HUDSON VALLEY WHEAT, THE NEXT FRONTIER

by Tracy Frisch

Issue 45 (March-May 09)

[Copyright © 2009, The Valley Table]

Tour the Hudson Valley countryside and you'll discover evidence of many kinds of farming: hayfields, livestock, orchards, vineyards, corn and vegetables. But despite an agreeable climate, almost nowhere in this landscape will you see fields of grain below a characteristically big sky. That's because the region's farmers back in the mid-1700s had overdone it by producing crop upon crop of wheat until the soil eventually was worn out and would support only rye, a less needy grain. Plagues of insect pests and diseases exacerbated the problem of depleted soil.

For the next hundred years, agriculturalists pushed westward to still-fertile valleys, creating a succession of breadbaskets that followed the frontier ever farther from the Eastern Seaboard.

Fast forward to the present: In the last few years, patches of local, small-scale wheat production have sprung up across North America. One center of activity is in Maine, where the second "Kneading Conference" last August brought farmers, breeders, oven designers and builders, and artisan bakers together to exchange knowledge and ideas, bake and eat.

In New York, the efforts of Northeast Organic Wheat, led by sustainable agronomist Elizabeth Dyck of the state's chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA-NY), literally are sowing the seeds of lesser-known types of wheat in farm fields while forging connections among farmers and artisan bakers.

The tentative return of wheat for local bread (sometimes even milled and baked by the farmer) reflects the soaring demand for all types of foods of known local origins, though by any measure the local grain movement is still in its infancy—--n most places, local wheat and flour are scarce and hard to find. But a few innovative farmers and bakers have been plugging away, laying the groundwork for others to join them as a second wave. Driven to gain more control over their own production chain, they are reaping the rewards (while overcoming the obstacles) of yet another value-added product.

Pioneers of this movement include Dutchess County organic farmer Alton Earnhart and micro-miller and baker Don Lewis, who works with Earnhart's wheat and other grains; Ben Gleason, a long-time Vermont organic grower and miller of his own wheat; and Lee and Lisa Purdy, a Michigan organic farm couple who have created a niche running an historic stone mill and baking with their own wheat.

Alton Earnhart always wanted to grow grains for his own bread, so when he was ready for a new challenge at Lightning Tree Farm in Millbrook, he started experimenting. To process the wheat, he acquired an electric stone mill that can turn out 30 to 40 pounds of flour an hour, far beyond the needs of the average home baker.

Raised as a Quaker in Indiana, where his grandparents farmed (one grandfather grew wheat in Saskatchewan before immigrating), Earnhart eventually came east for college and stayed in New York. Over 14 years managing the land at Lightning Tree Farm, he has built a successful organic animal feed enterprise, the only one in the mid- and lower-Hudson Valley that actually grows most of its ingredients. Lately, he has been complementing that business with food crops for humans.

Though Lightning Tree Farm comprises over 400 certified organic acres, in a given year only a fraction of that gets planted in wheat. Growing a diversity of crops lies at the heart of organic and ecological farming in general, and this principle is central to Earnhart's enterprise. In the organic mindset, monoculture spells trouble. Earnhart says bad things (like pest outbreaks and other misfortunes) can happen on a big scale. Earnhart bases his crop rotation plan on factors like each crop's nutrient needs, how well it competes with weeds and the length of time it's in the ground. Wheat (or, for that matter, any other small grain) doesn't get planted in the same field again for an interval of three years or more.

In total, Earnhart produces about 20 or 30 tons of wheats for bread and pastry flour, including unusual types such as spelt. "I've tried to be conservative and not go crazy ramping up production on any one crop before it's worked out," he says. "Careful decisions about infrastructure are what make or break this kind of business." During the next few years, he will be fine-tuning his wheat program.

Despite--or maybe because of--this "go slow" philosophy, the demand for Earhart's food crops is assured. He recently made his first purchase of wheat from other in-state organic growers to avoid having to let down customers and to share his strong market with farmers from less fortunate areas.

