Feature Story: Small but Mighty

SMALL BUT MIGHTY

Two Farm Credit West customers are proving they don’t have to have large operations — or even come from a farming background — to make a big impact on their communities.

BY SARAH KEARBEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY NATE CASTILLO

FILLING

THE GAP Reconnecting Growers with Their Communities Through Local Flour

For David Kaisel, milling grain is about more than making fresh, flavorful and nutritious flours.

For the beginning farmer and businessman, it’s about reconnecting growers with local consumers, improving his community through education and advocacy, and sparking a return to locally produced and consumed agricultural goods. David owns and operates Capay Mills in rural Capay Valley, California, about 40 miles northwest of Sacramento. There, in a facility in town, he transforms locally grown heirloom grains into fresh, distinctive flours using an artisanal stone mill. When he started his business in 2015, his goal was to give growers in his area a place to process their rotationally

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grown grains. Until the 1950s, California was the thirdlargest producer of wheat in the country. But as wheat processing consolidated, and the cost of land rose, growing grains as a commodity greatly diminished in the Golden State. “I wanted to start a small mill that would feature grains by local growers, ideally who are growing them in rotation with other crops the way they always had,” he says. “I knew farmers who were growing heirloom and specialty grains, but no longer had the infrastructure to process them at a small scale. That was the gap I was most interested in filling.” While most commercial mills require truckloads of grain to process, David can serve farmers growing as little as several hundred pounds of grain in rotation with their other crops. He works with local growers to produce heirloom crops that thrive in the area and produce unique flavors and textures. In contrast to his industry counterparts, where milling one million pounds a day is a matter of course, David currently mills around 150 pounds per hour — on equipment rated for 300 pounds per hour. He is on a mission to expand his milling capacity to approximately 1,000 pounds per hour with help from a loan from Farm Credit West. David grew up working with food and in restaurants, but until recently had no formal agricultural training. He found support at the Center for Land Based Learning in nearby Woodland, California. There, he participated in the Center’s California Farm Academy and Farm Business Incubator programs, gaining a foundation for modern sustainable farming and building relationships with growers in the area. One of those relationships is with Tim Mueller of Riverdog Farm in Capay Valley. An organic farmer producing yearround vegetables along with hogs, sheep, meat, birds and eggs, Tim has worked closely with David for several years growing native heirloom grains in rotation with his crops. Tim said David’s model of processing locally grown grain for human consumption reflects their shared ethos as place-based farmers. “Feeding [grain] to the animals is fine, but if we get even 5% of it to people, it’s great,” he said. “It also fits in with all the restaurants we work with — they’re excited about it.” Along with his mission to support local agriculture by making grain a viable crop for California growers, David is passionate about educating others about the role that local mills can play in communities. In 1870, there was one flour mill for every 1,400 people in the U.S., he explains. Today, there is just one for nearly two million people. On a scale that massive, not only is the identity of the grains unknown to consumers, but the final product changes drastically. To preserve freshness for shipping across the country, commodity mills use rollers, removing the components of the grain — bran and germ — which contain lipids and cause the flour to spoil within a few weeks. Those components are also what give flour flavor, texture and nutrients. “People taste bread baked with our flour and say they can’t believe it tastes so distinctive,” David says. “Cereals remain somewhere around 60% of the calories we eat worldwide (including rice, wheat, millet and sorghum). And yet with our globalized markets, we know the least about it.”

“Cereals remain somewhere around 60% of the calories we eat worldwide (including rice, wheat, millet and sorghum). And yet with our globalized markets, we know the least about it.

DAVID KAISEL | OWNER, CAPAY MILLS

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