Episode Eight - Ancient Grains from Farm to Table
Episode Description:
Today’s grocery store wheat comes from a variety of grains that were crossbred in the 1960’s to produce a higher yielding and lower cost crop. There is a growing interest in returning to what are known as ancient grains, grain that has been relatively unchanged by selective breeding. These grains are not only more natural, but higher in protein, vitamins, minerals and fiber. But, it’s not as easy finding and planting ancient seeds. There needs to be regional distribution systems in place to process the grains and distribute the products. In this episode of Grounded Hope we follow the path of ancient grains from a farm field in Wyandot County to a specialty mill in Athens and onto the shelves of the Village Bakery where neighbor loaves help to provide food security within the community. Along the way, we learn about challenges to rebuilding our local food systems.
Heritage Oberkulmer Spelt and Einkorn Wheat from Tom and Mary Klein & Son’s Organic Farm in Carey, Ohio.
Photo Credit: Renee Wilde
Podcast Script:
HOST INTRO: Today’s grocery store wheat comes from a variety of grains that were crossbred in the 1960’s to produce a higher yielding and lower cost crop.
There is a growing interest in returning to what are known as ancient grains, grain that has been relatively unchanged by selective breeding. These grains are not only more natural, but higher in protein, vitamins, minerals and fiber.
But, it’s not as easy finding and planting ancient seeds. There needs to be regional distribution systems in place to process the grains and distribute the products.
In this episode of Grounded Hope we follow the path of ancient grains from a farm field in Wyandot County to a specialty mill in Athens and onto the shelves of the Village Bakery where neighbor loaves help to provide food security within the community.
Along the way, we learn about challenges to rebuilding our local food systems.
I’m Renee Wilde. From the highways to the hedgerows, we bring you grounded hope.
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TOM AND MARY KLEIN & SONS ORGANIC FARM
(RAIN)
RENEE WILDE: Summer storms have been rolling through Ohio for the past week, keeping farmers from going out into the fields to harvest grain.
Golden-hued spelt and a floppy, heritage wheat, line one side of the lane back to Tom and Mary Klein’s farmhouse.
TOM KLEIN: Yes, my grandfather bought it in 1926. It was a working farm.
WILDE:The Keins have been married 51 years with 3 adult sons, all engineers who work off the farm.
In their younger years, Tom and Mary were Peace Corp volunteers before coming back to Ohio, where Tom taught industrial arts at the local school and farmed with his dad.
TOM KLEIN: Dad had hogs, he had cattle, chickens, sheep at one time.
I actually can remember he had horses. That was many moons ago.
WILDE: When his father passed away in 1990, Tom took over farming his mother’s land.
TOM KLEIN: One of the reasons I decided to go organic was, just out here in this front field I had a son who was cultivating corn one day and a guy came in with a sprayer and sprayed the beans next to him.
My son was turning around to go back, the guy picked his boom up, and sprayed right over the top of him.
MARY KLEIN: That was it. That was the deciding factor.
The first five years were extremely rough. There had not been any chemicals on the farm except for beans, that was the only thing your dad had sprayed.
TOM KLEIN: Right.
MARY KLEIN: And so that transition was fairly easy for us, but it was the soil that needed to be conditioned.
I remember working the ground and losing pieces of equipment behind me because the ground was so hard. It’s a lot of yellow clay, and Jack Wax, and that sort of thing.
And, today you can stick a spade in and just turn it over so easily. It's just a transformation that has been the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed because the ground has mellowed so much from what we’ve planted, and rotation of crops, and that sort of thing.
After the first five years I felt a real accomplishment because I could see the difference in the soil.
WILDE: Back in 1996 the Kleins started with 50 acres of organic beans. The next year, Tom says they went cold turkey and transitioned to all organic.
TOM KLEIN: The neighbor down here told this elderly gentleman that if I was still farming in five years maybe they oughta look into it.
Well, it's been 25 years and they’re still not farming organic.
WILDE: What do you think that resistance is?
