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Midwest Grain Chain - Cultivating Relationships and Markets
92 Plays19 days ago
The Midwest is sometimes called the breadbasket of America. But the infrastructure for local grain production and processing has largely disappeared, and most of the grains that are now grown here are used for animal feed. What does it take to restore a regional grainshed in the Midwest? Kate talks with folks at the Artisan Grain Collaborative about the future of grain, and with a brewer and a farmer who are bringing that future into being.
The Taproot Podcast is an initiative of the Midwest Transition to Organic Partnership Program, a project funded by the USDA National Organic Program to support transitioning and organic producers with mentorship and technical assistance and to grow the greater organic community. Learn more at organictransition.org.
You can find new episodes from The Taproot Project wherever you get your podcasts.
Guest Bios
Elena Gutierrez Byrne is the Communications Manager at the Artisan Grain Collaborative. She holds a doctorate in nutritional sciences from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and has been an avid gardener for years with her husband on their 8 acres just outside of Madison, WI. She is enjoying seeing the local foods movement capture the hearts of consumers everywhere.
Jessica Jones is the Brewer and co-owner of Giant Jones Brewing Company - an independent, women and queer-owned, certified organic craft brewery in Madison, Wisconsin. She is a Grand Master Beer Judge through the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) and an Advanced Cicerone®. Jessica loves Barleywine and providing extremely in-depth answers to what you believed was a simple question.
Willie Hughes is the sixth generation to operate the Hughes family farm in Janesville, WI. They have incorporated multiple conservation practices including diversified rotations, extensive cover cropping, improving soil health through compost and biologicals, variable rate applications, and automated irrigation water management. Hughes Farms consists of 5000 acres of food grade, NON-GMO and organic specialty crops.
Amy Halloran lives in upstate New York. Her love for food, and for the people who grow and make it, led her to write a book about the revival of regional grain production, The New Bread Basket. She's worked in emergency feeding programs, and believes that food insecurity and regional grain systems share a core American problem: of our not valuing the work of feeding each other. Amy is working on a book about the twinned histories of the modern American loaf and the modern American woman.
Helpful Links
- Artisan Grain Collaborative
- Giant Jones Brewing Company
- The New Bread Basket
- Anatomy of a wheat kernel
- Transition to Organic Partnership Program (TOPP)
Credits
Music by Ghost Solos by Lucas Gonze, Free Music Archive, CC BY
Hosted and produced by Kate Cowie-Haskell.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Grains
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello everyone and welcome to the Taproot Project. Today we are talking about a beloved food staple. You know it, you love it, you probably eat it or a byproduct of it every day.
00:00:13
Speaker
We're talking about grain. I kind of had a really basic, super basic question for you to start with. um What is a grain?
00:00:25
Speaker
That is actually not a super easy question um because it means different things whether you're talking about the nutrition realm or the agriculture realm.
00:00:36
Speaker
So I come from a nutrition background and so it took me a minute to figure this distinction out but in nutrition they think about grains as being things that are primarily a source of carbohydrates.
Agricultural Perspectives on Grains
00:00:50
Speaker
And then for things like soybeans, that is put in the legumes category. But with farming, grains refers more to the size and the form of handling. So in agriculture, grains includes soybeans. It includes dry beans. It includes all of the pseudo cereals like um like buckwheat,
00:01:17
Speaker
um And so, yeah, it's broader the agriculture field. That's Elena Byrne. She's with the Artisan Grain Collaborative, which is an organization working to strengthen the Midwest grain shed.
00:01:35
Speaker
And you'll hear all about what that means in a minute. Elena was the first stop on my journey of understanding grains and their role in Midwestern agriculture. And as you heard, we started with the basics.
The Artisan Grain Collaborative and Regional Movements
00:01:47
Speaker
What is a grain? One very simple definition, in addition to Elena's, is that grains are small, hard seeds used for food.
00:02:00
Speaker
I've never actually seen a lot of these grains in their original form. Corn, yes, but I wouldn't know if I was holding a handful of rye or barley or even wheat.
