No pain, no grain

On a Wednesday morning in October, Larry Mahmarian cuts open a 25-pound bag of wheat, carries it up a rolling ladder and pours its contents into the hopper of a stone mill, which makes a noise like a giant vacuum as its four-foot granite stone whirs to life.

It’s the first time I’ve ever seen flour being milled, and it only now occurs to me how bizarre that is, given how much bread and pasta my family puts away.

This is River Valley Community Grains, a fledgling grain hub operating in an old tractor repair building in Blairstown, NJ. Mahmarian, in a dust mask and flour-dusted shirt, will mill about 1,000 pounds of wheat today, as they do here three times a week – hauling one bag at a time up that ladder.

It is at once a humble and monumentally ambitious project: three childhood friends with no background in food or farming have taken it upon themselves to jumpstart a local food economy by going all-in on grains, a couple thousand miles from the wheat belt.

It’s been nearly a decade since the trio decided to pivot from unrelated careers in pursuit of that calling. Mahmarian was formerly an executive with a workforce relocation company, Lenny Bussanich sold outdoor gear, and Mike Hozer still works in finance, helping out part-time at River Valley Grains.

The local grains movement in upstate New York was already thriving, but only a few brave souls were growing staples in the Garden State. “We wanted to sort of bring New Jersey back into the fold,” said Bussanich.

Bussanich, a history buff, points out that a mill in New Jersey is not a radical idea if you widen your historical lens. The Northeast used to be America’s breadbasket back when the Erie Canal was a crucial artery, before ceding that title to the Midwest. In a nod to that history, the building – which River Valley leases from a farmer – is called Marksboro Mills, in honor of the town’s original mill, built in 1762 and still standing.

There’s a lot going on at Marksboro Mills the day of my visit. The mill doubles as a pop-up bakery and store for artisanal granolas, crackers and tea biscuits made with these grains. While the mill periodically grinds away, a woman sporting an apron and baseball cap makes pancake mixes. Bussanich is working on a laptop at a long wooden table when I arrive, alternately fielding emails and waiting on customers who walk in to buy a loaf of bread.

Bussanich is fired up as he gives me the tour. He’s just gotten an email from a farmer in the next county growing conventional soybeans and wheat on over 400 acres, who’s interested in transitioning to organic, food-grade grains.

It is the ultimate affirmation. More local farmers growing grain on serious acreage is exactly what River Valley is going to need to get to the next level.

Currently, they’re sourcing from farmers across the tristate, whose grain arrives in a medley of bags, sacks, bins and one-ton totes. But Bussanich envisions a future in which two, three, maybe even four silos stand out front, full of grain grown exclusively by New Jersey farmers.

“There’s a lot of farmland here,” said Bussanich. “I think the potential is there, I do.”

That they’ve come as far as they have seems almost miraculous to Bussanich. It has been a heavy lift, figuratively and very literally. “Grain is heavy and we’ve been working very manually, so we came up with the motto, ‘no pain, no grain,’” said Bussanich. When people ask how he is these days, he says, “Aside from my lower back, left knee and left shoulder, I can’t complain.”

‘It needed to be done’

Farmers have an old saying: you’re either born into grain or you marry into it. That’s because grains are expensive to get from field to table, requiring not only volume and specialized harvesting equipment (a combine) but also storage (a silo) and a processing step (a mill). But there’s a new breed emerging: first-generation farmers and millers who’ve jumped into the deep end of the silo because, well, someone had to.

“I did this because it needed to be done,” said Don Lewis, of Wild Hive Farm Community Grain Project in Dutchess County, NY, widely considered the man who brought back Northeast grains. It was the 80s, the golden era of convenience foods, when Lewis – a beekeeper, then a baker – had an epiphany at the dinner table with his kids. “I had a realization that this generation wouldn’t have anything worth eating by the time they got to be in their 30s, and that somebody needed to do something.”

When he encountered a bag of local flour grown and milled by a neighbor, he knew he’d found it – the “something” he needed to do. So began a career in advocating, tinkering, milling and scouring the globe for seed varieties that would inspire many more in the next generation to coax bread from the land.

These grain pioneers are, to a one, gritty and idealistic. “It takes initiative to accomplish anything. You’ve got to start somewhere, and then you have to be durable, withstand all the pressures: failure and lack of support,” said Lewis. “I’m not funded, never have been. It’s all just hand to mouth kind of, very basic. So all of this accomplishment has come the hard way.”

‘We’re not a food-secure region’

Grain pioneers tend to be sustained in their hard, uphill labor by a deep conviction in the worthiness of their work. Not only are they making good food and building local power, but they are fortifying us all against whatever shocks the future might hold. “I’m pretty motivated and fixated on long-term food security,” said Jon Kasza, of Home Farm, who grows staples like buckwheat and rice with his wife in Columbia County, NY.

