Tompkins County Relocalization Project

[Tompkins County Relocalization Project <tcrp-news AT lists.ibiblio.org>]

Tompkins County Relocalization Project wrote:
> It would be great if we could put local growing of wheat together
> with the rebuilding of our water-driven local mills.

Cayuga Pure Organics (on the Dryden/Caroline line) is growing and 
milling beans and grains.  They've mostly been doing wheat, but they're 
adding hulling equipment to handle a wider variety.

It's not water powered, but you can see more at:

http://livingindryden.org/2007/08/moving_down_the_food_processin.html

There's a link to a gallery photos of their operation in the middle.

So at least there's some local expertise.

Thanks,
Simon

> ==================================================================
>
> The New York Times
> September 10, 2008
> Flour That Has the Flavor of Home
> By INDRANI SEN
>
> Millbrook, N.Y.
>
> SQUINTING in the afternoon sun, Alton Earnhart strolled across his
> farm here in the Hudson Valley one day last month with Don Lewis,
> a baker and miller. Rows of wheat swayed to the horizon.
>
> A farmer and a miller surveying fields of russet wheat would not
> have been an unusual sight here on a late-summer day 200 years
> ago. Gristmills once dotted the banks of streams and rivers
> throughout New York, mapping out settlement just as subway
> stations today chart New York City’s migratory patterns.
>
> Today, nearly all of the nation’s wheat is grown on vast fields
> and milled in factories in the Midwest. Over the past few years,
> though, farmers and millers like Mr. Earnhart and Mr. Lewis have
> begun restoring wheat fields and reviving flour mills around the
> country.
>
> In New Mexico, a cooperative of Native American and Latino farmers
> produce a boutique local flour. In Western Massachusetts, a baking
> couple has persuaded their customers to plant front-lawn wheat
> patches. In Vermont, a farmer whose homegrown wheat flour was a
> curiosity when he began growing it in the 1970s now can’t keep up
> with demand. And in Pennsylvania, a venerable pastry flour brand
> from the 1800s has been resurrected, made with local organic
> wheat.
>
> Similar movements have started around the globe, including in
> Japan, where some udon noodle makers are using local wheat instead
> of the Australian wheat they had relied upon, and in Israel, where
> a group of Jewish and Arab farmers are trying to grow native
> varieties of wheat to supplant the American wheat that dominates
> the market there.
>
> In New York, a consortium of farmers and bakers called Northeast
> Organic Wheat is challenging the assumption that the state’s soil
> and climate make high-quality wheat impossible. "That’s what I
> heard that frustrated me 10 years ago, you can’t grow it here,"
> said Mr. Earnhart. "That’s like saying to me, go do it."
>
> Advocates of local foods have bemoaned the state of mass-produced
> flour, even from higher-end brands. Midwestern wheat has been bred
> for uniformity and yield instead of flavor or nutrition, they say,
> and processed for shelf stability. But avoiding commercial flour
> has been a challenge.
>
> Against a backdrop of concerns over food and transportation costs
> and with demand for local food growing, small wheat farmers see an
> opportunity.
>
> Since 1977, Jack and Anne Lazor have grown wheat and milled flour
> at their dairy farm in Westfield, Vt. Until three or four years
> ago, customers showed no interest in the flour, Mr. Lazor
> said. Last winter, his flour sold out in January.
>
> "It sure is amazing," he said. "Thirty years later, all of a
> sudden I feel vindicated. We definitely went down the right road."
>
> It might take a while to appreciate high-quality, small-batch
> flours after a lifetime of eating food made with mass-produced
> flour. Their musky fragrances are often more pronounced, and
> variations in taste and texture bring a new range of complexity to
> baked goods, making supermarket flour seem one dimensional by
> comparison.
>
> "Fresh-ground grains taste entirely different from the flour you
> buy at the grocery store," said Mary-Howell Martens, who sells
> organic feed and seed in Penn Yan, N.Y., and grinds her own flour
> at home. "Everyone knows that a January tomato that comes from
> Mexico tastes different than an August tomato taken straight from
> the vine. It’s the same with grains."
>
> In New York, Northeast Organic Wheat is holding workshops on
> threshing, cleaning and milling wheat, and exploring marketing
> alternatives such as baker-farmer partnerships and farm-share
> groups, where members pick up a weekly allotment of grains to
> grind into flour themselves using a small mill. They are also
> experimenting with older grains grown here when New York was the
> region’s breadbasket, as well as ancient wheat varieties.
>
> This region is supposedly too rainy for hard red spring wheat, the
> high-gluten wheat planted in the spring and harvested in the early
> fall. But some are growing it anyway because it is good for making
> bread. Others are sticking with the soft white winter wheat,
> low-gluten grain that’s planted in the fall and harvested in early
> summer that was traditionally grown here and is generally used for
> pastry and cake flour.
>
> Mr. Lewis called his first encounter with soft local flour eight
> years ago a revelation. He was picking up some organic feed for
> his hens from Mr. Earnhart’s farm, Lightning Tree, when he came
> upon a barrel of flour that Mr. Earnhart had made with a small
> mill.
>
> "I stuck my hand in it and I said, oh boy," Mr. Lewis
> recalled. "It felt different, it smelled different, it tasted
> different. It was intriguing."
>
> Mr. Lewis bought a second-hand milling machine and began grinding
> Mr. Earnhart’s wheat. From his bakery at Wild Hive Farm, Mr. Lewis
> now sells bagged flour as well as breads, cookies, scones,
> biscuits and pastries, all made from local grains.
>
> Creating a market for local wheat takes more than just planting
> seeds.
>
> Cheryl Maffei and Jonathan Stevens, who own Hungry Ghost Bread in
> Northampton, Mass., have persuaded 100 of their customers to grow
