#120 – Using Ancient Grains & Ethical Growing with Jade from Grand Teton Ancient Grains

Khorasan rye, spelt, emmer, millet, quinoa – what do all of these delicious foods have in common? They are considered ancient grains, grasses harking back to a time before industrial development and heavy hybridisation.

You are what you eat eats, and that goes for grains as well as anything else. The nutrients your grains are pulling up out of the soil are the ones you will find in your finished product. Grains are an incredible source of minerals and micronutrients when grown in a regenerative manner.

This is why today I am so excited to introduce you to Grand Teton Ancient Grains! You can find this incredible family business online at www.ancientgrains.com and in this episode I got to sit down with Jade Koyl, the owner of this incredible family farm, and learn more about the way they feed the soil, their crop rotations, grain storage, and how their family uses grains in their everyday diet; as well as why they started growing them in the first place.

Supporters can stick around for a couple minutes in the Aftershow on the private podcast, Kitchen Table Chats, where Jade shared some of the titles he’s reading right now and a little more about his family life.

Everybody can check the show notes for both the link to his company’s store as well as a link with an amazing wealth of recipes for utilizing ancient grains at https://www.ancientgrains.com/grain-recipes. Now, let’s get to the show!

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One Earth Health make the grass-fed organ supplements we use and trust. Get 15% off your first order here and 5% off all subsequent orders here.

For US listeners, we recommend Grand Teton Ancient Grains. They sell regenerative, organic flours and berries that can satisfy all your baking needs. Stock up and get free shipping at AncientGrains.com

What we talked about:

• What did you last eat?
• Farm origin
• Why ancient grains
• Regenerative growing vs conventional
• Cover crops and rotating crops
• How they replenish their soil
• How to increase diversity of grains in the diet
• Working with sourdough
• How different grains behave
• Fresh-milled vs pre-milled
• Storing grains
• How they mill their flours
• What does never hybridised mean

The personal views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect our own personal views or opinions. We recognize that our guests are whole persons and this may include views we or our audience actively disagree with; our guests are invited to the show because we feel they have something valuable to share with us all, and we do not ask them to censor their personal views on air. Our sharing of their work is not necessarily an endorsement of their personal views.

Resources:

• www.ancientgrains.com
• https://www.ancientgrains.com/grain-recipes
• Spelt Sourdough Everyday Cookbook by Alison Kay
• Episode 104 – Baking with Ancient Grains
• Episode 72 – All About Spelt Sourdough
• Episode 81 – Millet: How to use this sustainable, gluten and lectin-free grain
• Episode 41 – Wholegrain Sourdough Rye: Mastering the Basics
• The Ancestral Kitchen Podcast Guide to Milling Your Own Flour (and the Mockmill!)

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
Welcome to Ancestral Kitchen Podcast. I am here today, not with Allison, across the table screen with me. I am here with Jade Coyle. You might have noticed we have a new sponsor of the podcast. That is Grand Teton Ancient Grains. And this is a family-run regenerative grain farm and mill in Idaho, focusing on ancient grains. I know all of you have heard Allison and I speak at length about how important ancient grains are to us. Allison most especially using rye and spelt. Myself leaning more towards coruscant and einkorn and spelt. And today, as well as talking about regenerative farming, I want to ask you, Jade, I want to ask you about some of the other grains you have that I’m less familiar with and some that we haven’t really talked about much on the podcast. So, welcome to the Nantra Podcast.

Jade:
Thank you, Andrea. It’s good to be with you. I appreciate the invite.

Andrea:
I know there’s, I’ve fielded questions from people, and I kind of warned you in advance some of the things that were coming, but the first question we always ask everybody is what is the last thing you ate?

Jade:
Well, one thing that, yeah, one thing that we do at our house and my wife loves to have us all around the table for breakfast and hopefully dinner, uh, lunch is hit and miss depending on what’s going on on the farm. But we, we usually do a really big breakfast and um so yesterday my my wife made this einkorn cake and it’s it’s not you think of cake as being really sweet or something but it’s like a breakfast cake and just a delicious cake with some eggs we have chickens here and um you know eggs from the chickens and some potatoes and that was our breakfast um it sounds amazing yeah Yeah.

Andrea:
Well, so she’s the next person I want to interview then. You know, there’s a lot of farmers that I read, you know, Joel Salatin or, you know, whoever you read books by or whatever, watch programs by them. And I always have thought to myself, yeah, but the person I want to talk to is his wife. She’s the one who’s keeping this show on the road. Exactly. Like when Joel says, well, we always eat at o’clock on the dot. And then when we first had apprentices, we would eat at .. And I was like, okay, I got to talk to her. Like, what’s going on? This is pretty precise. How do you make that happen? Yeah, that’s cool. Well, behind every great man is a great woman, right? That’s awesome.

Jade:
That’s definitely true here. And it’s probably the most common question I have on these podcasts is, can we talk to your wife? So, you’re tracking her good.

Andrea:
Yeah, with good reason. Absolutely. Well, I like that she gets you guys together for the meal, too. That’s a huge effort, and you have, like, kids or something. So, that’s even more challenging. Oh, it is.

Jade:
It’s not easy. The timing. And, you know, just, it’s hard because it’s not scheduled or inconsistent. So, it can be a challenge some days. Some days, if you all pull it off. Yeah. But most days, it happens.

Andrea:
That’s remarkable, What’s the age range Of your kids And you have seven To be precise.

Jade:
Yeah Seven kids And our Our oldest is Twenty-four And our youngest Is eight

Andrea:
It’s awesome.

Jade:
And everybody’s still at home. We have three kids that are going to college, and the college is close by, so they still live at home, and they work in the business and helping either on the farm or on more of the business side of things.

Andrea:
I really love that. I wanted to ask you when we were talking today. I was thinking, gosh, are kids involved? And so it sounds like they were. I also didn’t know how old the kids were. Like, you know, if your oldest was or something, I had no idea. So that’s pretty cool. I, you know, I, of course, have a special place in my heart for big families. I just think it’s awesome. It’s a different kind of experience than really anything else that I’ve ever seen. So it’s really fun that you guys get to have that big family out there.

Jade:
It is. It’s fun to work together, too, and just see them learn and grow and, you know, take on more and more of our time. It’s an important part of their education and our growth as a family, I think.

Andrea:
Absolutely. I was told that you guys homeschool, and you confirmed that when we got on. So, curious, what sparked the interest in homeschooling, if you don’t mind me asking?

Jade:
Yeah, so I grew up in a town about three hours from here. And that town, Gooding, Idaho, is the name of the town, and that’s where my family farm was growing up. And our family, I was one of kids, the third of , and we homeschooled.

Jade:
And I tell people it was more of a farm school because we didn’t do a whole lot of book work we were more focused on the farm but that’s how we learned to do science and finance and repair and maintenance and all the stuff that goes on with the farm we learned on the hands-on there and it was an amazing education for me And when my wife Julie and I met And we married and stuff We didn’t necessarily plan to homeschool But she really liked the idea Even though she wasn’t homeschooled And she, you know, talked to me about it Talked to my parents about it And as time went on She expressed interest in doing it And I was like, yeah, I’d love to do it And so it just ended up happening It wasn’t something that was ever really planned And from the onset, it just kind of developed naturally and seemed like the natural thing. And, you know, today it’s much more common than it was then for me growing up. There were, I don’t, I don’t, I didn’t know very many other people that actually homeschooled. Very few people in that area did. So we, we were not as involved in the, maybe the community as we would have been had we gone to public school, but we were much closer to the family.

