Carolina Ground: A Micro Mill

Jennifer Lapidus drives up in a Prius with a bicycle rack on the back and enters a warehouse space with a simple wooden sign beside a steel door that reads farmer-baker-miler.

In the center of the room is a round sleek wooden mill that houses a millstone, not unlike the grist mills of old. She will be running the mill herself today, transferring ton sacks of danko rye from New York and wheats from North Carolina.

Lapidus is a baker who owned a small wood-fired bakery in Marshall, North Carolina for fourteen years. She milled the wheat, stoked the fire, and tended natural leavening. Tired, she was ready to move on. Her journey led her to this mill located in West Asheville and aptly named Carolina Ground. It is part of several mills in New York, California, and now North Carolina that are bringing back micro milling.

For those of us passionate about local food and farming, flour may not be the first thing that comes to mind. For one thing it simply wasn’t available, especially for breads in the south. A new breed of wheat and a new mill changed the way that we can get flour in North Carolina when a plant breeder released new varieties of wheat and a baker with a mission to get flour back in the hands of small business partnered in North Carolina.

A New Wave of Grain

Local bread wheat was never possible in North Carolina until 2009 when a plant breeder for the USDA released two new breeds. Hard wheat for breads didn’t grow east of the Mississippi River.

When David Marshall, USDA plant researcher and professor of plant breeding and pathology with expertise in wheat, moved to NC State University from Texas A&M in 2002, North Carolina flour mills asked him for bread wheat that could be grown locally because they spend a lot of money on transporting the wheat.

Marshall searched and found no seeds “off the shelf ” with good yields, so he began breeding wheats and testing thousands of new varieties to find wheats that grow in high humidity. “It takes about 6 or 7 years to develop a new variety,” said Marshall. “ In the greenhouse, it takes a thousand old-school genetic crosses per year and then selections are grown in seven locations across the state from the mountains to the coast.”

The new wheat was released in 2009. Two varieties, NuEast with a red kernel and Appalachian White with a white kernel, that mills like because the flour is whiter without removing as much of the grain.

What was once impossible, became possible. “We always have more requests for seeds than are available,” said Marshall, whose work has continued with two new wheat breads being released in a few weeks.

Growing Grains

In a typical year, North Carolina grows more wheat than any state in the East. This year has been an exception due to weather. “You have heard of a hundred-year flood, we had a hundred-year crop,” said Dan Weathington, the Executive Director of the North Carolina Small Grain Growers Association.

“Hard wheat is still a rare crop, only about 50 acres,” said Weathington.” Most of it is grown by Billy Carter. Carter raises both conventional and organic foods and supplies mostly locally.”

Other grains of interest include grain used by microbrewers; there are now 163 microbreweries in the state. A local distiller is looking for grains including rye and barley. As demand increases, so will the acreage. “The bottom line is that the farmers need to make money,” said Weathington.

Taking Flour Into Her Own Hands

As a baker, Lapidus had kept up with flour economy. In 2008, the price of wheat was in a bubble, the price went excessively high, and then later busted. Small bakeries couldn’t reasonably pass the high cost to customers. Pricing was determined by commodity traders rather than the market.

“Bakers were disconnected from the most essential ingredient, flour,” said Lapidus, who was concerned about who was controlling pricing. She then heard about testing for a new wheat variety being done by Marshall, and she realized the opportunity to start a mill, the link between farmers and bakers.

“The opportunity to close the gap between farmer and baker presented itself,” said Lapidus, who wrote a grant proposal for the Carolina Organic Bread Flour Project to begin a nonprofit. It was funded by the Tobacco Trust Fund, Golden Leaf, and the Carolina Farmer Stewardship Association. Carolina Ground began as a non-profit until the business could become viable on its own.

The baker who mentored her when she started the mill, Alan Scott, was purchasing a mill in Austria when he suddenly passed away. She purchased the mill instead and Carolina Ground began.

Local milling was not new, rather it was common. Gristmills set along streams and riverbanks. These were later replaced with city mills. You can see the evidence of shuttered mills when you drive through many small southern towns and see rusted silos beside weed-covered railroad tracks. Now, most all supermarket flour travels from megamills in the Midwest, even gourmet brands.

The connection between farmer and baker began when the mill opened in 2012. “We are a baker driven mill,” said Lapidus. “I am able to have a conversation with bakers in the way that bakers speaks. It is a narrative that offers feedback to the mill, a far different approach than for most milling.”