Topic
Stalking barley and wheat, some of it 9,000 years old.
Field of Red Fife wheat
Give us this day our daily bread. So says the Lord's Prayer, and so say James and I, fervently, having known its want on the 100-Mile Diet. Grain, we have discovered, is the Holy Grail in our little corner of the world. Ever since World War II, economies of scale have cloaked the prairies in grains, while farmers on the coast gave up their wheat for swathes of corn destined to feed dairy cattle. Or perhaps just to sow confusion, these days, corn seems most often to be fashioned into mazes.
But there are a few brave local farmers and artisan bakers who are looking for a way out of the maze that is the global economy. While my impression had been that wheat is fussy here, because of our near constant rain, I was recently reminded of the magic of micro-climates. Hamish Crawford, a farmer in North Saanich on Vancouver Island, owns four acres devoted to red spring wheat, and in 2002 he founded a wildly popular bakery, The Roost, that can turn out 32,000 loaves from this modest plot's annual harvest.
"I knew the only way to do this was a value-added thing," he says in his Scots brogue. Wearing a blue-plaid Mack jacket and sporting a silver buzz cut, he stands in his now-cleared fields while a black lab puppy jumps enthusiastically beside him. His sheep, or "woolies," as he calls them, graze placidly nearby. "I couldn't make money selling the flour on its own, when a big bag of Robin Hood is only seven dollars."
'Threw it in'
Red spring wheat is a typical modern prairie variety, which Crawford had grown previously in Alberta. After moving to Vancouver Island, he did what he knew: just "threw it in the ground" and it thrived, he says. In fact, because of the Saanich peninsula's dry summer climate combined with the longer growing season, the wheat is easier to manage here than on the prairies. "That's a huge surprise to people," he says.
Crawford takes us inside a shed where he stores his milling equipment: the lack of it elsewhere is the other big reason that flour is not readily available in our area. His fanning mill ($1,800 used, from Saskatchewan, of course) has screens with holes of two sizes, which, when mechanically shaken, clean the grain of chaff and dirt; and his stone mill ($1,200) grinds out whole-wheat flour. He scoops out a rich, fluffy handful to show us and his puppy eagerly licks it up. "North Americans damn near forgot how exciting eating can be," Crawford says. "You don't ever have to sit down to a meal and just go 'blah.'" The antidote, he says, is growing and creating food on the land within your sights.
Crawford is the right kind of man to be reviving wheat on the coast. It was Scottish people who planted the first wheat crop recorded in Canada, in Manitoba's Selkirk colony in 1812. Unfortunately, these Scots did not go to agricultural college, as Crawford did. They were fishermen in the old country, and for two years in a row, their crops failed. In 1815, the Métis attacked and destroyed everything and in 1818 there was a grasshopper plague. But the Scots soldiered on, praying for their daily bread; and in 1820, out of grain entirely, some settlers walked for three months to get wheat seed from Wisconsin farmers.
Making of a 'breadbasket'
Canada's reputation as the breadbasket of the world didn't come until slightly later, in the 19th century. In 1842, Ontario farmer David Fife planted some wheat imported from Scotland via Poland (modern scientists trace its ultimate origin to the Ukraine). This strain, which was the one that finally worked well in the New World climate, was later named Red Fife in his honour. Almost all North American wheat today has some Red Fife genes, though this type is no longer certified by the all-powerful Canadian Grain Commission. It is the Red Fife wheat that most Lower Mainland farmers are interested in, for its history, heritage flavour, and, apparently, better suitability to coastal weather.
"Part of the artisanal baking philosophy is that you want the best loaf of bread you can make. That leads you back to the grain," says Mara Jernigan, resident chef for the Fairburn Farm bed-and-breakfast in the Cowichan valley. Local bakers are starting to make their own wood-burning ovens as well, she says. "People are drawn to the idea of the traditional hearth. Community can start around that."
There is another grain that inspires equal reverence: barley. It doesn't sound like much until you take it to its logical conclusion: beer. James and I continued south down the Saanich peninsula to visit Michael Doehnel, whose dream it is to make beer from entirely local ingredients, both barley and hops. "I knew it had been done before," he says. "I found this old threshing equipment and combines all rusted out and covered in blackberry bushes." Though he doesn't own farmland himself, he hasn't let that stop him. He leases it. While he's been making small batches of beer for himself and friends since 1996 from seed he got from England, this was his first big year. He harvested ten tons of barley, and he was so close he could almost taste it.