“The main motivation is to think about, what are we going to eat in the next 50 years, 100 years? And the way that the climate is changing, we might look more like Maryland or Arkansas 15 or 20 years from now. So rice seems like a logical step to be able to get to that place.”

Here in the Northeast, we grow plenty of vegetables and dairy, but most of our calories are imported. “We’re certainly not a food secure region,” said Kasza. The fragility of our food system has been demonstrated multiple times in recent memory, he points out – by the gap-toothed grocery store shelves during Covid; and before that, a corn blight in the ’70s that took out a chunk of our nation’s grain supply.

“We’re all just hanging by a thread. That sounds really dramatic, but it’s just, the resilience is not built into the food system the way that it would have been 100 years ago,” he said.

Kasza started his farming career on a vegetable farm in Maryland, “but any kind of abstract thought around what we actually eat as a species tells us that grains are the main driver of our diet.” So he set out “to learn how to grow something besides eggplant and cauliflower and, you know, salad greens.”

Lewis is similarly concerned about the fragility of our food supply. He has been bringing grain seed back from his travels for decades – from Appalachia, Italy, Estonia, Holland, Germany. He seeks out grains that are older and wilder than the modern wheat grown across our heartland.

“There’s a lot of grains out there that don’t taste good to me,” he said. Modern wheat was bred not for taste but efficiency: short, strong, uniform stalks and large kernels that make the crop easy to fertilize and harvest. “What they took away from the genetics was the concept of nutrition, flavor and uniqueness. They lost of all of that.”

Once Lewis has wrangled his seeds through customs, he works with his partner farms to acclimate them to our climate, a process that takes an average of six years. Back home, the plants continue to evolve, acclimatizing to our region and, in the big picture, increasing the reservoir of genetic diversity available to future farmers.

Growing capacity and ‘grain cred’

Grains require a lot of infrastructure, and piece by piece, River Valley has been upgrading their equipment. They recently got a used gravity table for cleaning grains, and a dehuller to crack the casing off ancient grains. And you can’t miss the silo out front that holds 12,000 pounds of grain. That might have been a bit of an impulse buy, admits Bussanich, though it adds a level of “grain cred.”

“We haven’t used it yet. We thought it was going to be used for farms in the area but the yields just weren’t high enough,” Bussanich said of the $7,000 purchase. “But it’s here, and we know it’s going to be put to use, and aesthetically I think it goes a long way right now.”

Bussanich gestures to the mountains of grain sitting in the storeroom, in bags, sacks and totes stacked on pallets. “I’ve always been a nervous wreck about leaving it like this,” he said. An eco-friendly contractor installed a perimeter barrier around the building foundation, preventing rodents from getting to this motherlode. But “right now the building is just like a skeleton. We really need to figure out how to renovate it.”

River Valley’s wish list seems never-ending. They’ve been getting a couple high schoolers to come in after school to help with the milling, but “we’re going to eventually have to have a forklift here,” said Bussanich. What they really need is a dedicated milling room, which would go a long way toward streamlining the operation, he added.

It wasn’t until the next week’s visit to Wild Hive Farm that I really understood Bussanich’s point. Milling was never going to be easy, but it didn’t have to be this hard.

Trial and error: Milling 101

Don Lewis greeted me at the barn door. My timing was good, he said. I’d get to see the mills run. The moment Lewis’ twin mills turned on – a pair of New American Stone Mills identical to the one at River Valley – the difference between a single mill and a mature milling operation was unmissable.

Lewis’ mills work in tandem, gravity-fed from the second floor of the old dairy barn that houses his operation. Instead of one guy hauling bags up a ladder, wheat pours into the hoppers through unseen shafts in the ceiling. The wheat is ground into flour just as at River Valley, but then it gets sucked back upstairs by vacuum and collected in giant bags before falling back downstairs into a barrel sifter, where it spins out into separate compartments based on fineness.

All this happens while Lewis and his three employees go about other business. The mills do not stop and start. Once they turn on, they stay on until they’re done, grinding as much as a ton of flour in a day.

This system is the product of decades of tinkering. “I learned from my mistakes, learning how to mill, because there’s no teachers, right?,” Lewis said.

Lewis narrates what’s going on, his hand twirling and swooping as he explains details: rate of flow, tension of the stone, all the inputs the miller must balance to produce, in this case, a finely-ground circular type of flour. “It’s always different with each type of grain, because the consistency of the grain is different,” he said. “So it’s...” he pauses, hand mid-air, to find the right word, “it’s a dance.”

