Wheat farmers in the Pacific Northwest export up to 90 percent of their harvest; most of it is used to make noodles in Asia. “We are taking this situation very seriously and have launched a formal investigation,” said Michael Firko, of the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, in a press release.

The issue of genetic engineering of crops has been in the news in Washington state, as I-522, a  GE labeling initiative moves forward to the November 2013 ballot. While the Washington Association of Wheat Growers has been dismissive of claims that labeling would affect farmers’ abilities to export wheat, a response to the announcement of the discovery of the GE wheat in Oregon emphasized the safety of the food, and sought understanding from trade partners as the investigation continues.

Farmers in the east side of Washington grow 2.5 million acres of wheat, much of it the soft white wheat aimed for Asian markets. West of the Cascades, other markets for wheat are being cultivated. Farmers in this area are poised to feed the informed eaters who want grains with more identity than the anonymous products of the state’s grain belt.

Washington State University’s Mount Vernon Research and Extension Station tests 40,000 varieties of wheat each year–none of them genetically engineered. When Stephen Jones, director of the station, was the winter wheat breeder for Washington State University in Pullman, from 1995-2007, he struggled openly with farmer interest in GE crops. He wouldn’t breed anything that took ownership away from farmers and put it in the hands of corporations.

While all seed breeding seeks to develop specific traits, genetic engineering works through gene transfer, and can cross species barriers, which classical plant breeding cannot. Another reason genetic plant breeding is favored is the speed at which desired traits can be grown out. Jones is content to work at the pace of plants.

Plants have been hybridizing without human intervention for millennia. Jones and other plant breeders use classical breeding methods, relying on pollen to achieve results just as their peers did in the 1800s, when hybridization first became a habit.

“We make a cross in a greenhouse, put a male with a female in a dialysis sleeve,” said Jones. “Two generations out we plant test plots.”

However, even hybrids are perceived by some consumers as bad. The lack of transparency about genetic modification is adding to consumer confusion about seed breeding in general. Wheat breeding is taking a big hit from misconceptions promoted in the book Wheat Belly, which attacks modern wheat hybrids, claiming they are addictive and make people fat.

These fears and other concerns about gluten are giving gluten-free products a fierce market presence. On the other side, there is a separate, small but strong movement to relocalize grains, and Jones is part of it.

Across the country, farmers are putting grains in ground that haven’t seen a flour mill or malthouse for nearly a century. Researchers like Jones are working to help farmers find varieties that grow well in these areas, and also serve the needs of bakers and brewers. Conferences on grains and bread–like the Kneading Conference West, which Jones helps organize–are driving the movement forward.

“If you look at Iowa, this is what’s wrong with agriculture,” he said in Vermont in March, showing a 2008 USDA map that highlighted wheat production with green dots. The state was nearly white. “One hundred years ago, Iowa would be bright green. Now it’s wall to wall corn and soybeans. Winter wheat avoids drought. Corn and soy do not.”

The Northern Grain Growers Association had invited him to speak on the topic of growing grains “out of place,” or beyond the regions where the commodity crop is generally produced–eastern Washington and Oregon, Montana, the Dakotas, and Kansas. Jones gave a similar presentation in Tacoma at the Cascadia Grains Conference in January.

In the last century, same as other parts of our food supply, grain production was centralized. A staple food became a commodity crop, and the farmer know-how, and equipment needed to grow grains regionally was lost.

The research station builds on what farmers in the Skagit Valley and elsewhere in western Washington do know–how to grow commodity grains–with a goal of creating a closed loop system to meet the needs of farms and eaters in a region, from animal feed to flour and malting barley.

“These aren’t wheat farmers, these are farmers who grow wheat,” Jones said at his office and labs. Wheat farmers in eastern Washington grow large acres of commodity grains and little else. Farmers in his part of the state can’t afford to grow grains as their main crop. The land is too valuable, and the income from wheat is too low. Still, every few years, tulip, vegetable and seed farmers grow grains to break disease cycles and build up organic matter in the soil.

Growing the same plants year after year courts pathogens and pests. Grains are in the grass family, offering a break from the problems invited by other families of plants. Each family has different biological foes, so rotations help plants handle problems like funguses and bugs. Grains also add organic matter to the soil. Adding value to the grains farmers grow in rotation boosts farm economies as well as soil. Keeping those grains at home is key to Jones for many reasons, and not just because local food is in right now.

“I do like to get beyond the cliché of local and heirloom,” he said, and get to the root of the matter, which is to keep farmers farming in an area facing heavy development pressure.

News of GE wheat may well serve this mission, as consumer interest in non-commodity non-GE wheat could rise. Meanwhile, wheat farmers will have to contend with the risk of cross-contamination from this errant wheat–and the inadequacies of a regulatory system unprepared to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

Photo by Shutterstock

“I used to be a faceless producer,” David Rowley said of his last job in conventional agriculture.  “We grew two to three tons of tomatoes a week, starting in February. There were six people, no weeds, and no pests.”