00:02:12
Speaker
And for the folks at the Artisan Grain Collaborative, this gap between grain consumer and grain origin is exactly where the magic of a regional grain movement can happen.
00:02:24
Speaker
So bakers and farmers were were two of the main value chain roles that were the original members of Artisan Grain Collaborative because bakers did want to learn and source grain from farmers around them.
00:02:43
Speaker
And I think it's a natural thing in this in this era of kind of pushing a back against the commodity system But it's much more complex for grains than it is to get local produce, which you can just do from the farmer's market.
00:03:00
Speaker
um Produce can be gone grown pretty small scale. But with grains, there's so much equipment involved. um And they are such a small crop that has such a long cycle to maturity that it really does involve a lot of thought and space and expensive equipment.
00:03:22
Speaker
and handling once you've even harvested the crop to make sure that, yeah you know, fungal problems don't degrade the quality.
Commodity vs. Regional Grain Systems
00:03:33
Speaker
um And so it is easy to see why it has become this commodity system. But in that commodity system, an end user like a baker has no even connection to the farmer that's growing the grain that's then ground into flour that he's buying You'll hear the commodity system referred to a few times in this episode, so i want to say a little bit more about that.
00:04:00
Speaker
In commodity agriculture, farmers grow crops and raise animals for sale rather than for their own consumption, and this type of agriculture is typically large-scale and mechanized with the goal of maximizing production at the lowest possible cost.
00:04:18
Speaker
And the focus is on producing one or two crops on a large scale, usually for sale on the open market, at a price that is set by the market and based on forces like supply and demand, and that is constantly in flux.
00:04:35
Speaker
So establishing relationships with buyers or sellers directly is one way to get out of the commodity market system. The Artisan Grain Collaborative exists to facilitate connections between the people who are stewarding grains along each stage of their processing journey from seed to food product, which is a process the Artisan Grain Collaborative refers to as the grain value chain.
00:05:02
Speaker
So who, like what kind of people or businesses currently fall under the Artisan Grain Collaborative right now? Yeah, um we often refer to a value chain. um You could also describe it as a grain supply chain.
00:05:18
Speaker
So we really have a variety of roles that are part of the network. And I think I mentioned we sometimes summarize it to ah farmers, processors, and end users, which is a lot easier to say than what's on the homepage of our website, which is...
00:05:42
Speaker
um trying to do an exhaustive list, we listed out farmers, millers, maltsters, bakers, chefs, food manufacturers, brewers, distillers, research researchers, and advocates that are all working together to strengthen ah regenerative grain shed in the Midwest.
00:06:03
Speaker
I wanted to know why a strong regional grain chain is important. And for that, I called up Amy Halloran. Amy works with the Artisan Grain Collaborative, but she's also a historian, fresh flower advocate, and an author of a book called The New Bread Basket, How the New Crop of Grain Growers, Plant Breeders, Millers, Maltsters, Bakers, Brewers, and Local Food Activists are Redefining Our Daily Loaf.
00:06:31
Speaker
Okay. So a regional grain economy is a system of farmers, millers, maltsters, bakers, brewers, all of the people in the grain supply chain going before
Local Grain Economy and Its Importance
00:06:48
Speaker
farmers. You need people who are getting the grain um seeds because you need the seeds appropriate.
00:06:55
Speaker
Everybody working in concert to make grains from a place. Um, that region could be quite wide. You know, it's locavore miles are usually a hundred miles or maybe even tighter, but you have to go further with grain because the infrastructure you need to make grain grow and the farmers who are, um i mean, the infrastructure you need to to make grain into either flour or malt, the the two intermediate processing steps to get grain from the whole kernel
00:07:31
Speaker
to something that you can use in your home or have somebody use in your system, a baker or a brewer or a distiller. It's really expensive infrastructure.
00:07:44
Speaker
We had this kind of stuff everywhere um before we centralized grain production in these pockets of America.
00:07:55
Speaker
um and I think it's really important not to return to them in a, um, the past was better kind of way. Cause the past had as many complicated problems as the present does. Um, but because we need food resilience, um, this was really obvious during the pandemic when the only manufacturers of flour that could get flour to people were the small regional mills.