Andrea:
Yeah, it was the, that’s the generation we call the barely legal years. We started when we were being homeschooled. You kids, don’t go in the front yard until after three o’clock. Oh, my gosh, the trauma. When we started homeschooling, I was coming out of, you know, if you’re not a member of HSLDA, you’re basically going to end up in jail. And like I was coming out of that childhood. And then when we started homeschooling, I was always sweating about everything. And my husband, Gary, was like, what are you so worried about? And I was like, it’s they’re after us. You know they’re after us. Then I realized one day that it’s not that way anymore. But, yeah, I didn’t. I think I knew, like, one other homeschooled family when I was growing up. It wasn’t that common for us either. They had kids, too, by the way. But it wasn’t you guys. Yeah.

Jade:
Well, I think that the legal side of homeschool is one part of it, but the public pressure and, I don’t know, stigma that comes with it was another. And for us, it was, the school district was very, because everybody in our family is very athletic. And so they were upset because we were going to be part of the small school district sports program. And um but yeah my oldest sister continued in school she didn’t homeschool like the rest of us did um and and so i was in sixth grade when i started homeschooling and so i went home from public school but she continued and you know was a big part of the the program there and they just weren’t interested in having us involved at all in the school unless it was you know full-time I’m not sure that had to do something with funding or some practical issue, but it ended up being good things, just allowing us to focus on home and just be there. And we were farming a lot at the time. And so it was good for us to be on the farm and focused and give our attention to that and not be strung out. As you know, it can be with sports. It can kind of divide up the day and make it hard to accomplish a lot. Whereas with farming, it’s best if you can, you know, stay focused there. And I think it worked out better.

Andrea:
Well, isn’t it interesting how the physical activity of bucking hay or running a combine or whatever somebody might be doing on a farm is considered in our culture less valuable than practicing a sport that you might only play until you finish school. And that will keep you from eating dinner on the dinner table or going to church on Sunday morning or whatever other things you might want to do in your day. Um and then you know you grow up it’s not like you’re expecting all these kids to be professional sports players or something but but the odds of growing up on a farm and being a professional farmer is pretty good.

Jade:
Oh yeah no it’s

Andrea:
True you know with your your farm school growing up um if you uh take a kid off the farm and put together all those activities we call that a unit study And then it’s real school, you know. That’s right.

Jade:
When I’m sure it can be done very effectively, there’s enough subjects in there, that’s for sure.

Andrea:
Yeah, definitely. Well, let’s take a quick ad break. And then when we come back, I want to ask you more about your farm and about the, you know, speaking of farms, there’s a farm calling there, you know.

Jade:
Do you want to go into the origin story there?

Andrea:
Yeah, yeah, I do. So let’s take a quick ad break and then jump into the story of how your farm came about. So I’m curious about the origin story of Grand Teton and what brought you to farming ancient grains, which is kind of a niche thing in the farming industry, and what brought you to doing the types of practices you do without using all the conventional sprays and things. I’m very curious about all of this. So if you want to just wax eloquent, I’m on all ears.

Jade:
Yeah, so I already mentioned a little bit about how I grew up. you know, family farm. I think at the peak, we were farming about a thousand acres, which sure felt like a lot for all of us. But it was more of your conventional farm. You know, we weren’t organic. I didn’t even know that organic was a thing. But on our family farm, we grew alfalfa, sugar beets, pinto beans, and then barley and wheat.

Jade:
And so it was kind of your typical farm for that area. And I grew up working closely with my dad and we used a lot of methods that I was able to learn from and adapt to what we do today. But the way it came about was as I grew older, my dad was encouraging us to move on to other things, to look at other careers or opportunities, you know for education which is always a good idea anyway if you’re going to stay on a farm it’s very good to go get an education that will help you to understand the the maybe the market better or specific areas of farming better um and and many farmers today have to have a a job you know in addition to their farm so it’s it’s a good idea to

Jade:
To do that anyway. But for my dad’s case, he seemed to feel like the farm wasn’t going to continue on. And so we had gone in there and worked closely with our dad, you know, through all those years. And then he started to say, well, hey, why don’t you start looking at where you’re going to go? So I ended up in engineering, studying engineering classes on math, science, you know chemistry all that stuff and for a homeschooler you know honestly there was a lot of catch-up to do right but i caught on quickly and picked it up and i ended up not being in engineering as i got into material science classes i decided you know this isn’t something i want to do and i started working for a company while i was going to school that company grew very quickly and i grew up in that company um i i eventually went full-time with them and i didn’t finish my degree, but I took a lot of business classes and, you know, obviously science classes during my college years that were really helpful for me. And one of the most helpful ones was a writing class that I took.

Jade:
But as time went on, this company just continued to grow and grow. And here I was working in sales and marketing, and the company was growing quickly. We went from about employees to and um i took on a leadership role in that company as time went on and this was the time in the early s when you couldn’t really go to school for internet marketing um i i was learning on the job more and better and faster than you could at a school at that time that the courses just weren’t keeping up with what was happening online and so um Time went on. Julie and I had a few children. We were at a choir concert for one of our kids, and a friend of mine was there, and he told me that he had come across this ancient grain that he thought I would be interested in.

Jade:
And he said it was called einkorn, the most primitive form of wheat on earth, and it contains a different type of gluten than modern wheat. This really caught my attention. My mind caught a hold on the thought. I thought about it a lot. And as I got home, I started researching it on the internet. And I learned a lot about its origins. It wasn’t really possible to get other than, you know, maybe some eclectic people that were selling online on a small, you know, basis, but it wasn’t widely available. And um i was able to uh buy the domain name einkorn.com which you know for an internet marketing guy that’s not unusual you you do buy domain names when you see something interesting like that um but this was unusual in that that domain was up for auction and it closed that month so this was a saturday and monday that auction closed and i placed a bid and on monday i won that auction and a friend who told me about einkorn um you know he was like wow okay i guess we’re gonna do something and he and i started writing on this blog

Jade:
And this is like the early days of blogging, right? So we’re just writing articles and somehow people are finding them through SEO and, you know, searching on Google or they share it with each other through email. However, it happened. You didn’t really have social media back then. And so people started finding out and they were, we were contacted by people all over the world. Just, you’re talking farmers, researchers, you know, health food people, all contacting us, asking, you know, how, how can we get einkorn? What, what, you know, are you guys working on growing this? And I mean, we were just, we just threw up a blog, right? And, and the farmer, well, this is an exciting opportunity, right? Right. So little by little, you know, the whole whole thing just continued to grow and develop. And I remember still when we first found einkorn seed, it was from a farmer in Germany. And back then, it wasn’t like it is now where you could just go and use Google Translate or whatever. You know, you you had to find a way to translate what people are saying. But we were able to get in touch with this farmer, get a translator to help us communicate and get some seed from this farmer in Germany. He sent us seed and I planted on my dad’s farm in Idaho. And it did really well.

Jade:
And it was tall. You know, it probably grew up to shoulder height. And it was an unusual looking grain. But the flavor was interesting. The grain itself was. I got to run the old combine that I ran as a kid, uh, you know, to harvest it, um, And it was just a fun project. This wasn’t a business or anything. It was just a fun kind of hobby while I was in my career. And my friend, he was studying chemical engineering there at the school. So both of us, this was more of a hobby. But I kind of felt like I was thrown into this because all this time I had this idea in my mind of a local farmer in my hometown who would sell beans in small bags. I’m not talking like -pound bags. I’m talking about like two-pound bags.