TOM KLEIN: What do I think it is?
WILDE: Yeah.
TOM KLEIN: It’s bragging rights. The fancy equipment, you know, everything looks nice and hunky dory.
MARY KLEIN: No weeds.
TOM KLEIN: No weeds.
MARY KLEIN: I think that’s a big part of it. No weeds.
TOM KLEIN: I know people have one or two weeds in their field and have to go out and spray the whole thing.
MARY KLEIN: And, we believe that weeds are angels of the soil, really. They tell you what’s deficient in your soils. I’ve really learned a tremendous amount by farming this way.
WILDE: I love that. Could you give me an example of what a certain weed would tell you about (the soil)?
TOM KLEIN: Morning glory is a lack of magnesium.
WILDE: Between 2016 and 2020, organic farming rose 37% in Ohio, ranking the State 5th for certified organic farms in the U.S.
Tom and Mary now raise about 167 acres of organic crops on their 200 acre farm, including ancient varieties of spelt, wheat and Wapsie Valley Corn, an open pollinated, yellow and burgundy colored, heirloom dent corn dating back to the 1850’s.
TOM KLEIN: I still have the seed I started with 20 years ago.
WILDE: You’re saving your own seed?
TOM KLEIN: Save my own seed, yeah.
Then Monroe Stutzman asked me about raising Einkorn and….that was an experience.
WILDE: Einkorn wheat was the predominant cereal crop all the way into the 19th century.
But, during the rise of the Industrial Revolution, it fell out of favor to the hulless wheat varieties which were easier to thresh.
TOM KLEIN: We started out with 5 bags.
MARY KLEIN: 5 bags of seed.
TOM KLEIN: 5 bags of seed.
He said it was spring wheat, so I tore up some clover and put it in. I was lucky if I got a handful of heads.
MARY KLEIN: It was a disaster.
TOM KLEIN: It was a total disaster.
I had one bag left.
MARY KLEIN: We decided to keep one bag in case the experiment didn’t work, because there is so little information on it.
The seed is from Turkey, originally.
So, we had this one bag left and we decided to plant it in the fall, like it was winter wheat, and we had a crop.
TOM KLEIN: So it’s just blossomed into 5,6,7 acres a year.
The spelt, the spelt is ancient. It’s Oberkulmer, the old-fashioned spelt they call it. That seed I’ve probably had about 20 years.
WILDE: It used to be common for farmers to save the seeds from their best crops, but due to patenting restrictions that’s nearly impossible today.
Modern seeds are now engineered to withstand the use of more and more pesticides as weeds become resistant to chemicals, resulting in a dramatic rise in the use of pesticides on farm fields.
TOM KLEIN: You are what you eat.
When you hear stories about the wheat being sprayed with glysophates and stuff, so that everything ripens at the same time? Well, they do it when the berries are on, and everything else, and consequently it kills it and then they harvest it, well that’s got to be in the berries, so your bread…..
MARY KLEIN: Your breads, and everything, have that chemical in them.
TOM KLEIN: I always say it's good to know that what I put in the ground I can put in my mouth and eat.
That’s the way I feel.
(O True Wisdom, Meditation Chants of Hildegard von Bingen)
Spelt actually saw a resurgence in the 1970’s, with the rise of health conscious, whole grain products.
In Europe, the catalyst for a spelt resurgence was a revival of teachings by St Hildegard von Bingen (bing-uhn), the 12th-century abbess, visionary and healer who was convinced that spelt is the Healing Grain.
SHAGBARK SEED AND MILL
MICHELLE AJAMAIN: Hi, I’m Michelle Ajamian. We are at Shagbark Seed and Mill in Athens, Ohio, which is in the southeast part of Ohio. Appalachia.
WILDE: And what do you do here at Shagbark Seed and Mill?
AJAMAIN: We basically bring in grain from Ohio farmers and we mill it into flour, cereal, grits. We make it into forms that can then be made into tortillas, tortilla chips, (and) pasta.