00:08:29
Speaker
you know, the the larger supply chain collapsed and you couldn't, they couldn't, it was it was ah it was a many layered problem. But one of the big things was with closing down um ah industrial food processing or or the the way food gets out there, you know, so flour was going out in a hundred pound bags.
00:08:53
Speaker
to all kinds of bakeries that are at receiving it at that level. And when you switch to the home baker or family flour,
00:09:05
Speaker
the The production lines were not set up. They couldn't even do it. So it wasn't just that there wasn't flour. It was that it was set up for, instead of five pounds, 20 times that big.
00:09:19
Speaker
ah Another part of the grain economy, the current the current status quo in grains that made it really hard for people to get flour in early 2020 is that there were four major flour mills that run most of the the milling in the country.
00:09:42
Speaker
And It's like an ocean liner. And when you need to steer an ocean liner into it away from the iceberg, it's not
Challenges and Opportunities in Grain Production
00:09:53
Speaker
gonna happen immediately. You got the Titanic, it's going down.
00:09:56
Speaker
Another large problem as I see it is that the grain is grown, the grains that are grown are specific to these large industrial processors.
00:10:07
Speaker
um So their farmers are planting what they're asked participate in the system. um And there's not a lot of variety or character to these grains.
00:10:22
Speaker
They're grown to hit the the milling specifications of industrial scale baking. and And so a regional, a more regional grain economy would mean that um farmers are growing seeds that are more particular to an area and then selling, ideally kind of selling that to be processed within a local area and turned into flour or malt.
00:10:51
Speaker
Was that the other one? Yep. And that would be able to be sold kind of to people within that particular area too. So not batched into the giant 50, 100 pound bags, et cetera. Exactly. That's sort of what the smaller version looks like.
00:11:07
Speaker
Agriculture is always risk. Farmers are the biggest gamblers in the world to go up against a season. So they need to have the insulation of, okay, so if it though if we don't get food grade,
00:11:19
Speaker
um grains, hopefully there's a feed market or let's develop feed markets so that we are able to grow for, ah we are able to use everything at a premium because that's the other thing is the, you know, the the dominant agricultural system is set up at bottom dollar.
00:11:41
Speaker
absolute bottom dollar. And, um, but you're going for top dollar like that. Cash is King. Cash crops are King. And, um, which is why it's hard to get rotations happening.
00:11:57
Speaker
And if you, um, in a more regional system, there's the potential for more collaborations along the line. So you have relationships that with dairies and you have relationships with chicken farmers so that everybody is working symbiotically toward this larger goal.
00:12:19
Speaker
Just to clarify, the risk that farmers are taking when they grow grains. There are two classifications for grains. Feed-grade grains, which are grown for animal consumption, and food-grade grains, which are grown for human consumption.
00:12:37
Speaker
To qualify as a food-grade grain meant for people, grain has to be tested for substances like heavy metals, pesticides, and mycotoxins. And in the upper Midwest, where we have pretty wet summers, grains are susceptible to a fungus called volatoxin.
00:12:56
Speaker
If the volatoxin levels are too high, grain that was grown and intended for food grade sale needs to be sold on the feed grade market at a lower price than the farmer might have been planning for.
00:13:10
Speaker
So having connections with people who are looking for high quality or organic feed grain is really helpful for those farmers who are trying to grow food grade grain in case they need an off ramp for their crop.
00:13:25
Speaker
Bakers and brewers are two key pieces of the grain chain because their products drum up the market interest that can support the rest of the regional grain chain.
Brewing Industry's Role in Local Grains
00:13:36
Speaker
In Wisconsin, one key business that is serving as an advocate and a market for regional and organic grain is Giant Jones Brewery in Madison, Wisconsin.
00:13:48
Speaker
Giant Jones is one of 15 organic breweries in the country, and the only one in Wisconsin. I talked with Jessica Jones, co-founder and head brewer, about the struggle of setting up an organic brewery and her efforts to support regional organic grains.