> plots of wheat in their yards. A year ago, when they started
> seeking local wheat, Ms. Maffei said, their attitude was a tad
> naïve.
>
> "We thought, we’re bakers, and we want our flour to be local, more
> local than North Dakota, and all we have to do is ask the farmers
> to grow it and we’ll buy it," she recalled.
>
> When she spoke to farmers, though, she found that nobody knew
> which varieties of wheat would thrive in the area, and the
> cleaning, milling and storage facilities needed for flour
> production didn’t exist locally. Ms. Maffei and Mr. Stevens began
> working with nearby colleges to identify wheat varieties to test,
> Ms. Maffei said. The customer plots, which were harvested last
> month, were trial runs and raised consciousness about the
> wheat. Already, Ms. Maffei said, the three patches they planted at
> the bakery have brought in curious customers. "They’ve never even
> seen wheat growing," she marveled.
>
> But there is a long road ahead. The closest miller who can produce
> the flour they need is in Quebec. "With our infrastructure here,
> we also lost the knowledge of wheat and milling and storing," she
> said. "So we’re rebuilding it as we go."
>
> In New York, those who have ventured into wheat farming for flour
> have been mostly producers of animal feed for the lucrative
> organic meat market. The state’s wheat supply is small and the
> weather is unpredictable. Setting up the cleaning, milling,
> sifting and storage facilities required for a small-scale mill
> like Wild Hive’s costs at least $30,000, Mr. Lewis said.
>
> And the resulting flour can be finicky, bakers and home cooks have
> found. Mass-produced flour is tested and often blended for
> consistent, precise gluten levels. Small-batch flour can vary from
> season to season, farm to farm and even field to field, with
> different gluten content, flavor or levels of water
> absorption. Bakers used to uniform results have trouble adjusting.
>
> Supermarket flour is roller-milled and sifted to remove as much
> bran and germ as possible, making it shelf-stable for months or
> years. Most of the local flours are stone-ground, and even the
> white flours retain some wheat germ and can go rancid within weeks
> if not frozen, because the oils of the wheat germ oxidize.
>
> Members of the local wheat movement want to shift Americans’
> attitudes toward bread. Bakers must learn to adapt their recipes
> to the qualities of the flour, they say, as people did before
> mass-produced flour. And consumers used to buying the same loaf
> every day must adjust their expectations and learn to tolerate
> some variation.
>
> That is easier said than done, said Amy Scherber of Amy’s Bread in
> Manhattan, who has tried to use small-batch regional flour in her
> bakery but found it too inconsistent in quality and supply. She
> likes the principle of a baker responding to the quirks and
> nuances of flour, she said, but expecting her entire staff to do
> so on the fly is impractical. And if something goes wrong, a
> botched batch could mean 400 pounds of dough in the trash.
>
> "Our wholesale customers are restaurants and stores," Ms. Scherber
> said. "If you send a flat-looking loaf of bread, they’ll say, we
> don’t like it."
>
> Also, the soft wheat flours grown in the Northeast have low gluten
> and won’t produce the moist, springy crumb that Americans prize in
> bread.
>
> "It is perfectly fine for building very dense, very grainy
> Germanic breads," said Matt Funiciello, the owner of Rock Hill
> Bakehouse in Moreau, N.Y. The key, said Mr. Funiciello, is to
> embrace the difference.
>
> "Don’t expect this bread to be similar to what you’ve had before,"
> he said. "If you open your mind and your palate to it, you’ll
> realize that, hey, flour tastes like something. Wheat has a flavor
> that’s unique."
>
> June Russell, the farm inspections coordinator for Greenmarket,
> hopes variability might eventually become a selling point for
> bread, as it has for other foods.
>
> "Our cheese-makers at market will talk about their differences
> season to season," Ms. Russell said. "They’ll say, Our milk is
> really rich right now because the cows are eating this or
> that. You’ll never hear a baker talk like that, and that’s because
> everyone is basically getting their flour from the same big
> system." She is working with Northeast Organic Wheat, organizing
> information sessions and questionnaires about their bakers’ needs.
>
> Organizers in New York look to older local wheat movements for
> inspiration. In New Mexico, for example, the Sangre de Cristo
> Cooperative, a collective of small-scale wheat growers, produces
> flour for local bakeries and co-ops.
>
> Craig Mapel, an official with the New Mexico Department of
> Agriculture, helped start the wheat project in 1994 in the
> mountains north of Albuquerque. He said wheat had not been grown
> in the area for 50 years. Farmers in the program now plant more
> than 400 acres with wheat, Mr. Mapel said, and sell 250,000 to
> 350,000 pounds of flour a year.
>
> "There have certainly been bumps in the road," he said. But, he
> added, "it worked, because they’re still there."
>
> In 2002, McGeary Organics, a grain merchant, bought a mill built
> in the 1740s in Annville, Pa., and resurrected the venerable
> Pennsylvania pastry flour known as Daisy Flour, milling local soft
> wheat.
>
> "In the 1800s, if you were a self-respecting housewife in
> Lancaster, Pa., you couldn’t operate unless you had Daisy Flour in
> your cupboard," said David Poorbaugh, the company’s
> president. "We’re all romantics, and that’s part of the reason
> that we do this. I think we’re lucky if we break even with this
> old mill."
>
> Mr. Earnhart, the farmer, hopes local wheat will catch on, but
> he’s also apprehensive. Greater demand might bring calls for more
> standardization, he said. He doesn’t want to end up on the same
> path as large-scale wheat producers.
>
> "The idea that we have to get it so sophisticated that everything
> is perfect kind of defeats what I think made this unique when we
> started out," he said. "One of the things that we have to decide
> is how far we want to go."
>
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