Food & Climate
Some Americans now have fresh, delicious flour with its original flavor, as companies have been able to provide it, relying on the methods of their ancestors thousands of years ago in local gristmills or old mills.
Like the thousands of small processors that once dotted the American landscape, Carolina Ground founder Jennifer Lapidus buys her wheat from nearby growers, grinds it whole at low temperatures to preserve the nutrients in the grain’s flavorful, rich germ, and sells the flour to area bakers seeking a delicious, locally sourced foundation for their products.
Although September’s Hurricane Helene disrupted operations temporarily in North Karolina, the mill was up and running within a couple of weeks and could get flour to customers quickly, supporting their businesses in turn. That’s how mills once operated: as mainstays of their own small communities, according to a report seen by “Food & Climate” platform.
“Every town in the U.S. probably has a road that has ‘mill’ in it,” says Michelle Ajamian, who owns Shagbark Seed & Mill in Athens, Ohio (and in fact happens to live on a Mill Creek Road). But the era of the neighborhood mill disappeared long ago.
The Craft Millers Guild is working to change that. Ajamian and others established the guild in 2020 to provide a community for a new generation of millers who draw inspiration from historic practices and try to help restore regional grain economies that have been lost to industrialization.
Local gristmills operation way
These gristmills use a pair of huge cylindrical stones, each about four feet wide, two feet thick, and weighing close a ton apiece, to pulverize wheat and other grains. With a dull roar, like the sound of heavy rain and hail on a metal roof, they gradually crush the kernels between them into a cascade of flavorful flour.
“From the beginning, it’s been an open source-group,” Ajamian says of the guild. “We’re not competing with each other. We’re helping each other, because the competition is really with Big Ag.”
Her comment reflects a history going back at least a hundred years. The first formal count of American gristmills, conducted in 1840, found over 28,000 in operation. Back then, the high cost of transporting grain meant all milling was local.
Farmers would bring wagonloads of grain to the modest mill in their community, often paying for its services with a portion of the product, and receive flour back to sell themselves. Different areas used unique local varieties of wheat, like White Sonora in the Southwest and California, and Fulcaster in Pennsylvania. In comparison, when Ajamian started her business in 2010, she estimates there were as few as five small-scale mills serving local farmers left in the country. (Carolina Ground launched in 2012.)
The rise of railroad transport enabled mills to source grain from farther away and bring in more of it, allowing them to expand.
These big facilities adopted new steel roller technology that could process wheat more quickly and easily separate the bran and germ, yielding a flour that was much cheaper to produce and kept longer on the shelf, but had far less flavor and nutrition.
Wheat breeders focused on yield and ease of processing, pushing local varieties like White Sonora out of favor. By the early 1900s, industrial wheat mills prevailed.
They are still relatively rare
Today, although local grain mills have been gaining traction as part of the regional grain movement, they are still relatively rare. Just three companies—Ardent Mills, ADM Milling Co., and Grain Craft—own 57% of the country’s wheat processing capacity. 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.
Demand certainly seems robust at Carolina Ground in Hendersonville. Lapidus, herself a Craft Millers Guild member, moved from a cramped space in nearby Asheville to the roomy warehouse in 2021, bolstered by pandemic-era sales increases. A long storage space next to the milling room is stacked floor to ceiling with shrink-wrapped grain ready for grinding.
But finding local growers who can supply them isn’t easy. The hard wheat preferred for bread flour is a relatively new crop in the Southeast, with regionally adapted varieties only introduced in 2009. Farmers don’t have a lot of information about how best to grow it here, Lapidus says, and those used to focusing on yield alone might not produce grain with the protein levels discerning bakers expect, according to “Civil Eats”.