| November
16, 2007: Located 50 miles from the eastern Colorado
border and just as far from any major highway, Marienthal,
Kansas, seems at first glance an unlikely place for a hotbed
of organic agriculture. But the organic grain business that
has risen steadily from this High Plains breadbasket community
of 100 or so residents has grown to be the largest employer
around.
As Heartland Mill's General Manager Mark Nightengale tells
it, this company and its founders were in on the ground floor
of the organic movement when incorporating as a business in
1986.
“Several farmers—and I was farming at the time—began
noticing that our soils were really compacted and low in organic
matter,” Nightengale recalled. “It seemed to have
happened overnight. We went from good soils to highly compacted
soils in a matter of a season.”
“Yields were severely impacted, the water-holding capacity
of the soil was not there, and good soil tilth was not there.”
As the farmers struggled to figure out what the problem was,
Nightengale said, they saw their soil organic matter drop
from about 1 percent to less than 0.1 percent over several
growing seasons. “It was a progressive thing, but the
farmers noticed it from one year to the next. It was visually
apparent.”
The farmers began investigating the cause of their lost productivity
and poor soil. “Some people told us we were going to
the loony bin,” Nightengale recalled when the group
began to reject the common chemical NPK approach for composted
manures and organic amendments. “We found that the greatest
thing our soils lacked was soil organic matter or humus. Our
carbon ratios were really out of sync, also.”
Farmers enter processing
A handful of these farmers went into commercial composting.
Some got together and formed Heartland Mill, which in its
infancy consisted of one hand-crank mill powering a modest
6-inch set of grinding stones in Sharon Springs, about 60
miles northwest of the current facility. The company’s
first big break came in 1989 when it landed a substantial
contract to mill organic oats. The company moved to Marienthal
and began construction of a more modernized mill in the footprint
of a former Orville Redenbacher Popcorn plant.
“We discussed that if we were going to get added value
for [organic crops] then we had to do the processing and marketing
ourselves,” Nightengale recalled. For support, the company
joined the Organic Crops Improvement Association (OCIA)—in
fact it was the first member in Kansas and the seventh worldwide—only
to learn that the commercial organic movement was in a fledgling
state of development, at best. Nightengale found himself pounding
the pavement, explaining what “organic” was and
why it should command a premium.
“We began to realize that the organic standards were
not even written yet, and that organics and the whole-farm
systems approach were just on the drawing board. So we became
part of that process.”
Fast forward to 2007. Of 73 current stockholders—some
of them founding members—only half a dozen or so still
actively farm, said Nightengale. Others, he said, either retired
or simply lost out in the farming business.
Today neighboring, regional and farther-afield farmers grow
the grains—mostly hard red winter wheat, but also oats,
barley, rye, spelt, corn and millet—that get shipped,
cleaned and mill readied, or transformed into dozens of certified-organic
(and certified kosher) flakes and flours for sale by the 2-pound
bagful to the truckload. A white-flour roller mill operating
around the clock can produce 100,000 pounds a day. Sharing
the same facility, four 30-inch pairs of grinding stones churn
out whole grain and sifted flours, while rolled grain products—most
significantly rolled oats—are produced on specialty
milling equipment in a nearby building. Heartland Mill’s
total daily capacity is about 160,000 pounds of product. (Nightengale
declined to give specifics on the actual volume produced but
said that across the whole spectrum of organics, demand far
outweighs supply.)
Partnerships give rise to innovation
Strong partnerships with bakeries and other businesses across
Kansas and beyond have created a sense of brand loyalty to
the Heartland Mill name and yielded valuable data that’s
used to grow better crops and to mill better baking products.
Apprentice baker Mikey Humphrey said return customers come
from near and far—some daily, others perhaps only on
an annual stopover—to WheatFields Bakery in downtown
Lawrence, Kansas, seeking the artisan breads handcrafted predominantly
with Heartland Mill flour. (Lawrence is some 300 miles east
of Marienthal and just west of Kansas City, Kansas.)
Humphrey came here to learn to be a baker five years ago.
Retrieving a row of baguettes from the 3,000-pound rotating
cement slab in the bakery’s 25-ton wood-fired brick
oven, he said he feels he’s found his calling.