00:14:07
Speaker
I'm Jessica Jones. I'm the brewer and co-owner of Giant Jones Brewing Company in Madison, Wisconsin. We're a little four-woman-run brewery, um and everything we do is certified organic.
00:14:19
Speaker
All the beers are strong. They're 7 to 12 percent alcohol is our basic box that we play in, which is largely part of a effort to have an outsized impact on organic agriculture ah because we use more grain per bottle than most other breweries.
00:14:39
Speaker
So that means that I can be supporting more acres of organic agriculture as a little brewery. Why a brewery and why organic? Why a brewery? Like most things, it starts with trying to impress a girl. Woo!
00:14:56
Speaker
and hour When ah Eric and I met in 2003, was 21 and she said, oh, I like micro brews, which is the term we were using back then. And I said, cool, I've made beer.
00:15:14
Speaker
ah And she said, that's so neat. um So then I just kept going deeper and deeper, trying to impress her. um So one of the beers that we make a lot of is our Belgian-style triple. I tell people it's the beer that keeps our marriage together because it's Erica's favorite beer.
00:15:32
Speaker
um ah But it's also like that's how I make beer. So the the first time I make something, um I'm putting those ingredients together in that way, ah partly for my own fascination as a brewer of how it turns out.
00:15:48
Speaker
But after I've made something once, um regardless of how much tweaking it's going to have. um After that, I'm really only interested in making it if I know who loves it.
00:16:01
Speaker
um So like I'm making beers for specific people. ah People in your life. Yeah, well, and like people that come into the tasting room or like maybe that we only interact with um through um online comments or something. But if I know that someone really loves that beer, it's more compelling to make it again.
00:16:22
Speaker
um and to prioritize it, because we have, we're a small brewery. week Like our right now, the the max we can make is one batch of beer a week. So we make a thousand liters of beer at a time.
00:16:36
Speaker
um And if I don't know that that beer is specifically making somebody happy, um it's hard to go through all the labor to do it um because it takes work. And so like partly that's our motivation. But it's also if we're thinking about not making a beer or not putting something on the schedule, um I want to know who I'm disappointing.
00:16:59
Speaker
um it's because which is partly the line between uh a relational uh way of making and sharing things and just straight commodity um right so And for us, that continues to go back and shape our supply chain.
Developing Local Malt Production
00:17:18
Speaker
The relational side of how I'm choosing to make beer ties back into our supply chain because um for so long I was frustrated begging organic scraps at the fringes of a commodity supply chain.
00:17:32
Speaker
um So I was working with the largest maltsters in the world, which are really the supply chain for a hundred, like most of the breweries. um And there's just a few, it's it's just a less than a dozen large maltsters and a couple distributors that are,
00:17:51
Speaker
supplying all the breweries and organic is not a priority for them. um And so I was just like begging for scraps and the most of the organic production is in Europe. um And so I was begging for things to be imported or like be stocked um and things like that. And so partly it was that frustration that was like driving me to try and like build new ways of having a local grain shed that could create malted grains for us.
00:18:20
Speaker
um And i've understand it I've understood our role as the guaranteed buyer um as things get shaped um and the ones willing to take risks on it. And it got to the at first, I was just trying to agitate towards malt being in existence.
00:18:37
Speaker
um That's a big step because it takes a bunch of infrastructure. um Yeah, can you tell us actually what malt is? Yeah, so i it's just like the sprouts on your salad, um except the shoot has been killed off and the seeds been dried.
00:18:53
Speaker
um Like that's the simplest way. So ah malt, you take a seed, ah generally things that we call grains because they have a bunch of starch that can be converted into fermentable sugars for making beer or whiskey.
00:19:05
Speaker
um And so you let that seed sprout, that grain seed sprout. And then when the um shoot is about the length of the seed, um ah we consider that fully modified, which means that um the endosperm, that starch pocket, has been um broken up a little bit by the rootlets starting to form in there, and which makes it frayable, which means that I can pop it open and create grits.