Jade:
And so he was marking them direct to consumer. And so all this time, I’m just thinking about all these things going on. How is it that I’ve come across this ancient grain, and we’re starting to grow, and we’re doing these things, and now people are contacting me from all over. I thought, well, maybe this will become something. So I kept at it. And I say kept at it. It was literally a hobby. My oldest two boys were helping me to package, you know, we had, we had grains down in our basement and we would bring them up and, and ship them out. And so we’d ship like, you know, yeah, it was, it was just a little kind of hobby business and it just continued to grow and grow to the point where in , so you’re talking about quite a while later, Our family had moved back to Idaho, and living in Idaho, we weren’t near my family. We were about three hours away. We were near my wife’s family up here by the university. And… I was continuing to do sales and marketing, but this little side business was continuing to grow. And it was the point where I told my wife, we should do something with this, either stop it or put attention towards it. And the farm around us had come for sale. It was just a few acres, not very many.

Jade:
And we had bought that farm, started transitioning it to organic. It wasn’t enough acres to do anything serious about, serious with in terms of, you know, building a business on, but it was a fun way to start, just a few acres so that we could begin experimenting with and learning about organic farming. And so I started reading books. I

Andrea:
Called as many.

Jade:
Of the organic farmers in Idaho as I could get a hold of just to learn from them how they were doing it. I talked to my dad about the things I was learning and he guided me on, you know, some of the things we did when I was younger and how those same practices could be applied, like crop rotation and intercropping. We didn’t do cover crops as a kid, but that’s another thing that I learned the importance of. And around the last few years, you’ve seen a lot of these concepts become more and more popular and well-researched and more testing has been done with them. And that’s kind of falling under the whole regenerative movement, regenerative farming and so it it organic farming tends to be okay this is how you’re going to eliminate toxins and if you would not not bring toxins into your soils general farming is how you build fertility and how you care for the soil and you the practices you use for building you know nutrient-rich soil So the two hand in hand, as I researched it and read books, listened to podcasts, went to, listened to speakers, everything that I could do, I just came to realize this was the way to do it.

Jade:
And I went to my younger brother, he’s eight years younger than me, and I said, hey, this thing is going places and we could do something with this if you’re interested. He was a mechanical engineer, master’s in mechanical engineering, and was kind of at a point in his career where he could do something. I said, do you want to come up here and give this a go and see if we can do something with this? I’ll continue to work full time in my job and you can. You know, start working full-time in this business and we’ll see where it can go. Well, by , I was full-time in the business. And, and that happened faster than we thought. With COVID, you know, we at first sent all of our employees home. Our employees just, we weren’t sure what this whole COVID thing meant. We sent them home and our family just packaged and shipped and, and, and it was busy. It was our business we ever had.

Jade:
So this is kind of how it all came about. And fast forward to today, we farmed , acres, regenerative organic. We don’t own them. We have long-term leases with landowners here that allows us to build the, you know, take care of the soil, transition it to organic, and really build the fertility over the long-term that we want in that soil. And we’ve got a mill here. We clean grains, specializing in ancient grains, einkorn, emberspelt, coruscant, which we can always talk more about. And then we also mill some flowers, and we’re starting pasta online soon. So it’s been a fun adventure, and it’s been, to me, just I felt like God has helped us along the way, just kind of led us along and helped us to know it’s going to be all right. Keep taking these steps, and then the next step will kind of show up, and it’s been that way all along.

Andrea:
That’s incredible. You know, there’s an element where I think sometimes people look back at a story and they say, oh, so lucky everything just happened. But there’s a lot of your own big decisions and energy that had to go into each one of those things, you know, making the shift to moving into it entirely, finding the land, you know, not just waiting for the opportunity to rise up. That’s pretty wonderful.

Jade:
And there are the challenges along the way, too, you know, with that. There’s, unfortunately, very expensive mistakes that we’ve made along the way that sometimes make you wonder, you know, do we keep trying to do this? You know, we’re still alive today. We’ve been blessed to be able to make it through those and still survive as a business. And that really comes down to the support from our customers that has made that possible. Thank you.

Andrea:
When, if you, Jade, if you lean forward, I think it’s when you’re leaning forward, your microphone comes through better. And I think if you lean back slightly, it sounds a little farther away. I’m not sure if that’s what you’re doing, but if you, whatever, yeah, where you are right now sounds really good.

Jade:
I wonder if my camera mic is picking it up.

Andrea:
Oh.

Jade:
It’s supposed to be on my headphones. It says it’s on my headphones.

Andrea:
Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, Riverside sometimes tells me I’m on my USB microphone, but I’m not, like when we first got on. And then we had to.

Jade:
Yeah. Mic. Oh, it says the sound is coming through my AirPods, but the mic is not. And I don’t know how to change that. Let me see if I can change my mic. It won’t let me change it. So, yeah, you’re right. That’s why that’s happening. Darn it.

Andrea:
Okay. Well, it’s not the worst. If you stay closer, whatever it is you’re doing right now, then it sounds great. I mean, it doesn’t sound horrible the other way either. It just sounds better when you’re closer. I’m just making a timestamp note real quick so Rob can snip that out. I’m picking in. Cool. Okay. All right. We can jump back in. I’m curious about expensive mistakes. Is there any that you want to share?

Jade:
Well, the first one, I don’t know that it was expensive.

Jade:
It was more that it could have stopped it from progressing. When I got that seed from that farmer in Germany, the first thing I did was I found a farmer to try to grow it organically. And it was a farmer in Wyoming.

Jade:
I sent it to the farmer and i never heard from him again no and i was able to con but i unfortunately didn’t send him all the seeds so that’s that was the first good move i made and so so i sent him the seed never heard from i’d call him nothing and then you know i i ended up planning to rest the next year at my dad’s um and so i finally got a hold of him just by chance a few years after i had um had grown up my dad’s and he explained you know it just never grew anything um but i didn’t i about that point i’d moved on but yeah it was a pretty dramatic i mean it was a year lost right in learning yeah yeah anyway but there was that and then the biggest mistake that we made was when we when my brother joined with me we had decided to build a facility for cleaning and so this was and we bought a small piece of land here near me like we’re talking three acres in this rural community um and and it wasn’t it was farmland and we were going to convert it into

Jade:
Basically a facility where we could come in clean the grains, load trucks and so forth. So we built the building I worked with the mayor in this small town got approval from the county, all this stuff happened and A lot of my discussions were verbal. They weren’t official as they should have been, and it should have gone through planning and zoning and whatever. I just didn’t have any experience with that kind of stuff. So this mayor got sick in and passed away, and a new mayor came in, and the new mayor said that they were not going to allow us to continue to operate here.

Andrea:
No way.

Jade:
And so you know what happened in with building and land prices.

Andrea:
Oh, my gosh, yeah. Here we were.

Jade:
We had done all this before, and we were operating. And there were some issues with our facility with dust and noise, but we were willing to invest in them to fix it. In fact, we had come to them with a proposal to do this before they had told us they didn’t want us to be in Teton.

Jade:
Anyway, so the short end of it is that we ultimately agreed to move out of Teton, And we moved to Sugar City, which is a town about three miles from here, to an industrial property. It’s the old sugar facility where they made sugar, I guess, what you’d call it, back in the early s. And that sugar facility has been taken down. And in , a second facility that was there burned down. And so now we’re the third occupants of this old, very old, one of the oldest industrial facilities in this area. So it ends up being a great location. And it’s probably a much better location for us than where we were. But nonetheless, it’s been very expensive. And we were very scared at some times in there that Seton was going to not work with us on it. Because there were issues with credit and bank failures and stuff that continued to kind of mess up our plans as we went along. But we ultimately were able to get that built. And in the spring of this year, we finished, and we now have our cleaning facility in Sugar City.

