Welcome to Growing Grain, a new blog about Common Grain Alliance’s Grain Farmer Education project (Southern SARE # LS20-327). This is a way for me, the main content developer, to share grain-growing knowledge as I come across it, and to keep myself on-track. It is also an invitation to learn alongside me. As such it will be informal, nonlinear, and sometimes wrong. But I hope this window into my research process will be entertaining and illuminating.

I am not a grain farmer—I’ll say that right up-front. My husband and I grow vegetables for farmers’ markets in Nelson County, VA, and I bake sourdough breads in a wood-fired oven. My interest in grain stems from my love of working with it, and eating it. But my curiosity about growing grain has emerged from interacting with grain farmers—a resourceful and feisty bunch.  They have to be, since they are often making it up as they go along. As the grain industry consolidated in the seventies, knowledge of how to grow and market grain to local markets has dwindled. Yet these are staple foods, and deserve at least as much attention on the local food scene as, say, vegetables. So we started this project for farmers, and I will happily confess that I am delighted to be able to work on it. Follow this blog to learn alongside me, as I slowly sort through information with the goal of making it all make sense to you, my audience.  

So who are you? The audience I have in mind are anyone who is curious about growing grain for personal use, or for local markets. These are outlets (like farmers markets) that are not tied to commodity pricing, so the prices are higher, and the range of products buyers buy goes beyond corn and soybeans. We think the potential market is huge, but right now it is still small and the standards are often higher. If you already grow conventional grain, if you grow feed, or if you graze livestock, and are looking to diversify, this blog is for you. If you grow vegetables or just want to grow small grain plots, this blog is also for you. And if you are simply curious about how grain is grown, I am writing for you as well. 

I invite you to participate in the process. I will certainly make mistakes; I hope you call me out on them in the comments! Your participation, critiques, and feedback will only make these posts more useful to others. If you like what we are doing, please share it. And thank you for coming along with us!

Photo: "Wheat Field on a Sunny summer afternoon" by Coggleswort00 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0