00:19:36
Speaker
something that looks like grits rather than something that is flour. um We've also changed where enzymes are in um the ah little seed bundle. So, um ah because little tiny plants aren't eating bread,
00:19:54
Speaker
aren't eating bread starch, they're eating sugar. So there's enzymes, specialized proteins in the grain with generally the germ, um which is um where most the protein in ah grain seed is ah Those end up in other, like introduced the starch. And so enzymatic activity,
00:20:19
Speaker
starts to break down the starch into shorter carbohydrates, which we know as sugars. But then it gets stopped ah by drying and toast killing it at a low temperature, which starts to make color similar to like toasting a piece of bread or baking a loaf of bread in the crust. There's Maillard reactions happening that are creating those flavors and you can ah create lighter or darker malts and different flavors by killing it at different temperatures for different lengths of time. Right, and so coming back to
00:20:52
Speaker
Being interested in having things that are creating community and relationship and are like how we're making our schedule and pulling that back into our supply chain is i wanted local malted grains so I could make actually local beer instead of locally preparing beer with stuff from elsewhere in the world.
00:21:11
Speaker
um But getting local malt is quite the leap um for small-scale, relational community farms, um because there's places like RAR Malting um in Minnesota or Malt Europe, which is American company, where Or Brees, which is in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, but they're molting by minimum the rail car full, like shipping containers full of grain.
00:21:40
Speaker
And like that's their pilot systems. um So what we did was we said, great, we're going to be the dedicated buyer, like the committed buyer, like we're in. um But at a certain point, words don't mean as much as what you're doing.
00:21:55
Speaker
um So I was using no local grain. But all these farmers whose grain I wanted to use were drinking my beer because it's organic and they're growing organic crops, right?
00:22:07
Speaker
And so, but like that's still not a big enough leap. So i was like, well, great, I'm gonna figure out how to use raw grains. um And 16th to 19th century Belgian brewers were using lots of raw grain.
00:22:21
Speaker
And my system is set up to be able to do that because I was already, so I had set it up to be able to make Belgian beers really well, but it happened that it just like that also just helps me use raw grain really well. So we started doing that and then just like proved that we were in and like, it's a lot more work because raw grain doesn't give you any flavor.
00:22:43
Speaker
um really uh it's uh it's sort of because it doesn't have the malting right because it doesn't get toasted right think about eating the center of a piece of bread versus uh toasting it right like they're really different experiences so you had farmers around who are who are growing organic grain and and you start incorporating these raw grains into your beers and you can, like as a way to sort of show like, listen, this is, I really wanna do this.
00:23:14
Speaker
Is the next step or have you taken a step or had conversations with any of those farmers about what it would take to then have that grain be malted or? It's happening.
00:23:25
Speaker
It's happening now. Okay, tell me. Yeah. so um A couple of people came together on this. So ah the the there is a small pilot malting equipment that was acquired. It was used. um So that equipment was acquired. Then it ended up at the Hughes, the Wilden Hughes family farm in Janesville. And Willie, ah um the younger Wilden Hughes, was little got excited about this um and then hannah france who uh used to run the o-grain um conference for the university of wisconsin i got real keyed up about it she lives in the neighborhood drinks a lot of my beer um uh because it was organic and she was running an organic grain conference uh so she got really enthused and started writing grants um and that's when it really uh took off so last year they made their first pilot batch of malt um
00:24:23
Speaker
It only resulted in like, I mean, it was small, like they didn't do 500 pounds. So I ended up with 148 point whatever pounds of ah six row barley that had been grown by Chris Wilson in Cuba City, Wisconsin.
00:24:40
Speaker
um And we made an Australian sparkling ale. It was 34% their grain. It was amazing. ah there There was, of course, things to... improvements that could have been made on that that grain, but it was really great for just using to blend into as a third of the grain um for a batch. It also had some unrefined sugar, which is part of the style, which is part of why I was using it.
00:25:07
Speaker
um So it became this like multiple party um ah enterprise and initiative um But it was also, i i I see my role in it so far as proving that I was in to do whatever extra work because all those raw grain beers. So generally I boil beer for 90 minutes, um but to get flavor out of raw grain, I was boiling things for like four 11 hours.