Earnhart has a vision of supplying wheat and other grains to a half dozen small-scale food businesses, including Don Lewis's Wild Hive Farm, a wood-fired bakery and micromill in Clinton Corners. The two began working together about a decade ago, when Lewis, a Greenmarket baker, came in to buy chicken feed and ended up getting some wheat, as well. Since then, his baking and milling business has blossomed with a following drawn to the local, freshly milled Lightning Tree grains in his flours, breads and other products.

Having customers who are able to appreciate what he produces and who have the flexibility to "work around any inconsistencies" means a lot to Earnhart. He recoils from the idea of selling to a big production bakery for which his wheat would be "a drop in the bucket." Essentially, he's a direct marketer.

Non-industrial-scale organic wheat growers, who, like Earnhart, refuse to sell their crop as a commodity, have begun to emerge across the country. Ben Gleason, a Vermont farmer who ekes out every last bit of value (short of baking) by delivering his own flour to several small bakeries and large food co-ops, plants winter wheat on about 35 acres, one-third of the land he cultivates. In the early 1970s, when he lived in Connecticut, Gleason's impulse was to grow all his own food. He has been selling the flour he mills from his own wheat since 1982, when he grew just five acres of the grain. Now, wheat is one phase in his overall rotation scheme that alternates fields in beans, oats and peas for animal feed, and clover for seed.

Over the years, Gleason has grown several different wheat varieties (all of them commercially available). He shies away from saving his own seed as too risky, and instead opts for wheat seed certified to be disease free and very low in weed seeds.

"Many people remark that my flour has a lot better flavor," Gleason says. He theorizes that the taste of his flour could be due to the well-mineralized soil (built up over 30 years of organic growing practices with good crop rotation), or his farm's temperate climate (as compared to the dryland regions, where most bread wheat is grown).

Another pioneer in small-scale wheat production is Lee Purdy, a Michigan organic farmer. He found his calling as a miller when he and his wife bought a 172-year-old stone mill, where they also run a bakery. At farmers' markets, they tout their breads and baked goods "were wheat the day before."

"This has the makings of an adventure story--a little intrigue and a lot of terror," Purdy says of his vertically integrated business. He admits it has been very gratifying. "One thing we put a lot into is building community--we straddle a lot of different communities."

Purdy's mill is located in Michigan's Genesee County. (Settlers who flocked to the area from New York via the Erie Canal named their new home after the rich, wheat-producing valley south of Rochester. The mill was built one year before Michigan attained statehood (in the second violation of a treaty with the Ojibwa Indians, according to Purdy). Originally a gristmill fitted with French burr stones, a major reconstruction in 1937 turned it into a more modern roller mill. In its heyday, the mill ground 40 to 60 tons of wheat a month Kroger's supermarket would drop off a semi-trailer on Monday and pick it up, full of bagged flour, on Friday. In 1977, with granite grindstones from North Carolina, the mill was reconverted into a stone mill.

As a farmer, Purdy admits to "flailing around" for years, trying everything to hang on to the family farm he was buying from his brothers. They tried a roadside vegetable stand, different types of livestock and organic field crops (for which he couldn't always find a buyer). He always worked a second job, from draftsman to servicing grain elevators, and even as a second millman for Pillsbury. While his eclectic background gave him a head start in dissecting the mill's workings, he admits, "In this old plant, I had to teach myself to mill." He started with corn meal because it's hard to ruin; it took him two months to work up to wheat.

Purdy doesn't mill "green flour" out of freshly harvested wheat because it gives "crazy baking results." Some wheat kernels have 18 to 20 percent moisture, while others have half that. With a month of storage they equalize their moisture content.

Old-timers milled by feel, setting the grindstones .002 inch apart without being able to see them. Purdy says he listens for vibrations and mills by volume. He's proud of the 65- to 67-pound yield of unbleached flour he is able to get from 100 pounds of wheat; he sieves the flour to separate it into three fractions: Unbleached goes through 50-mesh silk, while a larger, 26-mesh wire catches the wheat germ meal. Bran flows directly out of the spout.