He’s worked many sectors of the food-service industry
in the tight-knit, somewhat alternative Lawrence community
over the years and said he’s seen the demand for artisan
foods climb steadily. On any given weekday, Humphrey said,
WheatFields will bake several hundred loaves. On weekends,
they ramp it up to more than 1,000. The bakery goes through
about two tons of Heartland Mill flour a week, which actually
isn’t much considering that’s only about one-seventieth
of the mill’s daily production capacity. But Heartland
Mill and WheatFields share a special relationship that goes
way beyond commerce.
Head baker Thom Leonard, who has been baking bread since
1973 and helped open WheatFields in 1995, has worked over
the years as a consultant to Heartland Mill, helping the company
continually improve its products. In 2001, Leonard helped
the mill establish a hearth bread test based on a similar
French method for assessing the quality of baking flour. Bread
loaves are baked according to artisan tradition and samples
are rated on more that 30 characteristics, measuring the flour’s
performance from mixing through masticating.
It’s all about consistency as well as quality according
to Leonard.
Such attributes can be measured in baking tests, Leonard
explained. They can be measured more precisely, he said, with
a specialized instrument called an alveograph. “When
you make bread you are expanding all the gluten sacks with
CO2 as the yeast respires." Heartland Mill’s alveograph—a
Chopin Alveograph, to be exact—measures the properties
of a dough sample as it is expanded by a force of air, “which
is what happens when you bake bread, so what happens is it’s
measuring the same characteristics you look for in a loaf
of rising bread.”
Because harvest times vary—this year the bulk of the
harvest took place earlier than the typical norm, which falls
around the week of July 4—and because crop characteristics
depend not only on timing but on the weather, percentages
of various lots get blended together in 7,500-bushel bins
to create a consistent product throughout the year.
“Timing of harvest affects the quality; so does the
variety being grown and cultural practices and the location
itself,” explained Leonard. “You can grow the
same variety in the same season in adjoining fields and harvest
on the same day, and it will still not be the same.
“Sometimes you have to go further afield…to get
the kind of wheat that will give you the right kind of extensibility
and elasticity,” Leonard explained. For the uninitiated,
he elaborated that extensibility is the quality of dough that
allows it to be drawn out or extended, while elasticity helps
the dough to retain that shape. “You need a balance
of extensibility and elasticity.”
Listening to Leonard wax on about the subtleties of quality
baking materials, it’s clear that his collaboration
with Heartland Mill has been fruitful for both the baker and
the miller.
“I think we’re really fortunate because of the
relationship I had with Heartland Mill when they were building
the mill and for several years afterwards,” Leonard
said. “We’re a very low-volume bakery, and we
had more to say about the quality of the flour than very large
bakeries, simply because of the relationship I’ve had
with them.”
And when it comes to the information they’ve gathered
together, Heartland Mill has an open-book policy.
“There aren’t many places people can go and look
at the lot number on a 5-pound bag of flour and get the same
data that I can. You don’t have to have a password,
it’s free-and-clear and their website explains what
those numbers mean. I think what they provide is a real service
to the baker.”
Bursting at the seams
While Heartland Mill does have a retail line—walk-ins
and website
orders welcome—the bulk of the company’s business
is just that: bulk. This means they deal predominantly with
manufacturers, distributors and bakeries willing to work directly
with the mill (WheatFields actually orders through a distributor
due to its relatively low volume).
Despite Heartland Mill's success and consistent premiums
for organic wheat and other organic grain products, many area
farmers remain reluctant to jump on the organic bandwagon,
according to company sales manager Carl Rosenlund. “Some
farmers have an attitude about the volume of paperwork,”
he said. “Some are willing to do it, and some say it’s
just too much. They don’t care if there’s a premium
of 100 percent.”
The mill consistently employs around 25 individuals, about
one quarter of the population of Marienthal.
Although Heartland Mill is willing to negotiate up-front
contracts with farmers, the arrangement is not really the
company’s model of choice. “The problem with contracts
is that somebody is not going to be happy,” Rosenlund
said. “If prices are up, the farmer’s not happy.
If they’re down, we’re not happy.” That
said, “We do a little bit of everything,” he added.
“We buy from all over North America. You don’t
have to be a stockholder to sell to us. We like to buy locally
primarily. Some of the products we can’t grow in our
region, such as oats, we buy in from the northern states and
Canada.”
