An Update: What we've learned thus far...
Yes, it has been far too long since my last post. I have not written since wheat harvest of 2013. At that point, there was not much to say beyond the fact that it was a terrible harvest. It was one of the latest harvests on record, and a very wet one at that. There was sprouting in the field, high levels of mycotoxins, and crops that simply did not get harvested because the ground was too wet. Our wheat breeder, Dr Marshall, lost a good bit of his test plots. He said it is to be expected that once every ten years, there will be a bad harvest. This was that year.
And yet, we are still here, milling forward.
And so, what we've learned thus far....
#1 Grain that looks vibrant, often is (and vice versa).
We were lucky with our 2012 crop. It convinced us that we could do single variety milling (most modern mills blend to spec) maintaining the provenance of the grain, variety, etc. Out the gate we had wheat that could stand alone as a whole grain or sifted product. 2013 wasn't nearly as straightforward.
#2 Specs don't often equate.
There are certain defined parameters that most flour mills exist within. We have milling quality standards-- lab tests reveal protein, falling numbers (a test that indicates potential sprout damage), and test weight (average weight in pounds per bushel (weight to volume))-- but regardless of what the lab numbers say, the tell-all for us is the bake test. This past harvest we had lab results that simply fell off the page, and yet some fine loaves were still produced.
Turkey Red, TAM 303, NuEast hard red wheat harvest
Looking Back Farms, Tyner, NC
#3 Plan to have enough of the previous year's harvest on hand to buy oneself enough time to sort through the new harvest.
I assessed the harvest available to us-- the brunt was coming from the
Sandhills
-- Billy Carter's farm in Eagle Springs. Lab results were okay and it performed well enough as a sifted flour, but it lacked the strength to stand alone as a whole grain flour. The grain coming off Looking Back Farms in
Tyner
had terrible lab results but seemed to perform well, and yet the harvest was minuscule-- not even a full truckload. I thought this would be the year we'd have to import from the Midwest. I called farmer friends in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, and contacted the Midwest Organic Farmers Cooperative, whose span reaches from Tennessee to Wisconsin. All the while, we were milling what grain we had. We were still working through what remained of 2012 crop. Our 2013 rye crop was in good shape and arrived just as we were finishing up 2012 rye. When we milled the last of our 2012 wheat, we shifted gears. The best of the lot-- Looking Back's wheat-- was devoted solely to whole wheat flour; Carter's crop would be used for our sifted flours. This was the plan until Looking Back's wheat ran out. And at that point, no solid plan was in place. I just wasn't ready (or quite willing) to commit to importing wheat.
I literally found myself counting the totes while counting down the weeks... and then the days. I knew I needed to make a decision. Do we import? Carter Farms still had two more truckloads of wheat in the bin-- about what we needed to make it through the year, but could the bakers work with this wheat as a whole grain flour (the brunt of what we mill)?
Ive always felt that beyond connecting our farmers with our bakers, our charge has been to produce the highest quality product-- fresh flour, cold stone milled-- a flour of provenance AND of quality. Quality has to exist, or we may easily find ourselves in the ranks with other 'local' products we all secretly wish were coming from California (Napa Valley, that it..).
I finally milled some of Carter's wheat into whole wheat flour and distributed samples amongst some of my favorite local bakers-- Dave Workman of
, Tara Jensen of
, Dave Bauer of
and Cathy Cleary of
to perform bake tests All four bakers came back with the same feedback which equated to a resounding thumbs up! This flour had received a thumbs down a few months earlier, so we-- including grower Billy Carter--
were all very excited to witness the improvement.