At the end of 2000, three things happened that led this farmer from old school ag back to the older school of ag, and into organics and direct marketing. Fuel prices went through the roof, pushing energy costs for the Pennsylvania greenhouses from $15,000 a month to $45,000 a month. A change of management occurred, and most significantly, Rowley got ill and attributed it to pesticides. 

As he repaired his health and revised his career, the idea of looking the customer right in the eye and saying the food he grew was clean became imperative. His illness was making him physically understand the importance of nontoxic production. Mentally, he understood organics through a very clever interpreter: his two-year old daughter.

Watching his child, who would not eat supermarket strawberries, devour strawberries from the CSA at home and in the field was another arrow toward this other way of farming. The transparency of the relationship between the farmer, the land, and the consumer was critical as he considered how he would live and work.

“When I was working for other people I had a job. It was a business,” Rowley says, recalling the distance he kept between his livelihood and his living. That gap has been closing ever since.

Monkshood Nursery started in New York’s Hudson Valley in 2001. From scratch, the operation was certified organic, and grew only herbs, selling them directly to the consumer at farmers markets. Now David is growing vegetables and herbs in 10 greenhouses and a number of fields in Stuyvesant, near the Hudson River. The produce makes its way to markets in New York City and Troy.

Last fall’s incredible rains dumped twenty inches of rain and the farm lost six acres of produce and two greenhouses full of food over the course of ten days. The crops yellowed and went moldy, suffocating the plants.

Rebuilding the business after such a massive blow was nothing he could do alone. Luckily, Rowley was already undertaking a restructuring of the farm with the help of some broad community shoulders–Columbia Land Conservancy, Scenic Hudson, and the Hudson Valley Agribusiness Development Corporation. These groups and his neighbors helped secure development rights for more than 150 acres. The Phillips’ family sold the farm they’d leased to Monkshood for years, and Kieran Goodwin and Catherine Rocco donated an easement on adjacent land to keep this parcel of land in agricultural production.

After the rains, Rowley also had to retool the farm’s infrastructure. With more help from his neighbors, he had six greenhouses built, kitted out to fit a tractor and all its attachments.

Rowley’s been in greenhouses much of his career, and a lot of the food he grows is still under cover. However, he and his crew also work in the open fields, and this shift can be seen as a metaphor for the gradual and continuing opening of his work and life.

Until recently, he thought of the work at the farm as very separate from the connections he made at the farmers market. He is a very affable fellow, and loves the connections he makes with people.

“I used to think on the farm, it’s just me, and at the market I’m hanging out,” Rowley says. Hanging out being shorthand for the juicy human intersections that make direct marketing such an effective selling point. Anyone who’s shopped at a farmers market knows you’re not just buying beets, you are buying a particular vendor’s beets, or carrots, or bacon. That food becomes an emblem of attachment, the relationship between the ground and the harvester’s hand made visible, and then edible.

The popularity of this marketing method is evident in the explosion of farmers markets. USDA counted fewer than 2000 in 1994, and this year, there are almost 8000 nationally. This so-called new way of selling mirrors old-fashioned public markets and produce carts that went door-to-door delivering vegetables, breads and other foods.

People used to have a lot of intersections with food, and the future of farming depends on increasing those intersections, from first graders planting onion sets, to twenty, thirty and forty-somethings dancing under a blue moon.

Blue moon dancing happened the last night of August at Monkshood. Severine von Tscharner Fleming of The Greenhorns helped Rowley with outreach this summer, ending with a big party that landed bands and eighty people on the farm for a big cookout on the blue moon.

“Severine helped me see that people should be in all parts of the farm,” says Rowley. He wants more farmers on the farm, too, and is working to create opportunities for young farmers to build their own resource base under the umbrella of Monkshood.

Fleming is the muscle behind a lot of beginning farmer projects, including the documentary The Greenhorns and Farm Hack, which is hosting a grassroots charette aimed at tools for small grain processing in Ithaca in October.

As farming evolves, she sees a danger in the desire to avatarize any and every experience. If traditional farmers are stereotyped in a few words, the prototype of the mod young farmer is one of a million words, chatted, tweeted, and Facebooked, either directly or on their behalf.

But are these farmers so different from what you might consider the traditional, taciturn farmer who wholesales vegetables or grows commodity crops? Chatty people are everywhere, but if you’re growing hundreds or thousands of acres, chances are you’re not going to interface much with your customers.

Socialization has always been a part of farming. Think of barnraising, and entire villages scything the wheat harvest. Food used to be too big a job to not have the community involved. Social media might not be the goose that lays the golden egg for food production, but it does help us inch forward as people experiment with ways to reincorporate humanity into agriculture.