Mishaps and disasters

It’s been multiple generations since food-quality grains have been grown in the Northeast on a meaningful scale, and in that time the knowledge and infrastructure required to get it from field to loaf has all but disappeared.

There are pockets of vestigial know-how: in the Amish farmers still planting corn by horse-drawn combine, or the Upstate dairy farmers still planting and saving seed from the wheat their grandparents grew, though these days they’re feeding it to their cows.

But for the most part, anyone attempting to break into this industry in this lifetime has had to figure it out on their own. Their tales of mishaps illustrate just how many things can go wrong.

One part-time farmer who had gamely agreed to grow for River Valley Community Grains was relying on his neighbor with a combine to come harvest his first wheat crop. But the neighbor never ended up showing, and that inaugural wheat crop never made it out of the field. Undeterred, that farmer has since purchased a used combine from the ’60s.

And when River Valley got their first farmer to grow einkhorn, the most ancient of the ancient grains, nobody knew an extra processing step was required to remove the hulls. So they ended up driving the load to an Amish farm in Pennsylvania to use their dehulling equipment, and driving it back.

“At the time we thought it was cool but now I’m like, okay, we can’t keep doing that,” said Bussanich. “What we’re realizing now as we’re doing more of this, is you need a lot of help if you really want to restore a grainshed. We’ve been doing this really by the seat of our pants.”

Then there are true disasters that threaten to upend a whole operation in one fell swoop. On November 6, a fire destroyed the New American Stone Mills factory the day after the mom-and-pop Vermont company celebrated a decade in business. Baker Andrew Heyn had taught himself how to build a roller mill so that he and his wife, Blair Marvin, could use fresh-milled local flour in their wood-fired bakery. Heyn’s elegant machines – 256 of which are now out in the world – have since became the gold standard in artisanal milling, used by all three millers interviewed for this story.

When I spoke to Heyn the week after the fire, I asked whether it had crossed his mind not to rebuild.

“Yeah, you’re always kind of wondering,” he said, sounding tired. “I poured 10 years into doing this now and it’s sort of growing every year, but definitely things come up where you’re overwhelmed. This could have been one of those things. But reaching out to our community and seeing the response from our community was a reminder why this is important.” By mid-December, a GoFundMe begun by a baker friend had raised $42,304 from 369 donations, the most generous of them from fellow grain pioneers.

‘A lot to lose’

It’s not hard to see why farmers might be hesitant to try growing a crop that no one they know has ever handled. “To convince a farmer to try to do this? To try to grow for human consumption? Was a tremendous challenge,” said Lewis. “But it just takes really one or two farmers to have success and then it starts to transfer. Then it’s proven. It can’t be hypothetical.

“You’re changing the whole curve of your risks,” Lewis said. “If you’re unsuccessful, which you’re just starting out so there’s a good chance you will be, you have a lot to lose.”

Unlike with more forgiving animal-feed crops, the standard when you’re growing grains for humans is high.

“You have to have a pretty well run business to be able to sell a food grade product,” said Greg Russo, co-founder of Farmer Ground Flour in Tompkins County, NY (which donated $1,000 to the Help Restore New American Stone Mills GoFundMe). “Some of it is just finding growers who are interested in going the extra mile.”

Russo knows a thing or two about going the extra mile. It’s been 16 years since he bought “a crappy little mill that was in the back of the barn.” He spent that first year sleeping on pallets and filling grain hoppers himself. Farmer Ground has since evolved into a model of a thriving grainshed, processing 3 million pounds of grain a year – supplying schools, food pantries, grocery stores, restaurants, home bakers and the renowned Wide Awake Bakery a few miles from the mill.

His partner, Thor Oeschsner of Oeschner Farms, won New York State’s highest award for agricultural conservation in September for his innovation and commitment to preserving wildlife habitat. What Oeschner and his team are doing is “an inspiration to other farms following in their footsteps,” said New York State Agriculture Commissioner Richard Ball. Whether farmers will take up that mantle en masse remains to be seen.

Amy Halloran, who wrote The New Bread Basket, has been puzzled by the slow growth of the Northeast grains movement in the decade since the book came out. “I was like well, why isn’t there more of this happening? What’s going on? And it’s because the way most farmers grow is for the corn and soy market, and that’s the dominant system.” Switching to growing food-grade grains, let alone organic, requires a complete overhaul. “It’s so many layers of hard,” she said.

The specifications for flour wheat are enough to make your eyes glaze over. Bakers care about the “falling number,” which measures wheat’s enzyme activity. Per the Food and Drug Administration, flour wheat cannot contain more than one part-per-million of a fungus-produced toxin called vomitoxin, so-named because it has that effect if humans eat it.

