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

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

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

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

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

Cody & Mel of Speedwell Farm & Gardens and Helen of Farmette Flowers, making up two thirds of The Treehouse Farm Collective, talk about their shotgun wedding farming collectively for land access and their model that respects both their pre-existing individual farm business autonomy while reaping many of the benefits of farming closely with others.

We were on a search for what to do with our lives.

From the moment we met the cacao, we knew that was going to be our path.

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

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