“What I want to figure out in terms of social media business is how do we bring back the core ideas of the grange, stewardship and ethics and banding together and cooperative spirit?” asked Fleming. “What would be the techno futurist or community-utopia online version of that? Because I feel like that there’s a social technology that’s due for revival.”

A version of this story originally published at Metroland

Don Lewis fell into flour because of his chickens. Back in the late 1990s, he went to Lightning Tree Farm for organic chicken feed and saw that Alton Earnhart was growing wheat. The farmer offered him a bag of flour, and this piece of wheat history began.

At the time, Lewis sold baked goods featuring his own honey at New York City’s Greenmarkets, so of course he was intrigued by the farmer’s flour. As a result, he began to incorporate local flour into all his products, increasing the percentage he used each year and upping the acreage he asked Earnhart to grow. All the while, Lewis educated consumers about ingredients as he offered samples.

In the early 1980s Lewis used samples to discuss the honey he produced. When he started baking bread with local grains, he also used the belly as a point of mental sale.

Since 2008 Lewis has run Wild Hive Bakery and Café, a Hudson Valley shop and eatery that he is now closing in order to focus on his passion: redeveloping a regional grains system. 

“I did not open the café to be a restaurateur,” Lewis explains. “I opened it to get local ingredients into local stomachs. That was the objective. I feel like the consumer base now is tremendous and awareness is tremendous and what I need to do is to really focus on the supply and processing end.”

I first encountered local Hudson Valley grains when my husband brought me an oatmeal ganache bar from Wild Hive. Since I’m a baker and I romance the past I already had a fondness for grains and their history.

By necessity, all flour used to be local. I knew that flour was milled near me on the Poestenkill in Troy, New York. Previously, the Erie Canal pushed wheat production and milling to Western New York, and developments in transportation and technology pushed it further west.

But knowing that anyone was growing grains in New York State now wowed me. I began to pay attention, and learned about farmers and researchers at NOFA-New York’s conference in January 2011. Last July, I got to tour the mill at Wild Hive, thanks to New York Farm to Bakery, a project that paired bakers from New York City with upstate millers and farmers.

“A lot of the growers in Upstate New York and the Northeast are [already] growing organic grain for the organic milk industry,” Lewis said. Hearing they can get a better price growing for the human consumption market intrigues them.

Humid and potentially wet summers pose challenges to growing grains in the region, as does post harvest handling, but the chance to break out of a commodity system is appealing to farmers. Witnessing the success and strength of Wild Hive’s partnership with Earnhart shows that another way of selling is possible.

In 2006, Lewis began to run the bakery entirely on his own flour, and was using 20 tons of locally grown grain annually. He was milling in a storage trailer at his home, and baking in a certified kitchen at home too. In 2008, he moved the bakery in the back of the storefront, and shortly afterwards, moved the mill to a nearby barn.

Amping up his milling capacity at this facility helped amp up farmer production, and consumer demand. Eataly, an Italian emporium in New York City, pursued him and doubled the flour production at Wild Hive; their bakery makes 1000 loaves a day with Wild Hive flour, including a special grind for ciabatta loaves that Lewis mastered under guidance from Italian bakers. The fact that this big bakery and others are using Wild Hive flour makes Lewis’ transition possible.

Lewis is driven to work for regional food security. His work at Wild Hive is a model that’s inspired groups in the Northeast to pursue collaborative relationships around growing, processing and baking grains. Infrastructure for harvest, post harvest handling, and storage are the weakest points in these operations. With the help of funding from USDA Organic Research and Extension Initiative granted to Cornell, OGRIN, NOFA-NY and PASA and researchers at Cornell are working on these issues for growers, including a mobile processing unit that Robert Perry from NOFA-NY is assembling.

Lewis has been working on these issues between field and flour, too, and now he can tackle them with more focus.

“The most important thing is bringing on new growers and getting more interest in growing in the valley and in the region, and expanding the production abilities for myself and then for others,” Lewis said.

Tools he wants to incorporate into an expansion of the mill include a grain cleaner and other equipment that farmers might not have, but need, to handle grains. Lewis has worked with the Hudson Valley AgriBusiness Development Corporation, and he expects to again as he expands the Wild Hive Community Grain Project.

The story of Wild Hive won’t end now that the bakery and café are closed. The tale will keep opening up futures, just as a bag of flour made one man a miller, and changed another man’s farming to include more and more grains. That the miller always bought the grains he asked the farmer to grow gave other farmers confidence in him, and in this market for local grains.

“The supply is there, the distribution is there, but it’s not up to me to do it all. I did all that I’ve done because it needed to be done,” he said. “Now there’s other people stepping up. That’s why they call it a system, not a monopoly.”