Fit for a Pharaoh
But then came the disaster, one of many that can strike the farmer. Now that I'm living and eating within my 100-mile circle, I identify much more strongly with his woes. He contracted another man to malt the barley, yet another service that is in short supply regionally, and Doehnel says that it is ruined. He's $10,000 in the hole and a lawyer is involved. Though he has a droopy air, he maintains a gleam in his eye and a manic smile. Like all farmers, by necessity, optimism dominates him. He pours us a glass of homemade apple cider from the trees his parents planted in the yard outside the window overlooking Brentwood Bay. "I think grapes are less doable than barley and hops," he says confidently. In other words, there's always next spring.
His experimental spirit extends to black beans, which he cultivates in his large yard, and he presses upon us half the contents of the small Ziploc bag that is his harvest. Doehnel is insistent and I am moved by his generosity. These are the only dried black beans we have seen in our radius so far. They are, in fact, the most beautiful and plump black beans I have ever seen.
Next, Doehnel leads us into the basement for a tour of his other agricultural treasures, and he gives us some coriander he grew to flavour his dream beer. He reverently shows us heads of ancient grains he grew just for the joy of it. The golden Egyptian Emer wheat, 7,000 years old, and the black-striped Einkorn, 9,000 years old. In this moment, I am touching the history of food and of civilization itself.
"People can get excited about protecting parkland but now we need them to get just as excited about setting aside food land. The food land is critical," he says. "Maybe it will take some kind of disaster to wake everybody up." He laughs, every dark cloud of burning oil has a silver lining, and we say farewell at his gate.
We are hopeful too, with the lemonade-like tang of Newton apples still in our mouths. Hamish Crawford promised us a sack of flour to see us through the winter. Not today, mind, the tractor is broken, he can't move the wheat from the silo to the mill. Maybe the next time we come to the Island. Hope rises with thoughts of homemade bread.
Alisa and James just closed a book deal on the 100-Mile Diet with Harmony Books (an imprint of Random House) in New York, to be released in spring 2007. Canadian rights are under negotiation. They will continue to write for The Tyee. For more information on finding locally produced food visit the web site of Farm Folk/City Folk.
Read the whole 100-Mile Diet Series. ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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skeptikool
7 years ago
Comments on "With the Grain on the Hundred Mile Diet"
Thank goodness for such people as this farmer. I firmly believe that much of what is being done to grain today is little short of criminal. The result is that much of what passes for bread, to me, is garbage.
Give me England's greyish, wartime bread over that white, spongey air-filled stuff flying off the supermarket shelves today.
Coyote
7 years ago
I am a passionate bread lover and bread maker. Of all the cooking that I do, and I do a lot, making my, and the old lady's daily bread is my favoured and most rewarding activity. Okay, next to sex.)
And of my ingredients, I will go to the ends of the earth to find purity and wholesome ingredients. And about that, I am a fanatic. Which is actually easier to achieve in a place like Vancouver, oddly enough, (thinking Famous Foods on Kingsway, or Galloway's in New Westminster.) than out here in the boonies where the stores only stock the major players in food commodities.
But like I say, I am fanatical. I hunt purity of seed, from whence it came and how it was grown, production methodology, milling, nutrition, packaging and marke5ting on down. To any lengths.
Eat my bread, and you know you have eaten the best possible in my particular situation.
My whole wheat bread alone, with a little flax and a little oat flour and oat bran thrown in, will get your pecker up and your vagina tingling. Look what oats does for horses.
And the colour of the loaf itself is orgasmic. :-)
And my buns are phenomenal! :-)
skeptikool
7 years ago
Much appreciated, Coyote.
A most memorable bread I experienced back at Vancouver's Habitat celebration. Wow! Must've been over 20 years ago. Anyhow, the ingredient (yes, singular) of this bread was sprouted wheat. It was a good sized roll, rather like a small cottage loaf - heavy and sweet. The bottom of the roll was like a sticky bun. It needed nothing and was a meal. The taste? Heavenly. Someone, in fact, referred to it as a Bible bread.
