Partnership shortens grain supply chain

Twenty-five pound bags of all-purpose flour are being filled at Farmer Ground Flour in Trumansburg, New York. Each bag marks the halfway point of the journey for grain grown in New York State to the plate of consumers in the Northeastern United States. The circuit for this grain from field to table could be as short as 15 miles, which is exactly as the owners intended.

Thor Oechsner, Farmer Ground Flour: “My grandfather was a German immigrant. He was a baker. And when I was a kid, I used to run around in the bake shop covered in flour - And when it dawns on me that his main gig was flour, I thought, oh my gosh, I should try and look at producing flour from the grain that I grow on this farm and in that way I can increase the the value of it. So value added.” 

The first challenge in Thor Oeschsner’s flour project was discovering that grinding flour isn’t a hobby to be done as a home business. Flour is a food product that’s regulated by the State of New York. Milling flour requires a facility. A facility requires scale. That  scale has come slowly.

Greg Russo, Farmer Ground Flour: “So originally I thought I was going to be an organic farmer, got sucked into flour, milling, and I'm happy I did. I really like it. I still get to work with farmers a lot, have an understanding of agriculture and all that stuff.” 

Greg Russo met Oechsner as a student at Cornell University in nearby Ithaca, New York. As both men discovered the demands of flour milling, Russo took charge of the mill full time. The early grinds were performed by manually pouring grain from a bucket into the mill. Demand has driven multiple expansions and the adding of staff. The mill now runs 14 hours a day seven  days a week producing over a dozen different products. But working with grain from New York State has its own set of challenges. 

Thor Oechsner, Farmer Ground Flour: “95 percent of the Bakers said this ‘you cannot grow food grade wheat in New York. It's going to be crap. We can't grow good bread, flour, here. You guys are nuts. This is never going to work.’ And, you know, we were so stupid that we did it anyway.”

Two hundred years ago, Rochester, New York ground more flour than any other city in the world. Flour milling soon migrated to the western Plains, which is better suited for wheat.  

Greg Russo, Farmer Ground Flour: ”Any Miller will tell you there's a big difference between hard wheat grown on the Western Plains and hard wheat grown on the East Coast. So but upstate New York does happen to be a pretty favorable little pocket for for growing bread wheat. So that's that's sort of central to our identity and mission statement sourced locally.”

Their flour finds its way into commercial bakeries throughout the Northeast, forming the base of a broad range of breads and pastas. Another part of the mission of Farmer Ground Flour was to provide flour to Wide Awake Bakery three miles away. 

Stefan Senders, Wide Awake Bakery: “It turns out that stone milling or milling is an extraordinarily complicated business and to make a really nicely performing flour takes a lot of expertise that is really not taught anywhere. I mean, I know that there are places to learn milling, but again, this is all large scale industrial roller milling. There simply isn't the knowledge base for stone milling. It's died out. That is gone.”

A dinner with Russo and Oechsner convinced Senders to open a bakery. The farmer and the miller now had a baker as a partner. 

Stefan Senders, Wide Awake Bakery: “I thought he was crazy, but two bottles of wine makes crazy look better. And so it started to look pretty good. So that was kind of the instigation.” 

The community around Ithaca is key to the partnership’s success. Many households in the region buy locally produced food or participate in a CSA during the growing season, so the addition of a bakery with locally grown and ground flour was an easy sell. 

The niche where Wide Awake Bakery sits is focused on a high quality product that can’t be produced on an industrial scale.

Stefan Senders, Wide Awake Bakery: “It's a craft work, which is very satisfying to some people. It's not for everybody; it takes a tremendous amount of dedication. It's a very long road to learn how to make great bread. You know, any, any fool can make good bread. But to make great bread is actually extremely challenging.” 

The partnership between grower, miller and baker provides the opportunity for feedback to each part of the process.

Thor Oechsner, Farmer Ground Flour:  “It was this giant feedback loop where we were making flour. I was growing wheat, and we were getting back information from the end user the baker, and they were telling us what we needed to do and us making the mistakes, doing the experiments, getting some victories slowly over the years, all these different little tricks that we learned over time has slowly improved our flour to the point where you know, people really think it's good flour.”

The techniques of organic production limit the amount of grain available each year, but also provide the opportunity for more farmers to market their grain through Farmer Ground Flour.

Greg Russo, Farmer Ground Flour:  “And a lot of the farms we work with are at the about a thousand acre scale. But since they're organic, they have all these crop rotations and you can't plant your whole farm to wheat. Right. So of any of these farmers, we're only buying a fraction of their total acreage, their total crops, which is why we you know, grow from or pull from seven or eight farms.” 

Farmer Ground Flour sources grain from farmers over a 150 mile range of Upstate New York to reduce its weather risk each year. Rainfall can vary enough across the region to limit the number of acres that meet the specifications for high quality bread production in any one year. Grain that can’t be made into bread is often sold to distillers or breweries, which have different grain requirements. 

Thor Oechsner, Farmer Ground Flour: “It's been really rewarding to be able to work with these farmers and a sort of teach them about growing food grade grain. But we were also able to because we've created our own market, we set our own prices. I'm able to supply our market to these farms at a way higher price than they're going to get anywhere else. 

For Market to Market, I’m Peter Tubbs.