The Movement to Revive Local Grains — and the Infrastructure Required to Keep It Going

Walk into an artisan bakery in New York or Seattle, Portland, Maine, or Portland, Oregon, and more likely than not, you’ll discover your baguette or boule was made from locally sourced flour.

A bakery using local flour was a rarity even a decade ago. But the current expansive landscape for these products is not an accident. It’s the result of years’ worth of dedication on the part of regional food systems advocates to revive wheats both ancient (emmer, einkorn, spelt) and heritage (red fife, white Sonora, warthog and some of more than 30,000 others), along with varieties of rye, barley, buckwheat and oats.

Missing Pieces

Getting farmers to grow grains for local markets is just a fraction of what’s needed to make a viable local system. Consider all those thousands of mills that no longer operate: Something’s got to replace them so farmers have a place to sell and grind their grain, and someone’s got to run them. Morse built a new, state-of-the-art mill; the Fischer family revived the 300-year-old Castle Valley Mill in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Adding to the challenge is the fact that there’s only one milling and grain processing degree program in the country, at Kansas State University,  and Morse says most of its graduates get scooped up by the biggest companies.

All sorts of other “middle infrastructure” has to be revived along with the mills. “You have to have small enough, modern enough granaries that can keep your grain clean to modern food safety standards, keep the different varietals separate,” says Morse. “It requires lots of time, expertise and infrastructure to do it right, and none of that’s cheap.”

Value and supply chains also have to be created, Russell points out, noting that “We’re still working very much in developing those.” Under her tenure, GrowNYC piloted a program that sold grains grown by 100 local farmers at some of its farmers’ markets, which helped drum up shopper interest. Educating consumers is hugely important, too. Heritage grains don’t act the same way commodity grains do, so bakers and chefs — not to mention home bakers and cooks — need to understand what these fresher, generally higher-protein flours do when you mix them and stick them in the oven.

“We’re still at the beginning of the process of establishing local grain systems,” says Kelly LeBlanc, director of nutrition at Oldways, a nonprofit dedicated to getting more Americans to eat whole grains, “and being able to say, ‘This type of grain is best suited for this purpose.’”

And, of course, farmers need seeds they can plant in different regions that will reliably yield useful and delicious crops. On the West Coast, both the University of California, Davis, and the Bread Lab at Washington State University have been instrumental in breeding new varieties. Morse says hard red spring wheats like Yecora Rojo (developed by UC Davis) are his best-selling flours — they yield soft, nutty breads — although he sells a winter-planted gazelle rye that is also popular. “The public is discovering [its] wonderful flavor qualities and we like it too, because from a producer standpoint, it’s low-input [and] disease-resistant.” Cornell University has been breeding small grains for the East Coast since 1907, including, more recently, malting barley for beer. (Craft beer standards in New York state mandate that increasing percentages of ingredients be locally sourced.)

Breeder Mark Sorrells says there’s increasing interest in specialty grains like quinoa and amaranth. He’s also focusing on developing hull-less grains as a piece of the East Coast supply-chain puzzle: “With some ancient grains, the hulls stay attached to the kernels and have to be removed for human consumption,” he says. “Hulling machines are expensive and the process is labor-intensive and time-consuming. But if I can remove those hulls genetically and make grains free-threshing, that will reduce the cost for both the farmer and the consumer.”

The Push for Scale

In his corner of Washington, where 14 farmers are producing 4,000 acres worth of grains, Morse says demand for his flour continues to surge. He’s currently milling a few million pounds a year to supply production bakeries like Tartine, in California, as well as “people pulling up in their minivan [or] Outback, wanting a couple of 50-pound bags.” He says his business grew 56 percent last year, and he’s looking to slow things down as his mill nears maximum capacity. Distillers like Portland, Oregon’s Freeland Spirits, which sources buckwheat from Camas Country Mill in the Willamette Valley, are also part of the PNW grains resurgence. “We’re getting to an impact and scale that’s meaningful,” Morse says, “but there’s plenty of room for more of these mills around the country.”

Russell sees positive strides on the East Coast, too. Many artisan bakers are milling in-house and under the radar, she says. Skowhegan-based Maine Grains recently expanded its product line. Wild Hive, Farmer Ground Flour, Small Valley Milling and Castle Valley Mill all have “excellent” bread flours, made from local wheat. “We are seeing some things are increasing in demand,” Russell says, “and at this point we have several very good performing bread flours coming out of the Northeast, which is such a huge achievement for this community. What’s happened in a decade is pretty amazing.”