I, too, love my oats. In a biography of Robbie Burns, I recall that he went through some very hard periods existing almost exclusively on a diet of oats. He was certainly no mental slouch. I doubt he would have done as well on some of today's pre-cooked packaged oatmeal breakfasts. There's oats, and there's oats!
Coyote
7 years ago
My family on both sides were all "off the boat" Scots and, of course, being peasant and Glasgow working class Scots who knew much about hard times in "the old country" of those days, could tell endless stories of what was done to subsist on their beloved "oatmeal", and the many things that were done with it.
Growing up in my parents home, oatmeal was what started your day. For the longest time, until they were sufficiently prosperous, you could have either sugar or milk on it, but not both. Always served up with much old fashioned prayer and Presbyterianism, of course. :-)
Still love my oatmeal porridge too-, with both sugar and preferably, cream, on the sneak, but usually 1% milk.
It was actually granny who used to extoll the virtues of oats with the story of horses.
"Just look at how frisky a little oats makes that stallion! So et yer oats, and it'll do the same thing fer ye.", she'd say with a twinkle in her eye.
She sold me.
BrianWhite
7 years ago
It is not widely know that south east ireland gets the highest wheat yields in europe. Yields which would make a farmer in winipeg drool!
Its a climate thing. (It isnt durum wheat in ireland and it is not so good for bread) but my da milled some on a small electrically driven machine for many years (mostly for animals).
But here! In the beautiful summers on southern van island, the only thing you miss for huge yields of wheat and barley is the summer rain. And you CAN grow durum wheat in this climate.
It is politics that drives the centralization of agricultural production. But what about food security? I have worked in norway, germany holland and north switzerland.
Sur fjord at 60 degrees north grows apples, pears, plums, cherries in a microclimate that extends for about 25 miles along the fjord.
That tradition has gone on in that area for something like a thousand years (since english monks brought fruit growing to the area).
Now they can only continue with government subsidy. But there is a choice. Keep the subsidy or lose almost all the population in the area.
Pop down th the pfals in Germany. Same climate as here, fruit growing everywhere, lots of grain and sugar beet. Really similar climate to the saanich area but colder in winter.
Across the border there (hessan or baden wuttenberg), I have walked through towns where they still keep milking cows in barns the towns.
Switzerland, tiny farms where the farmers cut their mountain plots with glorified lawnmowers. (Tiny amounts of hay that would make an irish farmer laugh) but drying weather that would make him emigrate!
The swiss also subsidise their farmers (even more than the EU). The disaster that is globalization is all through these countrys.
The americans demand access to the norwegan fruit market. (Norway never let them in their growing season).
Spain and greece can grow fruit easier than germany so last time i was in the pfals, holdings of sour cherries plums and apricots and white asparagus were all torn up.
Now from Ireland, i hear from my brother that the sugar company is quitting and selling its sugar quota to france and its land for housing. (France has a better climate for sugar). And it is not just irish sugar that is losing. Finland, and sweden lose too.
Much less diversity, much less food security in all those countrys and all in the name of globalization and competition. The only winners in all this is the transport multinationals.
Sugarbeet provides pulp for sheep, cattle, beettops for the same animals and now the farmers will have to import substitutes for all of those for the coldest months of the year in the northern countrys.(And they lose a profitable crop and the knowelege and machinery to grow it will be gone in about 5 years). It is Brutal.
It is so refreshing that some farmers here are fighting back. Dont be afraid. This (victoriac) climate will grow hops, wheat barley oats, beets sugar, peas and others. My da grew
wheat, barley, rye and triticale in ireland, and sugar beet, turnips, mangolds kale peas and beans.
Globalization means that 35 years on, my brother can just grow wheat barley and grass. Is that Progress?
Ask your politician what is their position on all this and vote for the ones that allow local production to exist. It cannot exist without the political will and encouragement.
Brian
Truman Green
7 years ago
Hi, Coyote. While I appreciate your knowledge of bread I suspect that you might have taken the phrase, "sewing your wild oats" a little bit too literally. (judging on your vivid description of what it can do for one's libido) Just kidding! I too love oatmeal but unfortunately just the mere mention of it throws my stomach and lower digestive tract into chaos.
RickW
7 years ago
http://www.healingcrow.com/dietsmain/paleo/paleo.html
The fossil record shows a massive decrease in average height, health, and rapid increase in disease, obesity, and population for cultures that survived the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a agricultural dependent one.