Jade:
So that’s behind us for the most part. We’re still working on some loose ends associated with it. But ultimately, all of our facilities will be in Sugar City. Our farm is still throughout Sugar City on a Wilford area but the actual grain cleaning and shipping facility will ultimately be all in Sugar City once we’re done with this whole project so it’ll be good

Andrea:
That’s an expensive college class but.

Jade:
Yeah you know I probably could have avoided that right I could have like someone more experienced more uh, savvy than me would not have allowed that to happen. But one of the big things…

Andrea:
But they’d only be savvy because they did it when they were starting. They did it.

Jade:
They made the same mistakes. But number one is just make sure you go through the proper channels when you do things. Because even though you might have a mayor saying, yeah, or whatever, you know, somebody in the city that you’re saying, yeah, you need to still go through the proper channels.

Andrea:
That’s a great point.

Jade:
It’s a good lesson.

Andrea:
Yeah. Well, the greens are safe now. Yeah. That’s a good thing. We like that. And you’ve redeemed Sugar City. Look at that.

Jade:
Yeah, that’s right.

Andrea:
All right. Let’s take a quick ad break, and then I’m going to come back with another question for you about the farm. So when you talk about regenerative, this is a conversation that I find most interesting because you alluded to cover crops. You also mentioned in passing the height of vine corn, which I understand the importance of that. But I wonder if you could contrast for us the most modern durum wheat and the growing of it with your process. Do you want to maybe show us, like highlight the difference between those two things? Because I think there’s a lot of people out there who maybe there’s a lot here that would be interesting and new information or adding to what they already know.

Jade:
So, yeah, so some of the differences between them show up only on the farming side. Like when it comes to, you know, baking with them, you might not notice a lot of these things don’t come into play. But on the farming side, it can change quite a bit. So number one is what we call hulled wheats. So these hulled wheats are the three farrows, einkorn, emmer, and spelt. All three of those have a hole on them. And that hull, it means that the grain is not free threshing. So if you have modern Durham wheat, like you say, or modern hard red spring or hard white spring, hard red winter, these grains are free threshing. And what that simply means is that when you combine it, the hulls come off, the kernel comes out of the hull very freely, very easily. And so you look in your combine or your truck and it’s just the naked grains, right? Whereas with Einkorn, Ehrman, Spelt,

Jade:
They’re like if you’ve ever seen barley in the hole or I’m trying to think, oats, you know, if you’ve ever seen oats in the hole, right, that you feed your horses. It looks more like that. And so it’s a very light bushel because you have that hole on it and then it has to be removed. And the mechanical process for removing that definitely changes things. But we like them because they store well. They handle it when they’re in the field like if a rainstorm comes they’re good at shedding that rain they’re not as good in hailstorms though well nothing’s really good in a hailstorm um but but uh the heads will fall off you know on some of these ancient grains it can get knocked off and and once it’s on the ground there’s nothing you can do with it so um you can have some loss there but but we like the ancient grains because they are tall they do They fight the weeds better Which from an organic standpoint is really helpful But they’re also more resourceful when it comes to use of water and nutrients

Jade:
So we can grow these ancient grains We live here in this Teton Valley

Jade:
At , feet elevation We’re not in the Teton Valley in the sense that it would be known here locally but we are in the valley below the Tetons. So the foothills of the Tetons come down into the city of Teton, and then from there it drops into the valley here. And that eastern Idaho Valley is a great place for growing wheat because of the cool temperature. Wheat is a cool season grass, and the dry climate both work together for really good milling quality. If you get a lot of rains on wheat when you’re at the harvest stage, it can hurt the milling quality a lot. And that’s why a lot of these places like in Kansas, even though they grow more wheat than anywhere else, a lot of that’s winter wheat because they’ve got to get it off the field before the season gets too hot. You know, it doesn’t grow as well. And they want to try to take advantage of the winter rains and whatnot. So in this area, we can grow exceptional milling quality. And we have these rivers running here. The free-flowing Teton River comes off the Grand Teton Mountain Range, flows through our farm. And it’s free flowing year round. And that’s where we irrigate from. And what that makes possible when it comes to ancient grains is we can be very selective in how we use water on our farm. And we can even grow it on dry farms. And it does really well.

Jade:
It performs well in areas where modern wheat, there are varieties made for these things, but they don’t perform as well as ancient grains. So we like the ancient cranes for that purpose. The other one I talked about is competition with weeds. You know, the more you have that’s going to crowd out the weeds to cover, you know, shade out the weeds, the better job you’ll do. And from an organic standpoint, that’s really important. But we do intercrop with our wheat as well. That’s one of the principles that we use. And we’ll plant peas in there with it. Those peas grow up alongside the weed at the same height. And so they don’t grow as big and bushy as they would if they were growing their own, but they help to take up and occupy more of that space, yet capture the sunlight and store that sun in the form of energy in the soil that we can use for future years.

Andrea:
That’s amazing. And you talked about the way that the ancient grains use resources and find their nutrients. Do you find that they’re less extractive than the modern wheats? Like, do they leave your soil, you know, like what are you rotating between or covering with to like, like are you putting pigeon peas in or something between them to fix the nitrogen? And do you find that they, like how does your soil, I guess, hold up to the grain growing is what I’m trying to get at.

Jade:
Yeah, so we grow, it depends on the rotation. So, like, if you wanted to grow hard white spring year on year, it’s just not possible unless you’re bringing in outside nutrients like, you know, conventional nutrients of some sort. It’s just not going to work. You have to rotate. And the challenge for that, even for a conventional farm who’s using, you know, industrial fertilizers, they’ve got to deal with disease and other things. Eventually, they have to change it. And it’s not going to work for them. Whereas on our side, We’re not worried about how far we can push it using these conventional means. Instead, we’re trying to do it naturally. And so we’re using every tool we can to accomplish it through natural means. And that includes cover crops. So in the fall, we plant crops behind our harvest so that there’s a living root in the soil. And that way, we’re taking advantage of the sun throughout the fall and into the winter and then storing that with a live root in the soil so the biology can live and add something to live on.

Jade:
And then it’s storing, it’s scavenging nutrients. So it’s pulling out the immediately available nutrients and it’s storing them in the plant. And then biology then will decompose it over the winter and make it available to the plant coming into the spring. And that scavenging process is really important for preserving the nutrients that way. But when it comes to ancient grains and how much do they tap the soil out, well, the truth with them is that They aren’t going to need as much in the first place, but also they’re going to be more resourceful at tapping into different nutrients, right? And even spelt and einkorn and emmer, they have different ways that they pull nutrients. Einkorn’s higher in zinc and iron. And so it’s going to, you know, extract more of that out of the soil than, say, spelt would.

Jade:
But spelt’s higher in fiber. So the things that it needs to do that are going to change. And that’s, you know, that’s the value of crop rotation. But we’re also planting different species. We would call all of these, whether it’s modern hard red spring wheat or einkorn, we consider them to be wheat in the sense that part of our rotation needs to be going away from these, right? So we’re going into legumes, alfalfa, clover, radishes, and we’re bringing other species into the crop rotation so that it’s not just the same thing growing every year. And then last of all, we plant a companion crop with it. So if we’re planting einkorn, we’re going to have peas growing with it. And then as those peas start to grow—

Andrea:
Like seeded in with the.

Jade:
Einkorn, is that what you mean? Yep, seeded together with it. And so as the peas begin to grow and they bloom and they start to develop… They start to develop nitrogen nodules on their roots. Those can be transferred over to the grains and made available to them as a source.