We also do dried beans; black beans and pinto beans.
WILDE: Athen’s had been without a mill for almost 50 years before Shagbark opened.
AJAMIAN: Existential anxiety.
So, my partner Brandon said that’s why we started this business, and I think that really describes why.
Like, where the heck do our beans and grains come from? We know where our kale comes from.
We really wanted to do something that would make a difference in our community, there’s a lot of hunger, a lot of poverty, and it’s a rural area with fields, and we had this highfalutin’ idea that with all those fields could be growing grains and beans, and that’s where we got started.
WILDE: Michelle and her partner started doing test plots for the USDA to see what high nutritious grains could grow in this area.
AJAMIAN: And we didn’t know we were on the path to opening up our own mill and seed cleaning facility at that point.
I think we thought we were going to grow those crops and that we were going to find, you know, public land on which to grow it so that those crops could go into people’s kitchens and people could have healthy food.
We didn't realize it isn’t like kale or lettuce, where you go out and cut it, and wash it, and then you can eat it.
You know, beans, you have to have a seed cleaner, you have to have a mill, all these things that you have to have before they even get into the pantries.
So, yeah, we had no idea.
WILDE: Shagbark Mill processes around 300,000 pounds of organically grown beans and heirloom grains by Ohio growers.
AJAMAIN: We had to let go of our dream of growing all the crops, because you just can’t do everything, but we’re very fortunate because in Ohio there are plenty of Organic farmers who were interested in participating and they’re all thrilled to finally be able to taste the food they grow.
So we make polenta or grits from Tom’s corn, and we send grits to Tom and his family, and they’re like, we’re eating the corn that we grew.
It’s really a great thing. It really is.
WILDE: We tour the stone ground mill which is housed in a building they share space with a community organization.
What’s right over top of our heads?
AJAMAIN: The blue machine up there is our seed cleaner.
So when that crop comes in it goes through that seed cleaner and gets cleaned, and then different levels of waste go into different bags. We would usually have a big, one of these big super sacks, would be here and catch the clean corn, the clean buckwheat, so forth and so on.
WILDE: Michelle talks about the importance of keeping cultural practices alive.
AJAMAIN: How did Indigenous people treat their corn? Indigenous people nixtamalized their corn.
Nixtamal is a Mayan word, and it has to do with putting an alkaline substance, so back long ago it was wood ash, into water and heating that water up a bit, and what it did, it started to break down the corn and make more of the nutrients bioavailable.
WILDE: This ancient process can help to increase the absorption of calcium, iron, copper and zinc, and improve the balance of essential amino acids in the body.
AJAMAIN: Our tortilla chips are nixtamalized. They are a healthier snack. We make fresh tortillas, also. We work with two tortillerias in Ohio, and that’s been really great.
This kind of food should be affordable to everybody. So one of the things we are really interested in, is not only how do you get those products out there, how do you get them into food access programs. That’s a really big part of what we’re interested in.
WILDE: Michelle and her partner Brandon Jaeger, have brought together local businesses, farmers and food access programs through the Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative to launch Neighbor Loaves.
This Athen’s based version connects food donations from businesses that use at least 50% of a local staple crop, with a network of local food pantries.
AJAMAIN: So, yeah, I think a network of everyone doing this is critical.
NEIGHBOR LOAVES
WILDE: The Village Bakery and Cafe in Athens made over 1,500 loaves of regionally sourced bread for the Neighbor Loaves program last year.
BOB O’NEIL: My Name is Bob, Bob O’Neil. Our specialty is all things great in the baking world and food production, local food and everything that’s good for the planet, I think, is really what we’re really focused on.
(OVEN NOISE)
So here we are, we have the Einkorn down here, it just needs a little more time. It's nice and golden.
Very big hit. It’s nice. The Neighbor Loaves are more of a sandwich loaf.
WILDE: This smells amazing, You have the best smelling job, ever.
O’NEIL: We really do.
