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To support sustainable farming we need to move beyond wheat

A while ago, in an instagram post I asked “Why reach for white flour when you can use wholegrain? Why reach for wheat when you can use rye, oats, barley, quinoa or buckwheat? “ How did we end up here; where flour means flavour-less white stuff?

Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote in an essay, “Large-scale industrial agriculture depends on engineering the land to ensure the absence of natural diversity.” (Link here) Klinkenborg goes on to talk about how in the name of uniformity (which agribusiness sees as efficiency) hills are leveled, streams filled, plowed over and wetlands drained to meet the parameters for mono-culture crops. This degrades the soil and therefore requires petroleum inputs to replace lost nitrogen and other soil and plant nutrients, while still the soil erodes. When we eat these chemically enhanced crops, we are eating petroleum.

Chemical Fertilizers are petroleum based and taken up by the plant. Fertilizers from animals on regenerative farms are grass based and cover crops used as green manure, are just soil waiting to happen.

So how does this tie to whole farm baking? Stay with me.

Because nature is against uniformity, it will find a way to subvert our latest engineering in GMO crops (just look at the emergence of Round-up resistant weeds) and the bad farming practices that accompany them. We need to farm with nature in mind.

Regenerative agriculture is a system that literally regenerates top soil (the key to plant health and nutrition in plants), creates high biodiversity and resistance to climate change, maintains watersheds instead of draining them, and is essential to carbon sequestration by capturing CO2 in the soil. Farmers will plant rye, buckwheat as green manure, inter-crop oats and legumes or have dozens of plants varieties, like vetch and radish, as cover crops to protect soil from blowing away and to replenish the soil for future wheat or corn plantings. These crops can also be harvested, so the farmer can get more income from each field. The crop rotation also plays an important role in disrupting pest and weed cycles. And that is just on the surface. The real magic happens underground.

Nutrients return to the soil through a symbiotic relationship between plant roots and mycorrhizal fungi. The fungi receive sugar from the plant roots, created by photosynthesis, and give back water and minerals to the plant roots, increasing nutrition and health of the plant. (Applications of Round-Up (glyphosate) has been shown to interfere in this key symbiotic relationship to the plant’s detriment.) By not plowing, but using a no-till seed drill the soil stays intact and can hold a lot more water, which is needed in times of drought and also in intense rains, the soil will soak up much more soil than impacted \-chemical laden fields. Whew, still with me?

Bottom line, regenerative agriculture means diversity. Diversity means more than monoculture. Therefore, the farmer will have more than one crop to offer and it’s my job as a baker to support all the crops- Whole farm baking. Baking with buckwheat, oats, rye and legumes. Buying honey from the bees on the farm and seeing what else in grown/raised on the farm that I can use. At this point, we use more rye and buckwheat than wheat and that’s how I want it to be. And using all of it in it’s whole grain form and not sifted to no-purpose white stuff.