Andrea:
Wow, so you don’t even have to wait for the—that’s incredible.

Jade:
Yeah, there’s some of that happens, you know, during the season, and then there’s some that gets left in the soil for the next season. And then we also will bring in nutrients from outside. So we might bring in fish. So there are a bunch of fish hatcheries here in Idaho off of the Snake River and so there’s a pretty good access to fish nutrients

Jade:
Another one would be bringing in micronutrients from the ocean so sometimes you need trace nutrients so if you’re just worried about the macronutrient soil and you’re not getting trace nutrients then the biology of the plants and the biology of the soil is not going to function properly And I’d like to talk about regenerative farming and biology in the soil kind of like intelligence.

Jade:
The greatest technology that we have on earth is the technology that came with it. It’s this biology where just like a bird knows how to build its own nest, nobody teaches a bird how to build a nest. It has that intelligence. And the same is true when it comes to the biology in the soil. There are millions of species who each know their job. You know, some of them are to pull nutrients out of the air and bring those into the soil and make it available to the plants. Some of them extract it from the minerals in the soil and break it down and make it bioavailable. Some of them transfer nutrients. And then there’s a whole ecology that happens in there, and that helps to balance this whole system so that nothing becomes too overpowering and that it’s going to take over and cause problems. And so that natural system, that ecosystem is vital to the functioning of a good regenerative program. So we’re constantly trying to work at it from the angle of building the macronutrients through our rotational programs, as well as the micronutrients through these outside products. And then, you know, obviously building fertility primarily through crop rotation, cover crops and intercropping. And then finally, we use some compost tea. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that before.

Andrea:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jade:
Compost tea, yeah. Just building biology by growing it in a tea that we put on. And then we take off the straw from our field. So this tall straw, the einkorn straw, we haul it off. We take it to dairies, to cattlemen. And then we bring back compost. That turns into compost, you know, over the next year. We bring back compost from the cattlemen and put it on our fields as a nutrient source. And so that’s, those are some

Andrea:
Of the natural things.

Jade:
That we’re using. Yeah, it is.

Andrea:
Perfect energy exchange there.

Jade:
You don’t want to be wasting anything, really, when it comes right down to it. We don’t have animals in our operations. We don’t have a herd of cattle or sheep or anything. If we did, we’d have them out there grazing right now. But we’re doing the best we can at incorporating these methods, and it’s working well, and we’re learning more and more every year. We have to try and do things constantly. We did a lot of intercropping with clover and peas over the last few years, and we’ve learned a lot about that.

Andrea:
Wow. I’m finding this so fascinating to hear about because I’m more involved in animals than—I’ve never grown grains, really. And so I’m thinking about there are modern breeds of chicken and cow and different animals that they will not survive without input from chemical industries like everything from antibiotics to, you know, kind of higher octane feeds. And they don’t have the, they’ve lost a lot of, you know, there’s birds who are a thousand generations into having never, you know, seen the sky pecked grass or, you know.

Andrea:
You know, hatched their own chicks or anything. And there’s a lot of, you know, when it comes to both animal and food breeding, then you can breed for specific traits and lose other ones that have value. You know, everybody wants like the broad-breasted turkey, but they aren’t really so concerned with whether or not the turkey is very good at taking care of her children. And and so then you end up in a situation where people will say well you have to feed this specific thing to these animals or they won’t survive and i was thinking of that as you were describing the grains saying you know well they can seek out their nutrients in different different ways and other grains would actually require the input and this is a conversation that is um, less i don’t know maybe less being had where people say oh i want this same thing as i had before but the organic version and sometimes that doesn’t.

Jade:
Exist right because

Andrea:
Of the the actual genetics of it.

Jade:
Yeah yeah and it it’s it’s hard as a consumer we have been And so, I guess, spoiled with this homogenous, consistently reliable line of products.

Andrea:
Right.

Jade:
And the closer you get to raw products, the less and less you should see of the homogenous.

Andrea:
Yeah. And I think the more time you spend with those raw products, the less value that homogenous appearance has to you. So, you know, people would ask us all the time, oh, how do I make, I don’t know, cottage cheese that looks like the one from the grocery store? To which I would say, why? Why do we want it to look like the one at the grocery store? Who taught you that that’s what cottage cheese looks like? Like, where did we learn that? We learned that from an industry that kind of standardized it and, you know, makes regulations around the fat quantities and, you know, flavor and salt content of a product. And then we think, oh, this is how that looks. And I must now make my homemade version. But sometimes your homemade version doesn’t exist because it’s just an industrial product. Oh, this is so fascinating. I’m really excited about the nutritional content of your grains because… Plants that extract food from the soil and from, you know, properties of mycorrhizae and different things have such a better profile than something who is some, a plant has kind of just fed, spoon fed, you know, nitrogen or something so that they’re going to be not only more flavorful, but at the end of the day, more, more medicinal in their feeding of you, which is awesome.

Jade:
I think so. And I think that there’s probably a lot to learn that maybe can’t all even be known. But I think if you use principles, we consider, for example, that regenerative farming is an aim of ours. It’s not a method. And what that means is that the methods may change, but the goals are the same. And the methods will change based on the year, what the climate’s like that year, what the growing conditions are like. And that will also change based on what crops were growing, how those interplayed with each other based on the prior year. There’s never one year that’s the same. There’s never one crop that’s the same. and so

Jade:
Even though we test, like on all of our grains, we test to make sure they’re glyphosate-free. We don’t use glyphosate, but we test to make sure it doesn’t show up in it. We test to make sure there’s no yeast or mold or, you know, any harmful bacteria in it. We test for heavy metals. We test, you know, we test all these things. There’s so many more things that you couldn’t even measure, right? Right. And and we we realize that that based on the year, based on the conditions, all these factors can be changing and we not even realize it. And and some of it is just nature’s way of doing it. And we need to be participating as part of that natural process and understanding that, hey, sometimes it’s really good and sometimes it’s not not as good as it might have been. And for us, the way that that shows up is in, you know, our yields. You know, one year you might have an amazing yield on a field, and the next year just, like, it might be a really hot year, and so the yields might be down.

Jade:
And that can play into a lot of factors in the grain. And so when you buy from someone like us, we’re consistently growing these grains using these regenerative organic methods. But you can notice the baking characteristics and whatnot can change from year to year because of that and so it’s it’s a as a baker it’s definitely a challenge and it’s also a kind of an adventure i would say to say okay yes i’m baking with spelt but you know we’re now in a new year we just finished spelt harvest the spelt harvest so when you buy from us if the last time you bought from us was, say, in April, then now this order is going to come from the harvest, and it’s going to be different. It might be better in some ways. It might not have as strong of a rise as the last year is, or it might have more. Or you might notice a difference in flavor. One might be more mellow, and one might be a little bit stronger flavored. And it’s the same spelt growing year to year, but the conditions just change so much every year.

Andrea:
That’s a great point. And that is something, actually, when Allison wrote her spelt cookbook, we specifically put in there because everybody wants an exact prescribed percentage. This is exactly how I do it, exactly what temperature. And that’s definitely a desire that we’ve kind of had pounded into us from the industrial food complex where everything is exactly the same and you will always get identical results every time. But when you start working with things like live yeast out of sourdough or wild yeast or the grains like you’re talking about, these grains that are having some variability in them, just spending an amount of your energy being connected to what you’re making and paying attention to it, being very awake to the process is so important. Because it is not as prescriptive and it isn’t a method, as you were saying, with the regenerative. It’s an aim, like you said. There is an ideal in mind, which is a loaf I can put on the table, but it might come out differently.

