Bob Quinn envisions wheat as an organically grown specialty crop rather than just a commodity.
“To me, there’s something almost sacred about growing wheat,” he said during an appearance at Grain School at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. “Just to think that this seed you are putting in the ground has been passed down for 500 generations and provided so many people along the way with the chance to earn an honest living.”
Quinn would like to return grain crops to the reverence they once held in society by growing them differently and concentrating on improving their health attributes. He has spent the last couple of years traveling extensively to promote his book, Grain By Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs and Healthy Food.
He was one of several Grain School speakers who shared their experiences developing markets and infrastructure to support specialty grains.
By the time Quinn graduated from college and returned to his family’s north central Montana wheat farm in the late 1970s, he was concerned by how many consumers could no longer tolerate wheat-based foods, due to dietary sensitivities. That led him to pioneer an organically grown Turkish strain of ancient wheat that goes by the common name khoransan but he trademarked as Kumut.
Many breeders insist that the gluten in wheat has not changed much over the last century and a half of wheat genetic selection and variety development. But Quinn argues the emphasis on yield to benefit large farmers and loaf volume to satisfy industrial bakers has led to subtle but meaningful changes in the kernel’s components. In addition, he contends widespread use of glyphosate and the milling of highly refined, white flour, which removes the third of the kernel that contains the most fiber and nutritive value, are also contributing factors.
“It’s not just one thing,” he said during a conversation at Grain School.
Friedrich Longin, a wheat breeder at the University of Hohenheim in Germany, confirmed that a similar trend is happening in Europe.
In fact, Quinn was able to grow his business in part by exporting grain to Italy and other European countries, which continue to be an important market for the crop.
Wheat breeders around the world still commonly draw on ancient wheat relatives to develop modern varieties. But growing and marketing these old grains in their original form pose a number of challenges.
While khoransan and spelt thresh like ordinary wheat, for example, einkorn and emmer require de-hulling, which adds an extra processing step.
Around the same time Quinn was beginning to experiment with ancient grains, Mark Nightengale was part of a group of farmers near Scott City, Kansas, who had grown increasingly concerned by the declining productivity of their soils and dissatisfied with the advice of university agronomists telling them simply to apply more nitrogen fertilizer.
Relying on a mix of farmer ingenuity and sheer determination, they started Heartland Mill and grew it into a successful marketing venture that now sells organically grown grains through several distributors and also operates a bread and pastry shop along Kansas Highway 96 in Scott County.
The operation stone-grinds wheat and corn and also processes oats, with a warehouse for storing the flour and a feed mill for shipping out organic feed grains. The company has been third-party organically certified since they first learned about the option back in 1986.
Nightengale said organic farming practices had improved the area’s poor-quality hard-pan soils, once severely lacking in organic matter, to around 5 to 6 percent, which allowed farmers to begin growing dryland corn successfully.
Capitalizing on consumer interest in organic foods hasn’t been easy, however. In one case, a freak winter storm dumped so much snow on the mill that several structures caved in and many pounds of product were lost.
But as Nightengale looks to the future his biggest worry is maintaining the integrity of the organic label.
“What concerns me more than anything is the foreign grains that are coming in and being passed off as organic,” he said.
Kris Gosar’s family moved to the San Luis Valley in the 1970s. His dad grew wheat and wanted to vertical integrate his market from field to table, so he started a small mill in Monte Vista. Gosar has since taken over the business and buys grain from about four organic farms in the area.
“The big mills have no problem telling the farmer that they are going to cut costs on what they are buying from them, if it’s not the right color, if it’s not the right protein. They look for every excuse to beat these farmers down,” he said.
“I like to work it the other way,” he added while attending Grain School. “I like to say, what do you need as a farmer to be successful, as far as pricing goes, and I’ll make it work on my end. Because the bakers believe in our product.”
Jason Griffin, owner of Aspen Moon Farm in Longmont, is a former landscaper who added specialty grains and flours to his biodynamic vegetable farm in recent years. His best seller among them is Floriani Red Flint Corn, which grosses nearly $18,000 per acre after it is cleaned and milled into a bright yellow cornmeal flecked with red. His specialty wheat flours also generate nearly $10,000 per acre.
That’s better than commodity wheat, but not as profitable as the organic fruits and vegetables he normally grows, he said during a breakout session.
But he also noted that the market is highly inelastic. Despite selling into one the nation’s biggest farmers markets in Boulder and through a large CSA, when he experimented with doubling his corn acreage, he was disappointed by the results and cut his production back from two acres to one.
He also prefers to harvest his crop by hand. On such a small acreage, it takes longer to get the combine set up than it does to actually harvest the crop, he said.