They envision a staple food system in which these vital products are grown, processed, value-added, distributed, and marketed at a great enough volume to catalyze the entire food system, creating meaningful work and jobs, and making the very best food accessible to everyone.

Thomas Toth & Mad Agriculture have released a report examining Local Grain Sourcing for the Colorado Brewing and Distilling Industries.

This in-depth research pulls together many of the threads of the local supply chain to holistically investigate the case for regionally sourced grain.

To move beyond that, he sees a need for greater scale and greater organization. He doesn’t necessarily envision a trade organization, but possibly a marketplace or a forum for growers or buyers to band together and create enough demand or enough supply to move the needle. “We need an opportunity to have the conversation,” he said.

According to the National Association of Wheat Growers, every time you buy a loaf of bread only 17 cents goes back to the farmer. Chandler Goule, CEO of the lobbying group, said the uncertainty for the farmers is just now sprouting.

The farm planted fifty acres that first year. "We weren't going to have a company unless the grain grew," Whitaker remembers. "I didn't even incorporate [Dry Storage] until after Sarah called me and said, 'We're going to have a harvest.'"

“It’s like we’re finally seeing all the hard work and time pay off,” he says, noting that, this past year, he set a new record for corn at 298 bushels per acre while using the lowest fertilizer inputs to date. “When you make these decisions, you have a hard time seeing the changes all of the time, but these past months, when we were able to do more with less, it feels like a homerun,” he says. 

In this week’s newsletter, we bring you a profile of Seven Sundays, an AGC member who uses their popular breakfast cereal and muesli to push the needle for regional grains. We’re also re-sharing insights on Ukraine’s influence on the world’s bread wheat and links to AGC members who have joined the work of fundraising for humanitarian efforts.

Of the hundreds of thousands of wheat varieties that farmers once cultivated, for example, only a handful are now farmed on a large scale, he told Vox.

Some of the open space was dedicated to heritage wheat as an experiment, Foster said by way of example. Some varieties of pre-engineering heritage wheat have lower gluten or other qualities prized by bakers. A farmer grew heritage wheat on 40 acres. “And the wheat that was produced off of those 40 acres was greater than the entire demand for heritage wheat in the state of Colorado,” Foster said. Other experiments included pinto and garbanzo beans, and other small-acreage crops.

There were several varieties of heritage wheat grown in 2020 and one variety (Rouge de Bordeaux) grown in 2021. I don’t know if there is any of the wheat remaining or whether the tenant plans to plant more next year, usually we talk to the tenants a bit later in the spring about their planting plans.

We are very excited to share one of our first new projects of 2022: the Growing Grain Blog with Heather Coiner of @littlehatcreek!

In 2020, there was a 6.8 percent increase in residential land sales, which the Realtors Land Institute and National Association of Realtors consider to be “underpinned by strong home-buying activity.” This coincided with an uptick in farmland real estate value by 7 percent across the country between June 2020 and June 2021, according to a survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).