Jade:
Yeah, and we experienced that with sourdough firsthand, depending on how warm it is in your kitchen. Depending on how recently you fed it.

Andrea:
Depending on how many of your kids jumped down the stairs when you’re coming down. Yeah, exactly.

Jade:
And all these things will factor into it. It’s the same on the farm. We like to think of it like a basketball game. We’ve got our game plan here. We’re ready to go. But as we get into the season, things start to change, and we start adapting our plan, and suddenly it doesn’t look like we thought it might. But at the end of the day, you know, it’s going to be, we’re going to try to adapt. For example, this year, we harvested almost two weeks earlier than we did last year. And that’s very unusual for around here. And it was a great thing. We were super happy about it because it allowed us to get cover crops in the ground sooner. But we had to have our seed sooner. We, you know, we had to just plan on some things related to cover crops that normally we’d have to worry about for a little bit longer.

Andrea:
Right, that’s it. Yeah, it throws things off, but that’s great that you’re adaptable and you could move with that. That’s another advantage of being a smaller farm, too. Not that anybody listening to this thinks , acres is small, but you know what I mean?

Jade:
But it is, yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah, yeah. In the real.

Jade:
Context of farming today, it is a pretty small farm.

Andrea:
Yeah, in the way when there’s a friend of ours out here that raises pasture chickens, and I think they do around , a year or so. And if you tell people that, they say, whoa, , chickens. And I say, yeah, but there’s also a plant down the road that’s slaughtering like a million a week. So it’s the scale is insane. let’s take a quick ad break and then i want to come back and ask you about um bringing these different grains into our diet and getting some of that diversity and some variability, so something that i’m noting as you’re talking you’re saying you know this einkorn is high in zinc or spelt is high in fiber i think you mentioned those two things and that reminds me of the importance of getting diverse grains in your diet, not just featuring, as our industry loves to do, one grain for life, only ever and always. So I wonder if you could talk about maybe some of the diversity you see between grains so that we can understand some of the importance of having different ones. But then also, do you, or maybe I should balance this question over to Julie, what are some ways for having diverse grains turn up in your diet and not getting fixated on just the one.

Jade:
Yeah, well, it can kind of be likened to the farming, where we try to use as much diversity as we can around the farming, bringing that diversity in allows the biology to thrive and the soil to thrive and to remain fertile. Whereas if you grow the same thing year over year, you’re eventually going to have disease, you’re going to have problems in your soil, in your field. So it’s the same with our bodies. And

Jade:
When we bring our grains into our cleaning facility, because we’re regenerative farming, you’re going to have, let’s say, a field of einkorn. You’re going to have peas in it. You’re going to have all these different seeds with it. And we have a specific grain cleaning facility that will separate those. So at the end of the day, when the customer receives it, it’s just einkorn. And it’s a beautiful, clean bag of einkorn coming to you in one of our paper bags. Well, when you open that and you start using it, you might struggle at first to use that einkorn because it’s a little bit different than, say, the white flour you’re buying from the store. And it can be a lot different, to be honest, in flavor, but also in the baking performance. And so the challenge becomes learning to adapt to it. And like you say, not getting fixated on, oh, this is the one that is the easiest for me to use, but embracing diversity. And even though it presents challenges to you, you can embrace that. And that’s where my wife is really good at incorporating these things. Julie’s built this process for using sourdough. So she feeds it with einkorn, but she can have a few different grains in the bread. So she might do a spelt Coruscant einkorn loaf.

Jade:
Or sometimes she’ll put in emmer or all four. And that diversity, what you’re doing is you’re making this bread that now has all these different elements into it, right? They came from different fields. They came from different conditions, different grains that do different things. And that’s an advantage. And so when it comes to embracing that and I’d say navigating it, But the biggest thing to remember is that spelt is the most modern of the ancient wheats. So spelt is going to perform more similarly to modern wheat than the others. But spelt is much higher in fiber than, say, a hard red spring or a hard white spring wheat. And you can see that when you look at it. But you’ll also definitely notice it if you just cook it whole and eat it like as a rice replacement, that spelt has more fiber in it.

Jade:
So baking with spelt, though, it has a strong gluten in it, comparatively, and it’s going to, you know, perform pretty similarly. But you start making it with einkorn, it’s going to… Be more sticky, it’s not going to develop as well, it’s not gonna hold structure as well. And so you work with them differently. Maybe the way that you’re used to working with dough in spelt, it might be very similar, but with einkorn, you’re gonna be more, maybe more of a no-knead process or a low handling process, or if you do handle it, you handle it with wet hands. But what you don’t wanna do is add more flour to try to take away the stickiness, or else you’re gonna end up with a brick. And so, avoid that temptation and let it do its thing. And you’ll be surprised at how nice that iron corn loaf can turn out. Emmer is similar to iron corn in terms of how it performs when it comes to baking.

Jade:
Coruscant, I would say, is kind of in a world of its own. Because when you, Coruscant by class is a durum wheat. It’s a chromosome, so is emmer. But so they’re both emmer and coruscant are in the durum class of weeds. Einkorn is its own class, a chromosome. Modern wheat is chromosome. It’s spelt falls under that chromosome class. And so the coruscant, the reason I say it’s kind of in a world of its own is when you mill it, it’s a really grainy flour. It doesn’t mill fine like einkorn mills into, almost this powdery, fine baby powder feel. Whereas Coruscant is going to be more grainy and you’re going to need to develop the gluten more and once you do though it can make the most beautiful soft loaves the loaves that come from Coruscant are some of the softest loaves that I’ve seen And so it’ll surprise you what you can do with these grains when you start to play around with them. And then once you understand what they do, then mixing them together to accomplish certain goals, like this hamburger bun recipe that my wife uses using Coruscant, I think it’s amazing. It’s a really nice, strong bun, but it’s soft, and it works great. So learning to work with them, I think, is a lot of the adventure.

Jade:
And I recommend baking with them individually to get acquainted with them, but then start trying things with a mix and seeing how they turn out, knowing what you have learned by baking with them individually and how that’s going to affect working with them together.

Andrea:
I think that’s great advice. I like that she mixes them. That’s something I do oftentimes because I just end up having a little bit of this and that left, and so I just throw them all in together. Yeah. That’s awesome. And you guys sell, well, you sent me a couple different actual whole berries. So if somebody, I know a lot of our listeners like to mill their own grains and I’ll plug our mock mill. We’ve got a link for the mock mill on here because Allison has absolutely fallen in love with the mock mill. It’s like her right hand now.

Jade:
At this point.

Andrea:
And I love being able to get the grains that we can mill fresh because there’s such a difference not just in the flavor but in the nutrient profile of the freshly milled grain do you have anything you want to say on the subject of having it freshly milled yeah.

Jade:
So I grew up in a home where we made our bread right there in the home my mom had a flour mill and we milled the flour fresh. So I grew up around that. We didn’t have the diversity of grains that we’re using in our home now. And so the thing that I like about…

Andrea:
Did you guys have a whisper mill?

Jade:
We had it in the jet engine. That’s all I remember. It was a jet engine.

Andrea:
I’ll bet it was the whisper mill. Because that was like homeschoolers of the s and s. That’s what we had, man. It was just giant bags of wheat that went through it but oh you can’t beat you can’t beat that fresh mild.