Heartland Mill exports products to Europe and Asia as well
as North and South America. That market has shifted over the
years, Rosenlund said, from primarily Germany, Holland and
the Netherlands to China, Sweden and France.
“The Asian market is primarily wheat,” Rosenlund
said. (With a growing awareness of wheat allergies on the
rise worldwide, he said, there’s also a large and growing
market for the company’s spelt products.)
GMOs (genetically modified organisms), which are not allowed
in organic production, are pretty much a non-issue for Heartland
Mill…for all crops, that is, but corn, which can disperse
pollen hundreds of yards, potentially miles. The mill has
its corn periodically tested by an independent lab to make
sure it’s below acceptable GMO thresholds (which vary
at home and abroad).
Rosenlund says business has grown steadily by 5 to 25 percent
a year over the two decades the company has been in operation,
particularly as of late. “It’s been tracking quite
well the past seven years,” he said. “This is
good wheat-growing area. We’re well-situated for a mill.”
On January 1, a build-up of snow and ice ripped through the
roof of Heartland Mill’s storage facility, causing the
loss of half a million dollars worth of product. “We
were actually milling four days later for a bulk load,”
Rosenlund said, adding that with the repairs came improvements.
“We store it, we stage it and we ship it out on trucks,”
he said. Having control at each stage of the process from
planting to delivery not only makes economic sense, Rosenlund
said, but “we exert more quality control on our product,
too.”
When expansion was inevitable, the company—true to
its history—took a somewhat unconventional approach,
growing down instead of out. “We went 20-feet down and
expanded the operation within the existing structure,”
Rosenlund explained.
It wasn’t so much a space issue (what else is there
in western Kansas?) but a matter of protecting the mill from
the region’s severe winds.
Wind swirls and fast-moving thunderstorms have already taken
out three of the four grain elevators surrounding the mill,
Nightengale elaborated. “We knew if we were to go up
another 30 or 40 feet in the air that’s what would happen
to our building, so we chose to go down.” A deep water
table of around 140 to 150 feet made that strategy possible,
he said, one result being a more-pleasant work environment
that also keeps the roller mills at a more constant temperature.
From the beginning, as much mill equipment as possible has
been purchased used, refurbished and updated, making for an
interesting blend of old-fashioned and modern ingenuity—one
part player-piano, one part high-tech synthesizer.
“We found it at different places, went through it,
installed new bearings, sandblasted it, repainted it, upgraded
and modernized it, and we’re using it today,”
Nightengale said, the gearhead in him shining through like
so much polished brass. “The bottoms of our mills were
cast in the late 1800s; the tops were rebuilt in the 1940s.
We’ve taken out the old Babbitt bearings and replaced
them with high-speed electronic bearings, modernized them
and integrated them into an electronic, automated system ourselves.”
Now Heartland Mill is about to take that retrofitting—in
the truest sense of the word—one step further (or backwards,
as it were).
“We’ve been looking for old ancient French Burr
millstones, which produce the best whole-grain flours that
mills can get,” Nightengale explained. “They’re
2 points harder than diamonds. You can beat a chisel on these
stones and the chisel will split; that’s how hard they
are.”
After joining the SPOOM Society (short for the “Society
for the Preservation of Old Mills”), Heartland Mill
got a line on several pairs when the company was contacted
by Steve Evans of Bob Evans Restaurants. “He said, ‘We
have a stone mill with six French Burrs.’ We gave him
an offer, and he took us up on it.”
“We now have six pairs of those stones, and they’re
54-inches in diameter. We moved them here to Marienthal, and
it’s our intention to produce our whole-grain flour
with them”
It’s this obsession with perfection—going the
extra mile to combine the best of modern science with old-world
craftsmanship—that has bakers around the world clamoring
for Heartland Mill’s wheat. “They like our flour
because of the wheat quality; some of the bakers like the
High Plains wheat,” Nightengale offered modestly.
Unlike so many processors who move into organics led by their
pocketbooks (even if their hearts and minds eventually follow),
these farmers who banded together more than 20 years ago to
solve a soil crisis in western Kansas are a testament that
doing the right thing by the land can have its economic advantages,
as well. “Some of those soils are between 3 and 5 percent
[SOM] now,” Nightengale said. “Some even more."
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