WILDE: During the pandemic the bakery started a porch pick-up program on Saturdays, and they added a Neighbor Loaves option to the online store.
O’NEIL: Customer’s would just click a button and add their neighbor loaf. Some people were adding 5 neighbor loaves to their order every week.
During that time we were getting around 45 donations, 45 loaves, to 35 to 45 donations, that’s the height. It was a really nice way of getting organic, local baked breads, and it allowed us as a bakery to really survive in many ways.
It was a really good income that allowed us to bake for everybody.
WILDE: Bob heads back to the kitchen to get ready for a wine tasting at the Bakery. Karin Bright from the Athen’s County Food Pantry comes in for the Friday night Neighbor Loaves pickup.
KARIN BRIGHT: This started in April, last year, I believe.
We got a phone call that they had bread available and we’ve been picking it up every week since then, so it’s been over a year since we’ve been getting bread from them.
WILDE: The pantry was serving around 400 people before the pandemic hit.
BRIGHT: The bread that we pick up at the beginning of the month, the first Sunday of the month, we give out with our senior boxes program.
The second and fourth weeks of the month, the pantry has an on the road program where we go into different communities in the county, and tomorrow that will be in New Marshfield, Ohio. So, we’ll have 13 households that we’ll be serving.
Then any that does not get used at those locations, the third week of the month we distribute, actually, at the food pantry. I’ve had one senior tell me it makes absolutely the best french toast they ever had, so they love getting it.
It’s healthy. It’s locally made. It’s a win for all of us. So we think that is really important.
Plus people will know that what they give when they donate to this program is actually a donation that is staying here and is being used throughout the county.
WILDE: Joe Burrow, Athen’s native and Heisman Trophy winner, brought national attention to the Athens area’s high poverty rate in his 2019 acceptance speech.
13,000 people in Athens County fall below the poverty line, with a food insecurity rate of 20%, the highest in the state.
BRIGHT: But food insecurity, to me, is even more insidious because it’s that constant worry.
WILDE: Growing your own food is often presented as a way to remedy food insecurity.
BRIGHT: As much as I would love to see people being able to provide their own food through gardening, if you're in a trailer in a trailer park and you’re on a little postage stamp lot, where do you put your garden?
People say, container gardening! Ok, how are I going to feed my family of 6 with a container of this or a container of that.
I mean yes, it would be wonderful if we could do more of that. We could have community garden plots and those things.
My kids are the 6th generation to farm their family farm. So I’m very big on the idea of agriculture and how we can solve some of these problems.
How are you going to make your own bread? Growing your own wheat to make enough flour to make your own bread for an entire year? It’s not going to happen in a container. It’s not going to happen in your little backyard garden plot.
So how do you do that?
I think what it’s gonna take to fix this is a whole group of organizations, agencies, individuals, people, however we want to look at that, collaborating together to come up with these solutions.
We always said our goal is to go out of business because nobody is hungry.
(O Verdure Most Nobel, Meditation Chants of Hildegard von Bingen)
WILDE: The Athens program is part of a larger network of Artisan Grain Collaborative’s Neighbor Loaves programs across the country that were created to help support local bakeries and grain farmers, and to combat the large rise in food insecurity as a result of COVID-19.
Next summer Agraria will be offering a grain school in order to help move the farming, processing, distributing, and localizing of ancient grains forward.
You can listen to previous episodes of this podcast by going to our website at GroundedHope.org.
This podcast is brought to you by the people at Agraria, Ohio’s first center for regenerative practices and funded in part by a grant from the Ohio Humanities.
Sign up for Agraria’s Black Farming Conference being held on September 10th and 11th at the Agraria website www.communitysolution.org.
Our scholars are Beth Bridgeman, who teaches a series of reskilling and resilience courses at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and Rick Livingston, the Assistant Director of the Humanities Institute at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
Our webmaster is Rachel Isaacson. I’m Renee Wilde, and you’ve been listening to Grounded Hope.
Agraria Farm at Sunset