Posted on November, 15, 2023 at 06:23 am
From 9 to 5, Terry Ellis works as an engineer for defense contractor Northrop-Grumman in San Diego. At 9, and on weekends, he’s a serious sourdough bread baker—and an aspiring grain farmer.
After looking in vain for an affordable local wheat source, Ellis decided to experiment with dry-farming the grain himself on a small piece of land 45 miles north of San Diego, in rural Valley Center.
On a sparkling spring day in March, Ellis and a crew of volunteers gathered at Rio Del Rey Farm to pull weeds from rows of experimental dry-farmed wheat crops. The months prior had seen a series of atmospheric rivers that brought abundant rain to the region and the six-week-old heirloom wheat was sprouting—to the delight of all involved. Wielding a hula hoe, inch deep in healthy mud, Ellis admitted he hasn’t done much manual labor.
But he’s willing to pour some sweat equity into this experiment. Currently, his best whole wheat source is 350 miles north, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, and shipping costs have recently tripled. As Ellis uprooted weeds alongside fellow baker and martial arts instructor Noris Velazquez, the “Kung Fu Baker,” they commiserated over their supply woes.
Velazquez committed to the project because he wants his customers to have bread baked with local ingredients, grown sustainably, without Roundup weed killer. He’d like to tell them the wheat comes from heritage varieties, with essential nutrients absorbed from the soil. He’s been collecting seeds for years.
“I seek out purity of ingredients, those that speak to my heart, and that is why for the last 10 years I’ve been collecting heirloom wheat seeds—to one day plant and watch them grow, to learn from them, and pass on their radiant life force through a loaf of bread, from the heart,” Velazquez said.
Waving fields of wheat once stippled the sunny lands of San Diego County, but higher-value crops supplanted it more than a century ago. Though San Diego is home to more small farms than any county in the U.S., grain is not a profitable use of the region’s extremely expensive land and water. However, given recent declines in profitability of higher-value crops such as citrus and avocado—and growing demand for local, nutritionally dense ingredients and the resurgence of dry farming in California—conditions might be ripe for the return of a local grain economy in San Diego.
Twenty-five landrace and heritage varieties went into the ground at Rio Del Rey Farm in late January, with guidance from Heritage Grain Trials and consultation from Monica Spiller of Whole Grain Connection, a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit that connects farmers, millers, and bakers interested in building local grain economies. Landrace grains are pre-hybridized varieties that adapted to their local environments as they evolved, optimizing water use, energy, and nutrients. San Diego doesn’t have a native landrace wheat, so it’s up to growers to find what works based on historical wheat crops in the area and experimentation with heritage varieties. Slow Food USA is supporting this experiment and a second crop in 2024 with a $4,000 grant.
The small-scale experiment also reflects the larger efforts of multiple organizations around the country working to revive heritage grains, including Golden State Grains in California; Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project in California’s southern Sierra Nevada; Palouse Heritage Grains in Washington; and Native Seeds in Arizona. The collective goal is to revive plant diversity, raise crops sustainably in conditions made more challenging by climate change, and collect successful varieties for future crop resiliency.
The day after planting brought a stroke of good weather luck: several hours of gentle showers to water the seeds. A few days later, Valley Center bean farmer Mike Reeske, who donated half an acre of his small farm for this crop, was already betting on which seeds would be the winners in the slow and steady race to find a heritage wheat that will grow—with rainwater only—in San Diego County.
His top picks: White Sonora, brought to northern Mexico by Europeans in the 1600s or earlier, and grown throughout San Diego and the Southwest before modern irrigation; and India-Jammu, which the University of California Regional Testing Program recommends for rain-fed sites and is touted for its “desirable whole wheat artisan bread-making properties.”
Artisan sourdough bakers like Ellis and Velazquez seek flour that is more nutritious and heartier than the refined stuff from most wheat and commercial mills. Most modern wheat is a high-yielding semi-dwarf variety that does not produce roots as deep as many heritage types. “Landrace and heritage varieties of grains . . . invest in deeper root development and have greater mycorrhizal associations, which afford them vastly greater capacity to scavenge nutrients in low fertility soils,” Reeske wrote in the grant proposal.
Those nutrients are passed to consumers when wheat is milled the “old-fashioned” way: on a stone mill, which breaks up the wheat berries while grinding the nutritious bran and germ into the flour. But most wheat is processed on roller mills that remove the bran and germ to produce a fine white flour, while much of the product marketed as “whole wheat” is actually refined white flour with larger particles mixed back in. Ellis and Velazquez both aim for that nutrient-dense, chewy, bubbly, filling quality of artisan bread—which comes with stone-milled whole wheat flour. Velazquez buys heritage whole wheat berries from Palouse Heritage Grains.
A 2019 review of studies on the health benefits of heritage grains concluded that in clinical trials, “all doubts disappear and diets based on ancient or heritage cultivars always showed clear advantages in terms of anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activities.”
That might be welcome news for the seemingly growing number of people suffering from gluten allergies in the U.S.
“People who have gluten allergies tell me they can eat the sourdough I make from true whole wheat,” said Velazquez.
“The local wheat movement is a thing, but California is way behind,” said Claudia Carter, executive director of California Wheat Commission. Though California has the most commercial milling capacity of any state, it’s not equipped for small whole wheat batches. The state also lacks infrastructure to market heirloom wheat to buyers and specialty millers. That leaves it up to growers, millers, small-batch bakers, and heritage grain groups to build communities based on locally grown heritage grain.
Whole Grain Connection maintains a list of stone mills throughout the U.S. and connects collaborators to local grain economies. While there are several in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles vicinity, not one mill on the list is in San Diego. And the price of local flour is often considerably higher than conventional flour, making it a tough sell for many bakers.
“I would have thought it would develop faster in the California market, where people are willing to pay more for local foods,” Carter said.
California was the nation’s second largest supplier of wheat in the late 19th century. A staple crop at the state’s missions starting in the late 1700s, the grain proved adaptable to the Mediterranean climate. By the 1870s, farmers in San Diego County grew wheat on a large scale. “The prolific cereal grew with little effort,” said historian Walter Wormer. But intensive cultivation and lack of variety led to challenges in productivity.
By the 1880s, many San Diego farmers were opting to grow fruit trees on the county’s hilly topography. Increased access to irrigation and new transportation options to the East Coast made fruits, nuts, and vegetables more lucrative than low-priced grain. Wheat production in San Diego, and the rest of the state, declined dramatically by the early 1900s.
Source: Civil Eats