"Wheat starts its degradation as soon as I break the seed coat," he says, noting that wheat germ takes about 72 hours to become rancid. He recommends freezing it. Despite the consequent damage to the vitamin E. Purdy believes it's the best short-term storage solution.

Earnhart, Gleason and Purdy belong to the new breed of direct-marketing wheat farmers who do not foresee growing more than 50 acres of wheat a year. Nonetheless, "local wheat" is spurring people and organizations to look for ways to speed up the return of wheat to their regions.

The new consciousness is evident in New York City Greenmarket's 2005 decree that bakers selling at its 45 farmers' markets must use local grain. At the time, some of the dozen bakers (plus a larger number of farm-based bakeries) balked that no one grows wheat in the region--especially not the hard red wheats that Americans consider essential for yeasted and sourdough breads. Although the 2005 Greenmarket rule, like previous attempts to require local grain content, proved unenforceable, last winter, June Russell, Greenmarket's head farm inspector and an enthusiastic defender of regional agriculture, decided to review the facts behind the bakers' arguments. She learned that the resurgence of interest in local grains (from both the growers' and consumers' perspectives) could be poised to change things on the ground.

As a result, Greenmarket is planning to phase in a requirement that its bakers use at least 15 percent regional grain in their breads and baked goods, with receipts to document the purchases. (The vast Greenmarket region stretches 250 miles straight north from its Manhattan epicenter, west into New York's Finger Lakes, and also encompasses New Jersey, Long Island, and some of Pennsylvania and New England.) "If there is going to be [regional] grain production, we want our bakers supporting it," Russell says, adding that Greenmarket will keep bakers apprised of efforts to solve problems of access, which she agrees will be a hurdle.

In the debate about the practicality and feasibility of sourcing locally grown flour on a commercial scale, Sam Sherman gives weight to the bakers' concerns. As the owner of Champlain Valley Milling in Westport, he has a solid basis for his opinions. Perched on the New York side of Lake Champlain, his is the largest organic mill in the Northeast, though a tiny operation in the overall flour industry.

In the mill's towering storage bins, Champlain Valley segregates wheat by type (winter or spring, hard or soft) and protein levels, not by the provenance of the grain or its variety. Every year, the family business mills 100,000 bushels of hard wheat--a whopping 6 million pounds--but Sherman has only been able to source a few percent of that, at best, from New York and Vermont farmers, though it's not for lack of trying: Sherman buys an estimated 1,000 acres worth of corn, spelt, rye and wheat from farms in the two states. This includes 30 to 100 acres of hard red wheat for bread flour, plus a larger acreage of soft white wheat for pastry flour, a type considered better suited to the region. Sherman also bucks the norms of the milling world--he deals with individual farmers, not commodity exchanges; he never buys on the spot market; he doesn't look for deals at grain elevators; and he stays away from the futures market.

Nonetheless, Sherman has no desire to sacrifice what keeps his baking customers coming back, so he sticks mainly with a small pool of growers in the Great Plains, where, for well over a century, conventional wisdom has placed the locus of quality hard red wheat production. He has vetted these farmers' growing practices and he follows their weather. He specifies the varieties, based on multi-year field trials and their baking characteristics. Before he orders a railroad car of wheat, he gets a sample of the load analyzed. He's sharp and careful.

When Sherman and his family first started out with the mill in 1985, they grew most of what they milled. Early on, they had a poor wheat crop and had to buy wheat for the mill. This experience strengthened his belief that you can't count on growing good wheat in our comparatively rainy region. "It may work one year and not the next," he cautions. In places such as Kansas and the Canadian prairie, the deep soils and drier climate have historically resulted in large, predictable yields.