Jade:
Yeah, it was the jet. And it did a good job. It made the flour, did the job. And, you know, we were taking advantage of the benefits of fresh milled flour then. But the reason I do like the mock mill concept and the mills like it is that when you put a mill on your countertop and you can just pour in just the grains that you need and fresh flour comes out, you don’t have to have a big milling event. Like with the whisper mill or some of these mills today, they’ll have kind of the containment and you end up with this process where, well, I’m going to get all this out, so I’m going to mill enough to get me by a few days. But when you mill with a countertop mill, you pour it in the top, the flour comes right out into your bowl, so you’re not having to turn into this big milling event. It’s just integrated. And that’s what I noticed with Julie is that if she’s going to feed her starter, for example, she just takes a third of a cup of einkorn berries, mills those, a third of a cup of water, puts it in with that fresh flour in her jar with a little remnant of the sourdough in it, and mixes it up, and it’s quick. It’s just a few seconds, and she’s done it and moved on. It’s not a big event.

Andrea:
Does she use them? What does Julie use for milling?

Jade:
Yeah, mock mill as well, yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah, mock mill, yeah.

Jade:
That’s cool.

Andrea:
Yeah. And you don’t have to put on like ear protection, which is kind of nice.

Jade:
Right. Yeah. That’s the other thing is, is it’s not, it’s not going to impose on how the house is much. And so I think Julie has seen the benefits of that, but as a family, we’ve benefited by all of what that brings because you tend to just mill it right when you need it. So you’re literally getting this fresh flower, you know, milled a few times a day. And, and, and every time it’s fresh flower being milled right then and, and, And the other thing that I’m practical, you know, let’s say from a budgetary standpoint, the best way to buy grains is in bulk. And that’s why we sell these big packages on our website. So they ship for free to consumers. Shows up in their house. And then you can put it, leave it in our bags or put it in your own containers. And it’s the most.

Andrea:
That’s how you actually sell some in buckets.

Jade:
Which I thought was genius. We actually just finished our bucket, our annual bucket sale. And it was a huge success. but we could sell it in buckets or we sell it in our paper bags, -pound bags. So if you buy the -pound option, you’re getting two -pound bags and you can transfer those into your buckets or your storage or however you do it. But when you buy it in bulk and you buy it by the whole range, you can store it for a long time. It’s the way God intended it to be with the nutrition stored right there in the grain, ready to unlock or want to mill it. And so, yeah, we’re big proponents of fresh milled flour. We do have a flour mill here and we’re expanding our milling capabilities as a mill, but we are still proponents and recommend if you can possibly do it to mill your own flour.

Andrea:
For sure. I love that you sell the milled flour, though, too, which you also or Adam sent me some of that as well, which I think is so great because not everybody has the investment of a mill made yet. And some people might just need to establish the habit of baking before they kind of are ready to dump a couple hundred dollars onto a mill. But, of course, once you have the mill, the cost savings is wonderful because you can get those big bulk bags, you know, make a yearly purchase or, you know, quarterly or whatever. And have your grains set up. I know you put an expiration date or like a best used by, not expiration, but a best used by date on your bags. But I always tell people when they ask me, you know, how long can you keep it? I tell them there’s three things that we find in tombs. It’s grains and honey and oils, essential oils. So, you know, you can just put those things on the shelf. It’s okay.

Jade:
It is, absolutely. And I, you know, we’ve, we put those dates on there just because we don’t know what might happen. But if you’re like us, you don’t pay as much attention to the dates as you do to how you store it.

Andrea:
And then. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Jade:
If these grains are bad, you’re going to know it. You’ll know it long ahead of time.

Andrea:
I’ve kept some grains for a very long time and used them. I had like a fair amount of organic wheat and then I went gluten free for a long time. And I toted the buckets of wheat from here across the country and back like three times. But um then i ended up eating them later they were fine so i think they’re like years old though but there you go.

Jade:
Yeah we’ve had it in our in our warehouse where um we had some einkorn from one fill it was just a couple hundred pounds that you know it was it was old so we weren’t going to sell it but we baked with it here in our house it was just fine it was over years old oh sure sitting in the warehouse not closed up not airtight or anything so no

Andrea:
That’s brilliant Oh, I love that. I mean, that’s the beauty of grain. Of course, this is why people were, you know, civilization grew with the grain was because it gave you something to eat over half the year when everything was dead and frozen. How do you mill? You said you’re working on your milling operation. I’m curious how you mill. I’m not like majorly familiar with milling processes, but I’m familiar enough to know that there’s, you know, a lot of heat can happen during milling. And so how do you guys mill?

Jade:
So we have this—one of the cool things about this area is every January, it turns down to negative for two weeks.

Andrea:
That’s not cool. That’s not what I call cool. I love that it’s an advantage for you, but—.

Jade:
But we’ll kick on all the fans on our grain bins and just suck that air in and just cool that grain down. And imagine this big, huge freezer, basically, right? And so as we go into the summer months, it’s still cool inside there.

Andrea:
Whoa, that’s incredible.

Jade:
Yeah, it’s a big advantage.

Andrea:
And genius resourcing, I mean, it’s smart.

Jade:
But when it comes into our mill, when I say mill, the first part is the cleaning, right? So we clean the grain, we separate it from the peas or whatever we grew it with, and there’s going to be weed seeds in there and a little chaff, right? We get the clean grain.

Andrea:
So does it store with all that? Like it stores unclean?

Jade:
Yep, we store it with the hole on. It actually, it’s made, I mean, it lasts so well in that hole, right? Oh, yeah. That’s it for us to store it in the hole because it takes up twice as much room. but it is the best way to store it and then we we clean it we de-hole it just as we’re ready to start shipping it to the customers so it comes

Andrea:
In that’s clean it well people need to know how amazing that is jade that’s like so awesome that you guys do that because yeah like you said it does take more room so it actually costs you more to store it but then when it comes at comes to our front door it’s literally fresh i mean it’s as fresh as fresh could be that’s amazing it’s like Like you just harvested. That’s awesome. I’m so excited about this.

Jade:
And, you know, when it’s, when you’re, so it’s gone through the cleaning facility and then it goes to the flour mill, if that’s where it’s going, or it goes to get, you know, packaged or whatever, right? So it goes to the flour and we’ll have, you know, three or four totes that are ready to be milled. And we’re milling, you know, between one and , pounds of flour a day or something like that right now. Yeah. And we have two large stone mills.

Andrea:
That’s insane.

Jade:
Yeah. So these are -inch stone mills that turn at RPM, which is not very fast.

Andrea:
How do you get, that’s a lot of, that’s heavy. That’s like we’re building a pyramid over here. How do you get that? They’re very heavy.

Jade:
Yes. These stones, you know, they’re like six inches thick. Anyway, we use forklifts if we ever have to handle them. But those things are running. The einkorn’s dropping in over the top, dropping down through them. And just like your mock mill, it goes down through the center of the top stone, and then it spreads out from there, right? So it’s then dropping down into a vacuum, which takes it up into a sifter. And the sifter just goes and it rotates and it aerates it. So it helps to, you know, gas off any of the moisture or whatever. It also helps to just let it breathe a little bit as it’s sifting it. And we make a fresh milled whole grain flour there and we make a sifted all purpose flour. So it’s like a white flour. And so the whole grain flour would be similar to what you would mill at home. Not as good as milled at home, because when you mill it at home, you’re going to mill it just as you use it. But yeah, you mill it as you bake with it. Whereas this, you know, we still pride ourselves on a fresh milled flour. So when you receive the bag from us, the date that it was milled is going to be within a few days of when you ordered it.

Andrea:
That’s incredible.

