Northwest wheat growers seek local market
Coalition aims to sell directly to consumers

By MELISSA ALLISON
The Seattle Times
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 10:41 AM PDT

Garrett Ziebell, 19, helps unload wheat during the harvest this month at E&F Farm, owned by Fred Fleming, near Reardan, Wash., in Lincoln County, Sept. 1. Fleming helped start Shepherd’s Grain, an alliance of Pacific Northwest farmers who practice sustainable farming.

REARDAN, Wash. (AP) — Fred Fleming stands in a field of golden wheat, surveying miles of grain as it gradually succumbs to the power of tanklike harvesters.

It’s been more than a century since his great-grandfather first drove horses across these Eastern Washington hills. Fred Wagner, whose 1888 homestead deed bears the signature of President Grover Cleveland, would not recognize the way his great-grandson makes a living — planting with a satellite-guided seeding drill and harvesting with air-conditioned combines that can measure the average moisture in each swath of wheat.

The complexity and cost of farming have exploded in recent decades, making it impossible for many farmers to keep up.

In response, Fleming’s farm and 32 other Pacific Northwest farms have banded together, calling themselves Shepherd’s Grain, to capitalize on the growing interest in locally produced food.

They market their flour directly to area bakeries and others, bypassing the global commodity market’s unpredictable prices.

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At the moment, Shepherd’s Grain farmers receive about $2.50 more a bushel than the $4 to $6 they get from the commodity market where most of their crop still goes.

That’s helped Fleming’s farm and the others pay off some debts and have a little left over, which was not always true when they sold strictly at commodity prices.

“Four dollars used to be a heck of a price,” Fleming said. “Now, it’s almost desperation because of diesel prices, fertilizer, seed and cost of living. Everything has gone up exponentially.”

Hot Lips Pizza in Portland was the first client of Shepherd’s Grain in 2002, and word spread from there.

Sales for Shepherd’s Grain have climbed from 12,000 bushels in 2002 to 400,000 bushels last year. With four employees and no hard assets, the company has low overhead, and it now makes a small profit after years in which Fleming and business partner Karl Kupers worked without paychecks to build its base of farmers and customers.

Its first full-time saleswoman, former Nordstrom marketing executive Debbie Danekas, has traveled from bakery to bakery in the Seattle and Portland areas since being hired last spring. “I haven’t had one bakery say, ‘No, I don’t want to see you,’” she said. Besides selling flour, the farmers are forming personal bonds with customers that include Mostly Muffins, Cupcake Royale & Verite Coffee, Blazing Bagels and Tom Douglas’ Seattle restaurants and bakery.

At the grand opening of Cupcake Royale’s fourth store, on Capitol Hill, this summer, Fleming shook hands with customers eating cupcakes made with Shepherd’s Grain flour.

This month, Cupcake Royale owner Jody Hall made the reverse trip. She and her director of operations, Melanie Bonadore, visited Fleming’s home, tasted kernels of wheat from the fields where their flour originates, and drove combines over the rolling hills before settling down to an outdoor harvest meal below the rising moon.

“This is the wheat that goes into your cupcakes,” Fleming told her, and Hall pulled a few sprigs as a souvenir.

She and Bonadore like the consistent quality and price of Shepherd’s Grain, particularly after watching 50-pound bags of flour rocket from roughly $11 to $33 apiece last year, when commodities in general soared in tandem with fuel prices.

They also appreciate the buy-local angle, which saves fuel and supports people who live in the state, if not actually nearby.

Much of the flour typically used in Northwest bread originates in Montana or North Dakota.

“For me,” Hall said, “it’s keeping your money where your house is.”

One of Shepherd’s Grain’s biggest customers is Stone-Buhr, the old milling company from Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood that’s now based in San Francisco. Josh Dorf, a dot-com executive, bought Stone-Buhr from international conglomerate Unilever in 2002 in an effort to return to business basics.

After five years of driving through Eastern Washington’s wheat fields, he realized his wheat was coming mostly from Montana.

“It was embarrassing to me,” Dorf said.

The Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) mill in Spokane that was milling Dorf’s Montana flour introduced him to Shepherd’s Grain. ADM — one of the world’s biggest agribusinesses — also mills Shepherd’s Grain flour but keeps it separate from the commodity-market flour it sends by barge to Portland for export overseas.