Sherman's experience confirms that even a good-looking wheat field does not automatically translate into good flour—harvest conditions and timeliness are critical. For example, a little rain after wheat matures tends to destroy some of its gluten strength, according to Sherman. With enough moisture-induced sprouting damage, wheat cannot be salvaged for bread making.

Rock Hill Bakehouse owner Matt Funiciello's calculations further underscore the extent of the shortfall of regional bread wheat production. His business in Saratoga County is a mid-size bakery specializing in European-style, naturally leavened, hearth-baked breads. A vendor at Greenmarket for more than 20 years, Rock Hill wholesales to supermarkets and specialty stores. Funiciello estimates his bakery would need 800 to 1,000 acres of wheat to fill its unbleached, unbrominated white flour needs alone (though he adds the bakery has succeeded in regionally sourcing a portion of its spelt and rye).

Funiciello believes that local wheat can be an option now for small, truly artisan bakers who sell their breads on a small scale exclusively at a few farmers' markets. "It's very idealistic," he says, "but what if you want to put a thousand loaves in a supermarket, or 20,000 loaves in the region?" For a bakery the size of Rock Hill--neither "a huge factory" nor an "artisan enterprise"--buying from individual farmers is "not workable." Regardless of the acreage planted, Funiciello says other challenges, like the quality of the wheat and the skill of the miller, matter a lot at his scale of operation. Rock Hill doesn't have the flexibility of a one-person bakery to work around flaws in raw ingredients, and it doesn't use any of the many allowable additives that serve to compensate for shortcomings in commodity flour.

Funiciello believes a relationship with an independent mill, like Champlain Valley, offers the best option for creating a demand for local grain. "As a buyer, I can tell my miller that I am willing to buy local flour, grain and seeds," he says. "It's mid-sized bakers, like us, that can act as a pry bar to get millers to see the benefits of producing regionally grown flour."

But attempts to re-establish Hudson Valley wheat will face some formidable challenges. Generations have gone without a significant crop, and gone is the infrastructure and know-how required for growing and processing it locally. Our highly centralized industrial food system has made "small" and "local" synonymous with inefficient and outmoded, and the consensus remains that bread-wheat farming belongs in the optimally suited, dry-land regions. Questioning this long-established assignment means all aspects of the soil-to-grain-to-flour equation must be reinvented, from finding the best seed, learning how to grow a reliable, high-quality crop, to developing storage, milling and distribution capacity. The new wave of wheat farmers at present looks a lot like the farmstead cheesemaking a decade ago or the transition to farm wineries when it began reshaping the American wine industry for 40 years.

Some of the barriers to developing sustainable local wheat and grain enterprises may be difficult to overcome. Inflated land values discourage grain growing due to the extensive area requirements (though corn and hay are still grown on a fairly large scale in parts of the Valley). The demand for local wheat and other grains has proved to be mainly limited to organic production. Growing grain for human consumption is not a casual task—it requires specialized equipment for harvesting, and suitable drying and storage arrangements that protect it against loss from mold and insect infestations.

But over the past decade, both price and demand have changed. Last summer, for example, the price of wheat on the world market was climbing, which meant that the cost of local wheat began to appear more reasonable in relation to the rising cost of the commercial product.

Additionally, global wheat demand exceeded production in seven of the last ten years. With the weak dollar attracting more foreign buyers to American wheat, U.S. stockpiles have dropped to their lowest level since 1946. "Ten years ago all my costs were labor," Funiciello mentioned last August. "Flour as a commodity made its cost pretty much irrelevant." But not any more: He says his price for unbleached, unbrominated flour had almost tripled from three years earlier. Ethanol subsidies for corn drove some farmers to convert wheat acreage to corn, which accounted for a good share of the wheat price increase, Funiciello claims. The demands of industrial organic dairy and poultry farms for corn had the same effect on wheat in the organic sector.

