Baked from scratch: Local bakers sprout plan to grow wheat

[ Originally published on: Thursday, January 31, 2008 ]

It won't be your run-of-the-mill bread they're spinning their wheels for.

The bicycle-driven thresher and grain mill being demonstrated at Saturday's first-of-its-kind Winter Fare at Greenfield's Second Congregational Church points to a Montague baker's plan to grow his own wheat for 'Daniel Shays Bread.'

Jonathan Stevens and Cheryl Maffei of Hungry Ghost Bakery became interested in what some are calling their 'little red hen' idea of giving people wheat seeds to grow locally after a New Mexico baker at a conference eight or nine years ago introduced them to bread made from locally grown grain.

Instead of baking with organic flour grown in North Dakota that gets trucked to North Carolina for milling, Stevens said, it makes much more sense to look at growing wheat and other grains nearby and milling it locally -- especially since Massachusetts is believed to have been the site of North America's first oat harvest -- on the Elizabeth Islands -- in 1602.

Pioneer Valley farmers grew wheat, according to 93-year-old Amherst resident Stephen Puffer, who remembers farmers brought local wheat, rye and corn to his family's mill on what is now Route 63.

The Connecticut River Valley was the 'breadbasket of New England,' Howard S. Russell wrote in his 1976 history of New England farming, 'A Long Deep Furrow.'

'It was here,' said Stevens. 'We're not inventing anything out of whole cloth.'

Gill farmer Clifford Hatch grows wheat that is used for bread at Bread Euphoria in Williamsburg, and two farms, in Belchertown and Easthampton, are growing spelt and rye for Hungry Ghost as well as El Jardin Bakery in Deerfield.

The demonstration of 'home-spun' equipment from a Hampshire College appropriate technology class, sponsored by Northampton's Hungry Ghost Bakery, will be one of several offbeat -- or at least off-season -- attractions at the winter farmers market, planned for 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

'We pride ourselves on baking organic bread,' said Neftali Duran of Ashfield, who owns Holyoke-based El Jardin, with a branch bakery in Deerfield. 'Yet we buy flour from 1,500 miles away. It doesn't make sense.'

Working with the Montague couple on their 'wheat patch' project, Duran said he hopes that the success with spelt -- a grain that's becoming more popular, especially among people with wheat allergies -- will convince farmers that grain-growing is possible and worth the risk.

Stevens and Maffei, who have been trying to interest local farmers in looking again at growing wheat, are researching four or five heirloom varieties of the grain, which they plan to distribute to customers to try square-foot plots on their lawns as a test.

'It's a step-by-step, little thing,' said Stevens, who's faced a challenge not only in getting seeds -- some because of import restrictions from Canada -- but also in convincing agricultural officials that there's any reason to grow wheat here. 'We're trying to get it moving. We have to be an agricultural state, because we eat. There's a lot of fallow land, and economic rationalization be damned, we should use it. Let's stop paving it over and grow some food!'

Adding yeast to the call for local grain is the rising price of flour, because of transportation costs, but also because of incentives for farmers to plant corn and soy for ethanol instead, and because of worldwide demand for grain.

A 50-pound bag of organic white flour has gone from about $22 last May to $48 said Maffei, and organic whole-wheat flour went from $18 to $40.

But Stevens noted that the silver lining of rising flour prices is that it may encourage local farmers to grow wheat.

Once his 'guerilla farming' approach has been realized, handing out seeds to area people this spring and pedaling around Northampton in early August to harvest it from their yards with a scythe, Stevens said, the trickier piece will be figuring out how to process the grain.

A meeting is planned for March 12 at 7 p.m. in Northampton City Hall to teach people how to plant their small plots of wheat, and there are already plans for storing it in a local barn and giving people a chance to 'mill the grain that grew in the neighborhood' at the bakery's annual bread festival in September.

Area farmers already have combines and even reaper-binders that can be used for harvesting and threshing wheat, but how to thresh, clean and mill it into flour will be a problem if the scale of the project grows. That probably would require seeking grant funding, said Stevens.

He said he can imagine calling the end-product Daniel Shays Flour, as a play on King Arthur Flour and Robin Hood Flour.

'Daniel Shays is our local yeoman, and it represents rebellion, against ConAgra, anyway,' said the Montague baker, recalling that some people have dubbed his effort the Little Red Hen Product.

As attention turns to local food this Saturday, growing our own grain to make our own bread is as basic as anything else we can do.

You can reach Richie Davis at: rdavis@recorder.com or (413) 772-0261 Ext. 269

 

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