix older but more affordable equipment—but that support hasn’t come close to covering the full costs of machinery.
Of the more than 21.5 million tons of wheat flour milled domestically in 2022, over 96 percent came from the 21 largest millers and entered the commodity market that fills supermarket shelves across the country.
“It’s more challenging than I ever expected,” says Jordan Shockley about building the local-grain supply chain. An agricultural economist with the University of Kentucky, he helped organize the inaugural Southeastern Grain Gathering in 2019 and has since worked to create grain opportunities for farmers.
The challenges aren’t insurmountable, though, says Shockley. For example, he sees promise in the way Kentucky’s bourbon makers are interacting with small-scale rye growers. They guarantee payments to farmers for producing rye on a certain acreage, reducing the risk of loss from crop failure. (Existing crop insurance programs can be complicated to access for small-grain growers and doesn’t always work for smaller, diversified farms.)
It helps the farmers, and it’s a win for the distilleries, who can emphasize the local provenance of their raw materials and command a premium from avid drinkers. “It’s all about the story when it comes to local grains: knowing where the grain came from, promoting the farm, and marketing that it’s a local product,” says Shockley.
The large-scale grain industry has substantial economies of scale, admits Ajamian of the Craft Millers Guild. That translates to a dramatically cheaper product. Carolina Ground sells a four-pound bag of stone-milled all-purpose flour made from Appalachian White Hard White Wheat and Shirley Soft Red Winter Wheat on its website for $17.75; a five-pound bag of unbleached all-purpose commodity flour at a nearby grocery store costs as little as $2.49.
But by galvanizing the many small players doing their part for local grains, Ajamian believes the movement can build a different kind of strength in numbers.
A bag of all-purpose flour from Carolina Ground. (Photo credit: Taylor Heery)
Organizations like her guild, she says, can advocate for policies that can help local millers gain footing and lower production costs. Several U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs, for example, support regional food system infrastructure—including for local grains—under the umbrella of the Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP), and guild members and others could work to ensure that support remains under the Trump administration.
Citing another example of advocacy, Ajamian points to a letter-writing campaign by the Craft Millers Guild asking the USDA to prioritize local sourcing in food assistance programs. The Biden administration subsequently allocated $900 million to create the Local Food Purchase Assistance program to help state, tribal, and territorial governments buy foods produced within 400 miles, including wheat.
That money meant Ohio food banks could afford the premium for locally milled flour, which put fresh, nutritious whole grains in the kitchens of food-insecure people while supporting local farmers. She’s pushing for Congress to make the program permanent as part of negotiations over the upcoming farm bill.
However, a much larger pot of USDA money gets funneled to large-scale wheat growers selling to big grain buyers. In 2021, about 70 million acres of wheat fields were eligible for subsidies through commodity programs. Even if regional grain growers could access those programs, the payments, at about $10 per acre, don’t add up to much unless they’re operating at a massive scale.
The Common Grain Alliance’s Smith adds that expanding crop insurance eligibility and making the program work better for smaller, diversified farms could be a big help for aspiring grain growers.
But for now, she says, education is even more important than policy. “Every community used to have its own grain mill, and it was natural that bakers would bake with the grains that were grown in their local community,” says Smith. “This isn’t a new way of doing things, but so much of that knowledge has been lost. We’re having to work together to rediscover and relearn those systems.”
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