Earnhart, like some of the other farmers who champion local food and live out the new agrarian values, has decided to operate independent of the commodity market. He doesn't want to be grabbing windfall profits one year and weathering devastating lows the next, so he tries to keep his prices steady to cover his cost of production. "We're tired of the cyclical up and down," he says. Even after the price of organic soybeans had dropped, Lightning Tree Farm was paying farmers extra for their beans, which it buys for its feed mixes. Earnhart summed up his ethic: "They're real farmers. We have a rapport and we agreed on a price. If the rest of the economy is going to pay attention to local food, we can't get caught up in that game of 'lowest cost production,'" which, he stressed, depends on cheap oil. "We have to look at the hidden costs--of shipping food from elsewhere, or of a farm in New York going under."

While wheat has been used as a commodity for at least a couple millennia, surviving traditional cultures and pockets of peasant communities were isolated and tenacious enough to hang on to their own cherished types of wheat--they kept their localized strains going because they did well on their land and had the qualities they sought in their favored foods. That is, of course, until the relatively recent penetration of the world food system into almost every nook and cranny of the planet sped up the rate of plant and animal extinction.

When it's sold as a global commodity, the few factors that matter in a load of wheat can be boiled down to a simple "grade," as one discovers by checking out the latest prices on the Internet. The grade takes into account whether the wheat is white or red; whether it was planted in spring or it stays in the ground over the winter; protein content; and the extent of damage to the wheat kernels. That's it.

Against this backdrop, advocates of localizing the food system are embracing the revival of heritage wheats as a stimulus for more local production. The Northeast Organic Wheat project is about rethinking the priorities in the wheat we grow and consume. It's the "people, not profit" approach to the fundamentals.

What do organic growers in the Northeast need in a wheat variety? Hardiness, pest resistance, and the ability to thrive in a system with limited fertility and some competition from weeds for starters. The wheat will be different from the varieties that have been bred to withstand chemical fertilizers and fungicides, weed killers and insecticides.

New York project leader Elizabeth Dyck is undertaking quite an ambitious enterprise. With determination, she sought out older wheat varieties packed away forgotten in seed bank freezers, as well as more recent offerings from Canada and other parts of the U.S. that she suspects might have advantages on upstate farms. She also has painstakingly researched old agriculture reports and other sources for descriptions of lost varieties. Frequently, she can only get her hands on a pound or two of seed; multiplying it by growing it out for a season or two is necessary to produce enough bulk seed to plant in farmers' fields.

Mike Davis, the manager of the Cornell Willsboro Research Farm on Lake Champlain, recognizes the importance of this quest. "You need to do something to differentiate [local wheat] from the commodity product," he says. Part of the key to increasing regional wheat production is finding varieties that are "really well adapted to this region's soils and climate, and especially high quality. Six acres (of a couple hundred) at this Cornell experiment farm are in organic wheat and other field crops and it's there that he has put in replicated trials of heritage wheats given to him by Dyck.

When Earnhart signed on early to participate in the Northeast Organic Wheat project by trialing wheat varieties on the farm, practicality was number one in his mind. Unless a variety performs well under his low-input farming conditions, he doesn't have any intention of growing it. He is on the lookout for wheats that reliably produce without added fertilizer, with only clover plowed under for the nitrogen it releases. For a wheat to fit his system, he says it also must have enough leaf canopy to shade out weeds.

The question of treated seed illustrates the need to breed for sustainable agriculture. Earnhart remarks that when wheat breeders use a fungicide seed treatment to prevent wheat seed from decaying, they are, in effect, selecting for "wimpy seed vulnerable to rotting." He has never used treated seed; instead, he protects his seed by putting off spring planting until the soil warms to 58F. His wheat acreage is small enough to quickly get the seed in the ground when the time is right.

If Earnhart likes a particular variety in the field, he pays attention to its eating qualities. He has a simple method for evaluating flavor. Using an attachment to his Kitchen Aid food processor, he'll roll enough wheat (like rolled oats) for a week and then cook it up as a hot breakfast cereal.