Jade:
I mean, that’s just incredible. It’s an amazing advantage that we have as consumers today, where it can come from our farm and show up on your step and it was just milled a few days before. It’s cool. It’s neat to be able to do that the

Andrea:
Direct sales that you do like the farm right to the customer is a whole other, betrayal of fascination that I wouldn’t mind going down like that’s just that’s just amazing also because you’re able to cut out, So many hands in the middle that not only take a cut of the customer’s money, but delay the product arriving to the customer and then can sometimes sit in, you know, warehouses or on pallets, on loading docks in the baking sun or whatever the conditions may be. So it’s awesome that you guys got total control over your product. Sorry, carry on.

Jade:
Oh, that is it. I mean, knowing where your food’s been, what it’s been through, is a very big part of the advantage of ordering from us. We’re the stewards of that, and we’re stewards of the seeds. We manage all of our ancient grain seeds, so iron, corn, emmer, spelt, coruscant. Those are all managed by us, so we’re not relying on somebody else to preserve those seeds or to keep them from being contaminated or ruined in some way. So we manage that whole project. And then at the end of the day, you have confidence to know, okay, these guys are taking care of it. And we invite anybody, if you’re ever in this area, if you go to Yellowstone National Park or Grand Teton National Park, we’re about an hour from either of those. And so you should definitely reach out to us. You can text the phone number and the footer of our website, ancientgrains.com, and let us know you’re going to be in the area. We’d like to do a tour, and we’d love to show you around. That’s awesome. You know, if you come in June or July, you’re going to get to see the fields, see the grains growing, and I can take you to the fields and show you what they look like as, you know, a field of vine corn, a field of spelt or whatever, so you can see it in the field. Wow. And so those farm tours are helpful, but in the tour, you’ll also see how we maintain the control of it all the way through.

Andrea:
That’s amazing. So you’re milling daily, you’re sending it out fresh, that’s just amazing. Could you say, I don’t know if you could elevator pitch this, but what does it mean when you say never hybridized? Can you explain that for people listening who might not be familiar with seed smithing and all of that, or who are just getting into the world of ancient grains for the first time?

Jade:
Yeah, so einkorn is kind of in its class of its own in that it’s a -chromosome wheat. So they refer to all the -chromosome weeds as einkorn. There’s actually different varieties of einkorn out there that have just naturally developed. But they’re all -chromosome, so they’re all einkorn. So those can, you can see different properties. And I’ve seen all of those varieties. I visually inspected them for color and shape and size, and they do vary a lot. But einkorn doesn’t hybridize with modern wheat. So when it comes to, you know, like the things that are going on in plant breeding and whatnot, einkorn is kind of set aside from all that. In that there are not active breeding programs that I’m aware of with einkorn. We don’t participate in those. We don’t know of any that are going on. It’s just these old seeds that we’ve kept and maintained since we took control of them. And telling you the stories about the seeds is another fun thing, but these are the mentors that have helped me throughout since I got started, the people I got to know and got acquainted with and that helped me and mentored me through this. And ultimately, I became the steward of those seeds, taking it over from them.

Jade:
And so when we talk about hybrids I’ll just give you a specific example So we sell a few grains on our website That are not ancient grains And the reason is because We have some customers Who just need an assortment of different grains But they want to use Just regular hard red wheat Or regular hard white wheat And they want to fill up the box And get access to the free shipping When they fill up the box And so we provide enough of a diversity of grains so that people can do that. And one of the grains that we offer that’s not an ancient grain is called Yacora Rojo, and it’s a hard red spring wheat. And so that’s just a variety of hard red spring wheat, right? There’s, I don’t know, probably thousands of varieties of hard red spring wheat. And the USDA is actively managing programs to breed new varieties of wheat. And they’re trying to deal with

Jade:
Yield, baking quality, flavor, agronomic characteristics. They’re breeding for all of these factors, right? And that has its place. The funny thing is, they’re often, I went and visited with one of these plant breeders and he said, yeah, this is a plot and we’re trying to extract genes from the einkorn that we can try to figure out how to cross into this modern wheat. Wow. They’re not considered GMO wheats, but they’re somehow trying to crossbreed two different species together so they can bring in the rust resistance that einkorn has inherently built into it. Anyway, it’s just—

Andrea:
What’s considered GMO is another conversation.

Jade:
Yeah, I don’t— Yeah, the whole what is GMO thing is where that kind of leads. But, you know, when you talk about GMO from the standpoint of injection of some sort of a, you know, foreign genome, I think is generally what that would mean. And, you know, that’s not technically allowed in the U.S. It’s not, you’re not allowed to grow GMO wheat. If it was ever detected at the ports, all wheat is checked for GMO before it leaves. If it was ever detected, it would stop all exports immediately from the U.S. And so we don’t tell people that wheat is GMO. We put on our website that it’s non-GMO because it’s only people asking. We have to clarify. It’s not GMO. But, you know, anyway. But the whole plant breeding and varietal aspect of it is just based on the idea that, hey, you know, we noticed this wheat does this well or it tastes this way or bakes this way, so we’re going to try to get those characteristics over here on this one. And the truth is that grown in one area long enough—

Jade:
Everything changes. It somehow naturally adapts. And so the einkorn that we originally got and brought here to Idaho has probably naturally adapted to our climate and the characteristics that are here because the wheat, the einkorn that survives is the einkorn that we replant just by natural selection, as they say.

Jade:
And so the characteristics that allow it to thrive and to continue on to the next year end up what be showing up in the seed the next year. And so that natural process of, I would call it improvement, is a healthy thing for our area. And it allows the grains, I think, to just adapt and naturally change. Now, the plant breeding is a different thing altogether in that they’re trying to get them to cross-pollinate and to share DNA and try to move those in between them. And I don’t know much about plant breeding, so I can’t speak to that. But I’ve spoken enough with a plant breeder to understand some of the goals of it. And, you know, it has important things that it has important purposes that might really matter in the larger world of food. But sometimes we can also introduce things that we didn’t mean to, right? And we aren’t too glad that we brought into the mix. And so some of those can end up being like disease resistant. So, you know, modern wheat’s not very resistant to disease. Rust is a big threat to the modern wheat. And so, by offering these ancient grains, we’re also providing diversity against that.

Andrea:
Right. Well, that’s wonderful. So, everybody’s going to ancientgrains.com, which, yeah, when I saw the web domain, I was like, wow, I get that. So, it’s funny that you shared that story in the beginning. everybody go check out ancientgrains.com i’ll also put that link in the show notes and then i have another link here ancientgrains.com forward slash grain dash recipes uh that looks amazing i’m gonna put that in the show notes as well because spelt tortillas um your einkorn ritz crackers all look so great so i’ll show that for um listeners, and i’m yeah i’m a big fan of the bulk buying i think that’s that’s great you know get one one shipment you know one truck traveling kind of situation cut down on everything and just get get a nice big bucket to sort all in. It’s a great idea. Is there anything else you wanted to say on this episode, Jade, for people to know?

Jade:
I think the main thing is that it’s the customers that make this all work. You know, we’re a family farm and mill that we work hard over here, but we rely on word of mouth. We rely on people’s support for listening that can keep going. Absolutely. We’re just very appreciative of our customers and any new customers that come in that they understand where we’ve come from. Hopefully you can hear our story somewhere on this podcast and just get acquainted with us. We love to meet people in person and hopefully it can ultimately do some benefits in your home and how you’re eating and we can share what we’re learning and learn from you as well. And it’s, in my opinion, it’s part of a community.

Jade:
It’s a change in how we eat where we get more connected to our food. And I think that doing it through grains is an important part of that,

Jade:
As well as many other ways, you know, how we grow vegetables in our gardens to the meat producers around us that we can work