00:25:38
Speaker
And so it's it's a bunch more work, but it's also like, really cool. um Yeah, and and kind of a way, I think, to it seems like ah a way to show your investment.
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Right. um And in the relationships. Yeah, because you have you can't just say you want to do something. You have to show that you're in in some ways and you have to start um working with what exists.
00:26:04
Speaker
It seems like you just being there as a buyer, as um you know a place where these grains could go and be turned into something delicious and organic was enough for people to start talking and making connections and kind of filling the gap that would allow you your beers to exist. Yeah, absolutely.
00:26:24
Speaker
Yeah, and fill your mission of local and organic, yep which is... Yeah, i don't that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. It's like, okay, we're talking about um ah start reestablishing regional grain.
00:26:36
Speaker
Then just having somebody to like slot into a piece of that chain and say, like here I am. I'll bring things forward if you get them to me. it feels really kind of like, I don't know, it feels very hopeful. It is really hopeful.
Sustainable Farming Practices
00:27:01
Speaker
Willie Hughes is one of the farmers involved in the local malting project. He is the sixth generation to operate the family farm in Janesville, Wisconsin. Their farm is a certified organic and non-GMO diversified row crop operation.
00:27:16
Speaker
that grows organic soybeans, soft red winter wheat, small grains like barley, hybrid rye, food-grade corn, and canning vegetables like lima beans, peas, snap beans, sweet corn, and some oil seeds like sunflowers.
00:27:32
Speaker
All of their crops are intended for food-grade or seed-grade consumption. We have, i have, and i and i the the farm in general has, i think a really strong commitment to producing food in a way that we feel is sustainable.
00:27:50
Speaker
And the term sustainable means a lot of different things to a lot different people. But for me, and maybe this is kind of through the lens of coming from a sixth generation family, it's, you know, how do we raise food ethically um in a way that five,
00:28:10
Speaker
six generations from now, they could, you know, foreseeably use these same tools, these same methods and be producing food, you know, safely and, and, and ecologically, in you know an ecological responsible manner.
00:28:25
Speaker
I think there was something about the organic, way of looking at it and the, the, the creativity and, and maybe just the stubbornness and, and sort of the refusal to just accept the status quo that I think kept me here.
00:28:40
Speaker
I don't know if you know, if it wasn't for that, I don't know if I would be farming. Well, yeah, maybe, um, you could tell me then about, um, how small grains, how how the malting operation was sort of like first brought to you um and and what you felt about it. um Yeah. How did you get involved? I know that you're still at a very experimental level right now, but I'd love to know like a little bit about the trajectory project. Yeah.
00:29:11
Speaker
Yeah. So we've kind of already established that, you know, the the goal is to like continually develop this rotation, you know, sort of like moving towards this ideal of like the perfect rotation and um any agronomist, anyone will tell you that bringing small grains um and and and, you know, fall seeded annuals, I guess, maybe it's just a great, it's a great agronomic practice.
00:29:48
Speaker
It's not... Just so pause for a second, what is it what does a perfect rotation do? Like, perfect rotation for the soil? like Yeah, tell me about It's a good... you're You're mixing up the harvest intervals.
00:30:02
Speaker
and so And so that's what you're trying to do. With a a ton of other soil health principles and benefits. I mean, you've got ah living root that goes you know through that that winter. if you're um If I seeded barley today...
00:30:17
Speaker
ah There's you know the next six or seven months where those that soil is going to have something to hang onto with that root system. ah There's you know potentially excess or or wasted fertilizer that's looking for a home that's getting you know sequestered by that living plant. There's um erosion and runoff. and and there you know There's all sorts of reasons why you want to keep the soil covered.
00:30:44
Speaker
and ah in a um you know and in in our current farming system, a small grain is ah is a good way to do that.
Economic Value of Malting Small Grains
00:30:54
Speaker
The problem with small grains or the reason, you know, so sounds good, why doesn't everybody grow small grains everywhere every year?