The poster child for heritage wheats is Red Fife, the hard red wheat that settled the Canadian prairie and made it a breadbasket in the nineteenth century. It's known for an appealing flavor and making good bread. Though there are many other wheats we should preserve, its advantages are instructive.

While a modern variety is expected to consist of almost identical seeds, Red Fife packs considerable variation among its seeds because it is a "land race," a variety that is a mixture by definition. This allows Red Fife to more easily adapt to local growing conditions. Though all the Red Fife currently grown in Canada, from the eastern Maritimes to the valleys of British Columbia, came from the multiplication of a single pound of seed in 1988, different strains already have emerged. A miller in the Atlantic provinces was quoted as saying, "Farmers are intrigued with how Red Fife adapts. Their yields keep going up."

No discussion of the prospects for producing bread wheat in the Hudson Valley would be complete without reference to the protein question. Experience teaches us that wheat protein levels tend to be depressed in temperate regions with adequate rainfall. That geography is typically considered better for soft (pastry) wheat production than for the higher protein hard (bread) wheat.

Overlaid on the factual influence of climate is a prejudice that seems particularly American. The entire wheat chain, from farmer to broker to miller to baker, has been convinced that wheat must have a greatly elevated protein content to provide enough gluten for yeasted and sourdough bread making. But this view hasn't quite been universally embraced. The late culinary historian Karen Hess zeroed in on this point in her keynote address at the Symposium on the History of American Bread at The Smithsonian Institute in 1994: "Hardness is not the only criterion of wheat, nor even the most important one, although to read American works on bread one would be given to think so. At the French government bureau concerned with the quality of grain, I was dumbfounded to learn that their prize bread wheat strain, depending on year and provenance, produces flour running from 9 to 10 percent gluten content. American bakers consider such flour virtually unworkable for making bread--12 percent often being given as a minimum. But M. Cocaud, maitre boulanger at the time, smilingly explained to this American that, 'It is not so much the quantity of gluten that counts as the quality.' The French also believe that quality is in inverse proportion to the size of the harvest, whether speaking of wheat or wine... Since they equate flavor with quality, it follows that enlightened soil management is to be preferred to artificial fertilizers and overdependence on irrigation." She concludes by noting, "the bread of France is also in peril" as production in that country's breadbasket region increased threefold in two decades.

Though you wouldn't guess from the written version of her name, Caroline Gordon, the bakery manager at Hawthorne Valley Farm, comes from Germany, where she trained in baking by completing a five-year apprenticeship. Though she is skeptical about some of Hess's claims, she concurs that U.S. expectations about wheat are different from what she learned back home. Gordon notes that growing modern wheat with a lot of chemical fertilizers gives wheat protein levels as high as 16 percent. "We don't have this kind of high-protein wheat in Germany," she explains. "We would not have a flour higher in protein than all-purpose flour--12 percent."

Flour in her native land is graded by ash content, rather than protein, and there are also more than three categories. In this country, hard wheat, which has the highest protein content, gets milled into bread flour; soft wheat with much lower protein becomes pastry flour; and all-purpose flour is an intermediate blend.

Yet, even as the debate about which wheat is best suited to which region and for what purpose, and even as seed conservationists work to stave off the disappearance of older varieties with potentially important traits, another threat looms large. Corporate, university, and government research on "transgenic" (genetically modified, or GMO) wheat has been underway in various parts of the world, including the U.S. and Canada, and field trials of GMO wheat are being conducted. Several years ago, intense opposition both in Europe and this continent's Great Plains wheat belt temporarily slowed down the introduction of GMO wheat.

U.S. Wheat Associates, the industry's official export promotion arm, predicts the crop will go on the market whithing the next decade. In a 2008 Powerpoint presentation, the group states that it's "No longer a question of if transgenic [wheat] will come, but when."

Northeast Organic Wheat Project

www.growseed.org/now.html

Lightning Tree Farm 152 N Mabbettsville Road, Millbrook

(845) 677-9507

Rock Hill Bakehouse 19 Exchange Street, Glens Falls

(518) 615-0777

?