The infrastructure costs add up and can discourage all but the most dedicated growers from taking a risk on small-scale grains. Danny Cowan, farmer and co-owner of Red Tail Grains in North Carolina, says he and co-owner George Allen have invested roughly $150,000 in equipment to grow and process grains like Turkey Red winter wheat on about 70 acres. The two have built up that infrastructure over the course of a decade, reinvesting their earnings from the farm and working off-farm jobs to raise further capital.
Machines like dryers and seed cleaners, Cowan says, can each range from the low thousands to nearly $100,000. Red Tail Grains has benefited from a few small local government and nonprofit grants—as well as Allen’s mechanical aptitude, which means he can fix older but more affordable equipment—but that support hasn’t come close to covering the full costs of machinery.
Of the more than 21.5 million tons of wheat flour milled domestically in 2022, over 96 percent came from the 21 largest millers and entered the commodity market that fills supermarket shelves across the country.
“It’s more challenging than I ever expected,” says Jordan Shockley about building the local-grain supply chain. An agricultural economist with the University of Kentucky, he helped organize the inaugural Southeastern Grain Gathering in 2019 and has since worked to create grain opportunities for farmers.
The challenges aren’t insurmountable, though, says Shockley. For example, he sees promise in the way Kentucky’s bourbon makers are interacting with small-scale rye growers. They guarantee payments to farmers for producing rye on a certain acreage, reducing the risk of loss from crop failure. (Existing crop insurance programs can be complicated to access for small-grain growers and doesn’t always work for smaller, diversified farms.)
It helps the farmers, and it’s a win for the distilleries, who can emphasize the local provenance of their raw materials and command a premium from avid drinkers. “It’s all about the story when it comes to local grains: knowing where the grain came from, promoting the farm, and marketing that it’s a local product,” says Shockley.
Making Waves for Local Grain
The large-scale grain industry has substantial economies of scale, admits Ajamian of the Craft Millers Guild. That translates to a dramatically cheaper product. Carolina Ground sells a four-pound bag of stone-milled all-purpose flour made from Appalachian White Hard White Wheat and Shirley Soft Red Winter Wheat on its website for $17.75; a five-pound bag of unbleached all-purpose commodity flour at a nearby grocery store costs as little as $2.49.
But by galvanizing the many small players doing their part for local grains, Ajamian believes the movement can build a different kind of strength in numbers.
Organizations like her guild, she says, can advocate for policies that can help local millers gain footing and lower production costs. Several U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs, for example, support regional food system infrastructure—including for local grains—under the umbrella of the Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP), and guild members and others could work to ensure that support remains under the Trump administration.
Citing another example of advocacy, Ajamian points to a letter-writing campaign by the Craft Millers Guild asking the USDA to prioritize local sourcing in food assistance programs. The Biden administration subsequently allocated $900 million to create the Local Food Purchase Assistance program to help state, tribal, and territorial governments buy foods produced within 400 miles, including wheat.