00:31:02
Speaker
And the challenge is is just the the market. it's it's um It's not a economically competitive crop to corn and soybeans. And so,
00:31:13
Speaker
farmers get put in a tough spot because we're told, Hey, um, you know, you guys are the stewards of the environment. We want clean water. We want clean air. We want this. We want, you know, pollinators. We want, we want it all.
00:31:26
Speaker
Um, and then people go to the grocery store and buy the cheapest product they can get, you know? And, and so farmers at kind of are put in a tough spot, you know, we're, we're, ah um,
00:31:40
Speaker
we're a product of our environment and and in in you know you ah a system that values efficiency and scale and size, the just those economic drivers force a lot of other crops out, not to mention government policy. And I mean, there's there's so much to that kind of all incentivizes what we do.
00:32:02
Speaker
um but But growing small grains in general is hard. is is is hard And so for me, the calculation isn't necessarily, well, let's just ditch small grains because we can make more money growing corn. kind of came at it or have the opinion that, well, what sort of value adds can we put onto a small grain to incentivize it? Or you know how do we how do we value the ecosystem services or the agronomic benefits that we get, that rotational benefit?
00:32:37
Speaker
And so, um you know, malting is is a value add. You take a small grain um that's worth a couple dollars a bushel and you malt it.
00:32:51
Speaker
um You find a customer who values that and and who is is interested in maybe, you know, regional production of malting, of which in the state of Wisconsin, for as much beer as we drink, there's not a lot of malting, craft malting, at least. There's there's the big maltsters.
00:33:11
Speaker
But even they are, you know, they're they're shipping a lot of the grain in from Western states. um And so i just am always looking talking, you know, any, any conversation I have with someone who farms, inevitably I'm going to be moving it into the direction of like, how can I glean information that helps me grow a value added small grain? And, and so I, I found myself in one of those conversations with a gentleman, a fellow farmer, a friend of mine named Graham Adsit, you know he's always scheming, I'm always scheming, we're always calling each other,
00:33:50
Speaker
with harebrained ideas. um And I got a little bit of a rumor through the rumor mill or the grapevine heard that he was getting into some malting. And at the time I was growing winter barley for seed production. So I was raising barley this year. It happened to be a certified organic winter barley for seed production.
00:34:13
Speaker
Then I called him. I said, hey, Graham, you know, I heard you're doing a little bit of malting. what's What's the deal? You know, I've got some barley. Can you malt it? And, um you know, it's in so many words or less, he he basically said, i have a prototype malter.
00:34:30
Speaker
i just said, you know, bring that sumbitch over here. We'll fire it up. Yeah.
00:34:38
Speaker
And we did. So we got it. We ran some electricity, you know, ah got it going. And I took some of my barley, got it cleaned, and I malted it.
00:34:48
Speaker
Then we put it on a pallet and sent it up to Madison for Jessica. and wow And that was just, yeah, I mean, it was just kind of, it you know, it it it was this slow burn process where it was, you know, I think it was a year before we actually got some stuff molted and we had to do some work on the machine. And and then all of a sudden, like, you know, I don't know, a week process, we had, we malt, we molted, we made it, we took it, she brewed it, it was bottled. It was just like, you know it happened really fast.
00:35:20
Speaker
did you have and Did you have any of the beer? i did. i did. it was an, An Austrian-style sparkling ale, and which Jessica um and Erica are both, like, total alchemists.
00:35:37
Speaker
You know, I mean, I don't know if you've ever enjoyed any of, like, Giant Jones beer, but they just have such a... such a raw talent. It's just a, she just paints with her palette, right? I mean, that mean that's what she does.
00:35:49
Speaker
But I just, I really enjoyed it. And I think the the coolest thing for me was that the first sip, I mean, the first sip, I could taste the malt in it. Like I could taste my malt that came from my farm, from my soil.
00:36:04
Speaker
um And just the experience, my personal experience, tracking that, you know, or just, or just Watching that progression or witnessing it was really fun you know, to have such a personal connection with someone using your product like that.
00:36:23
Speaker
um i mean, for me, that's just what it's all about. So um it really motivates me to, you know, take it up to the next step and, you know, and and really do a good job with it.