“Trying to get local growers interested in doing this very detailed, very customer-minded approach? It takes a certain breed,” said Halloran.

And the farmers who do succeed in growing high-quality grain will eventually bump up against yet another conundrum. How to grow these hungry crops year after year after year?

“How do we sustainably use this 25 acres for the same thing every year, without depleting our soils?” said Rachel McDermott, a second-generation grain farmer who founded Dancing Grain Farm Brewery in Saratoga County, NY.

“We’ve seen some pretty significant yield decline in the first few years.” They’re experimenting with techniques to boost barley and wheat yields: plowing under cover crops to build organic matter, rotating the fields in a more methodical way, and taking a lot of notes.

Co-opting ‘local’

It’s been frustrating for those who’ve made it on their own to see big players like Nestle and the NoVo Foundation – funded by billionaire Warren Buffett’s son – investing in mills recently, edging in on the growing market for “local” and “ancient” grains.

“The landscape is changing, you know. There are bigger, more well-funded actors moving in, making products with all these kind of vaguely connected descriptors like ‘regenerative,’ ‘local,’ ‘small family farms,’ ‘ancient grains,’” said Russo. “It’s getting more sophisticated. People are getting big USDA grants and building roller milling facilities to make white flour while focusing on local grains. It’s kind of the classic story, like something gets popular and then corporate actors move in and the ideas get diluted.”

Roller mills, built for high-capacity production, are anathema to many local grain adherents, part and parcel of the industrial agriculture machine. The millers in this story use stone mills, like people did for thousands of years before the advent of the roller mill in the late 1800s.

Stone mills run at lower speed and temperature than roller mills and preserve the wheat’s germ and bran. The gentler process yields flour that’s more alive than its roller-milled counterpart, say bakers: more reactive, flavorful and nutritious, but also more variable and less shelf-stable. It produces the kind of artisanal bread for which people are increasingly willing to pay more.

Most of the stuff on grocery store shelves, by contrast, is made with roller-milled “commodity flour,” which is easy to bake with, shelf-stable, and the culprit responsible for giving bread in this country a bad name, said Lewis.

“People are struggling with intolerance, and that’s because of the system,” he said. “Commodity flour can be years old. And we do not believe you should be eating flour that’s anywhere past five or six months old.”

When big companies simply add local or ancient grains – “tiny nutritional powerhouses!” – to their mix and jack up the price, they’re not advancing the cause, said Lewis. They’re doing what they do so well, he said, intentionally misleading consumers.

Miller-vision

Lewis has been thinking about big questions while his mills are running. At 71, he’s begun looking for a successor. His son Matt Lewis currently “sails the ship” at Wild Hive, said Don, but has other long-term plans.

Lewis feels he’s accomplished what he set out to do 40 years ago, and is ready to turn his attention to other problems in need of solving. “The food system is like a wild horse, and it’s still running wild, but there’s a lot of accomplishment,” he said over the roar of his mills. “There’s growers, there’s millers and there’s a lot more bakers than there ever have been. A mill and a bakery, what a concept.”

More than a miller, Lewis thinks of himself as a system designer – whether he happened to be engaged in beekeeping, baking, turning wheat into flour, or coaxing ancient plants from far-flung lands to populate the Northeast.

Recently, Lewis has begun growing groups of grains together in a maslin, or medley, like the early homo sapiens did, in stark contrast to the monocrop system that dominates modern agriculture. The maslin survived the drastic climate change of the Bronze Age, and therefore so did the people growing it, said Lewis – and it’s thanks to the ingenuity of these early system designers that we now have wheat in the first place. Lewis has been fine-tuning which plants to include in the blend, much as our cave-dwelling ancestors must have done.

“There’s about eight or nine players in there, and they were all chosen for their independent qualities, and grown as a group they become a surviving maslin. Which I think is an appropriate thing to be growing at this time of climate change,” he said.

Russo, of Farmer Ground Flour, is likewise doubling down on future-forward farming practices. With over 1,200 acres of devoted farm fields, he’s using his platform to take on climate change, “the existential threat of our time,” he said.

Farmer Ground has transitioned their fields to 100 percent Regenerative Organic Certified, a higher bar than USDA Organic that takes into account soil health, greater animal welfare requirements and treatment of farm workers. They have an agronomist on staff to help their partner farms get the new certification.

“We have to adjust our practices, and the soil is one of the biggest potential carbon sinks conceivable on the planet,” said Russo. “And we’re not using it because we can’t seem to focus on incentivizing farmers. I think it’s a hugely overlooked opportunity. And you know, it’s a win-win. Healthy soil makes better bread.”