BC Mary
7 years ago
Wonderful story and comments. Thanks all.
Truman Green
7 years ago
Damn, life is full of surprises. RickW's link provided an answer to a question I've been wondering about for a long time: If oats and legumes and beans are so good for me, why the hell do they make me as sick as a dog. As I mentioned about oats, I love multigrained bread and all kind of beans, but I might just as well try to digest wet concrete. (with calcium added for quick setting) Even before reading RickW's link I had concluded that these foods are vastly overrated and that we are probably not genetically prepared for them the way say herbivores are prepared for grasses and grains. Thanks for the link, RickW. I'm going back to study it again. I understand that the question is: Do I have a digestive deficiency, an overactive immune system or am I a product of an anomalous genomic inheritance. All interesting (if somewhat self-centred) questions to ponder on a quiet Sunday morning, eh.
BrianWhite
7 years ago
You might be celiac like my sister.
different strokes for different folks. I am 6´ 1¨, taller than my ancestors and stopped eating meat when I choked on a bone at 5. I still dont eat much meat.
I dont think that internet stuff linking grain diet to health is too reliable. The diet changed lots even in the last 200 years and if you ever worked with africans, you would see an amazing diversity of sizes and shapes of different tribes of people.
And there were no states in the past, tribes moved a whole lot.
And europe was the same, there was many invasions where people came in and overthrew the people in posession. So, just because they found bones of tall guys, dont mean they are any relation to the short guys that may have killed them. And, and i shouldnt say it, perhaps the small guys were smarter?
After all, you got to be big to kill all the mammoths, perhaps? But its kinda stupid too, because you gotta eat something.
Mkitty
7 years ago
Ah..the bread of life. I am blessed to live in Victoria where I just yesterday bought a fabulous loaf of foccacia from the Wildfire Bakery. The owner, Cliff Leir (sp?) only uses REd Fife wheat, I believe he mills it himself, and doesn't use any commercial leaveners...all naturally leavened, baked in a woodfire oven. Ahh...pure bliss...
RickW
7 years ago
Truman Green:
Brian White is likely right.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celiac_disease
pubwvj
7 years ago
I respect your decision to be Vegan but it is very hard to be Vegan in the north country while also eating locally grown produce. I've tried. Consider that meat can be raised locally on pastures that can not be used for growing crops. We live in the mountains and raise pigs, sheep, ducks, geese, chickens and guineas on pasture. Yes, that's right even pigs. Pigs can be raised 100% on pasture contrary to what some people may tell you. You don't have to feed them any grains, corn, etc. Of course, cows can also be raised 100% on pasture as my cousin does.
Not only that but we have found that the combination of the pigs, sheep and poultry are wonderful for turning old brushy mountain fields with poor quality soil into lush pastures and wonderful organic gardens. Our soil was poor, thin and acidic.
What we have done is put our livestock into our gardens for the winter when the snows are too deep for them to pasture. They eat hay and poop out wonderful manure. In the spring we use the pigs to till the gardens thus eliminating the need for petro and mechanical tilling. Then I move the pigs out and the chickens in to the gardens. The chickens spend two weeks smoothing the soil and weeding. I then move the chickens out and plant immediately. This quickly turns our poor soil into virtually weed free rich organic gardens.
Pastured livestock does not take away any grains from hungry human mouths - a reason often given for not eating meat. The pastured livestock are converting vegetation that is not easy for humans to eat into protein that is easy for us to eat. It is not possible to grow much of the way in crops on our mountain pastures so the animals aren't even taking up crop land that could be used to grow grains.
I raise this issue because it is very hard to have a vegan diet in the north country without buying non-local products. Adding locally pastured meat, which is high in the good Omega-3 fatty acids, greatly expands the available menu. If you want to eat as much as possible of locally grown foods then consider expanding your diet to include milk, eggs and meat from pasture raised animals.
On a slightly related note, I would like to suggest that thetyee.ca keep comments and discussion open rather than closing them on stories. The web is a timeless place which brings together people not just across space (I'm in Vermont, USA) but also across time. Keeping the discussions open means more people can participate and expands the community. This is a good thing.
-Walter Jeffries
Sugar Mountain Farm
in Vermont
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/blog/