00:36:43
Speaker
From your perspective as a brewer, maybe also just a person in the world who um eats grain products, why is reestablishing and supporting a regional grain economy a worthwhile effort?
Personal and Community Impact in Grain Trade
00:37:00
Speaker
Everything's better when you know who you're connected to. like Actual human connection is better than commodity connection. um I'm always interested in having direct relationships with people. There's places, there's
00:37:15
Speaker
That's not always possible. So one of the reasons that we're certified or organic is that's a placeholder for that direct relationship when someone's engaging our beers on a store shelf um because it's third party verification that I'm doing what I say I'm doing.
00:37:30
Speaker
um So like, if we weren't certified or organic, my friends could believe it when Jessica says, I'm only using organic ingredients and all this stuff, but why should you believe me?
00:37:43
Speaker
um So like it becomes validation of of that relationship. um And so to me, it's I'm always interested in the relational aspect of things and a regional grain economy does that.
00:37:57
Speaker
um And partly these small scale, like malting small scale, small scale, ah like grain distribution, like what Meadowlark community farm and mill is doing, um those preserve identity.
00:38:15
Speaker
um So once you start blending um these things, like if you sold your stuff to grain millers or something, like it gets blended and your identity disappears. come on um Graham said at a field day once last year, commodity is the loss of identity.
00:38:33
Speaker
um And i I find human connection to be the most compelling thing. are Like our our first baseline of Giant Jones is, well, it's are we being nourished well enough by it?
Giant Jones Brewery's Community Focus
00:38:50
Speaker
um But then like our main like external baseline is, are we making positive impacts in our community? Like are we shaping our community in positive ways and being a positive part of it?
00:39:02
Speaker
um Money just needs to make enough sense. Who actually cares? It's a made up symbol system. I don't care. I mean, I need it, but i could also barter for beer. yeah oh Wow.
00:39:17
Speaker
where Where do you think your understanding of the importance of human connection and in your business come from? Like what formed the core of that value system that lies at the heart of what you do?
00:39:30
Speaker
ah I wanted to be dead for so much of my life. um I couldn't even connect to myself. I was a trans kid in the 90s. There wasn't any language for that. I had no idea that I was a trans kid.
00:39:44
Speaker
um And so I just wanted to be dead. um and i Finding little pockets of joy in the world was something that I worked really hard at. um And then once I finally came out in 2016, so it's been nine years now, um and i
00:40:10
Speaker
connecting to myself as ah a being worth living a very, very,
00:40:18
Speaker
instantly like it was overnight like i i came out tuesday night and wednesday morning woke up wanting to be alive for the first time since i was twelve
00:40:31
Speaker
And ah it um really solidified so many things that I had like been dancing around and being close to.
00:40:43
Speaker
ah um And then I really understood everything is just like,
00:40:51
Speaker
connecting and like the intrinsic um joy um and ah worthwhileness of living for me but also the plants and animals and microbes because like that's part of what organic is like it's communal all the way down to the microbial level of what's living in the soil um um And it's caring for the yeast that are fermenting our beers and like it just keeps tying out to and like how the air agriculture impacts waterways that aren't even directly they're just like receiving the runoff but if the runoff is just like rainwater through like natural soils like
00:41:33
Speaker
it's actually good for the water, right? Like it's like it's replenishing those wrought waterways. um And so a lot of it comes through just like me discovering how to be alive.
Supporting the Regional Grain Chain
00:41:54
Speaker
The Artisan Grain Collaborative hosts events, workshops, and five different member-led working groups to support the regional grain chain. And you can find information about that at graincollaborative.com.
00:42:08
Speaker
Thank you to Elena, Amy, Jessica, and Willie for answering my questions and scheduling with me during the busiest time of the year. The Taproot Project is produced by me, Kate Cowie-Haskell.
00:42:23
Speaker
This podcast is an initiative of the Midwest Transition to Organic Partnership Program, a project funded by the USDA National Organic Program to support transitioning and organic producers with mentorship and technical assistance and to grow the greater organic community.
00:42:39
Speaker
Learn more at organictransition.org.