Here and There Grain Project

Our farming practices:

As combine operators and short-haul truckers, our aim is to have long-term partnerships with farms, giving farmers a chance to work with small grains here in the Northeast, sowing the seeds of our future which quite often already exist in the seeds of our past. We prioritize feedback loops because the combine operator doesn’t get to see the field as often as the farmer, and the farmer doesn’t get to see the underside of the combine as often as the mechanic.

The farming practices we support are regenerative; the farms we’re partnering with are already organic-practicing or certified organic—they’re not using herbicides and pesticides, they’re composting, they’re cover cropping, they’re mulching—but to regenerate is to heal, and to heal is to recognize that there has been some harmful land-use in the past. With that starting place in mind, we evaluate our farm partnerships based on mutual understandings of where they’d like to see their agroecology in a ten years and how incorporating grain growing can help them get there.

As machine operators, we aim to minimize the amount of fossil fuels that we burn and to be transparent in the amount of burn that we make each year. The best way to understand our carbon footprint is to measure it. We count miles and gallons during harvest season every year.

Our value-added food producer practices:

As value-added food producers, we aim to make the tastiest and most nutrient-dense whole grain flours, rolled oats, and pearled barleys. Someday, we’d like to offer gluten-free flours from pseudograins like buckwheat. We prioritize the farming, and will continue to develop our line of products as it fits our partnering farms.

Namesake and an ode to small farms:

With each harvest, small farms are filling bellies with nutrient-dense whole foods, contributing to building resilient communities, and reconnecting people with the land. It’s a stark contrast to the factory farms with their singular goal of productivity, a mission that has caused massive soil degradation and fertilizer dependency world-wide.

The toll that the factory framework has taken is felt by the local farmer and by the land. As we look for ways to make our farming practices more sustainable, we are called to remember that this land that we grow on is not ours. We share these fields with the life beneath our feet and growing above our heads, and even on our busiest days we must make time to fill our role in this reciprocal relationship, giving back here and there.

The combine operator:

Hi, I’m Andrew Dixon!

I grew up in Groveland, Massachusetts carrying Eggo waffles to the bus stop. I earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at UMass Amherst and worked from 2016 to 2020 as a self-taught software engineer where I found inspiration in the peer-to-peer networks of the open source community. A pandemic-era mutual aid network food security effort and an apprenticeship at Trent’s Bread in Westford, VT got me interest in the world of microbes and bread as a community builder; especially rye bread. Following curiosity, I made a career change in 2021 and worked in Cape Ann, Massachusetts at Alprilla Farm part-time and Black Earth Compost full-time. At the compost site, I learned more about global nutrient cycles and food-scrap composting facility construction, finally putting that mechanical engineering degree to some use. On the farm, I learned about soil biology, crop rotations, and the role of winter grains. When I’m not on a farm or in the shop, I’m probably in the woods. Occasionally, I sing baritone folk songs at karaoke night.

Land Acknowledgement

In the lower Merrimack Valley, Here and There Grain Project has been farming on the unceded ancestral lands of the indigenous Pawtucket people. We recognize that the land that we grow on is not ours; we share these fields with the beings below our feet and above our heads.

Why support small scale grain growers?

Here and There Grain Project wants bakers and eaters to understand just how fledgling the revival of the small scale grain grower in the United States is. The reemergence here in the Northeast despite the consolidation of farmlands by large corporations nationwide is a testament to the entrepreneurial spirit of the American farmer, mindful of the ecological trade-offs necessary to reach for financial footing in many conventional markets.

All compelling arguments for supporting the local food movement extend to the revival of grain growing, but the barriers to entry for the small scale grain farmer are so high in this generation due to the past fifty years of investment targeted almost exclusively at the industrial scale, that farmers who are just getting set up to grow human consumable grains sure could use your support. The primary bottleneck, the limited availability of properly sized combines, is the first and largest hurdle. In the past twenty years, some of the other pieces—seed cleaning facilities, stone mills, and markets for whole grains—have seen steady redevelopment, especially in Vermont and Maine. This infrastructure has been a little slower to develop in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, but there are several farmers working hard to change that.

Clean, high quality wheat and rye with good falling numbers and adequate protein is a prerequisite, but the price premiums for these local products should be understood from the standpoint of our historical neglect for this scale of grain growing. How often do you see a bag of flour or a loaf of bread labeled with a farm name that you know?

What is a custom combiner?

Americans on both of the coasts are largely unaware of the “custom combiner.” A quick wiki search and you’ll learn that this industry does a large portion of the commodity grain harvesting; not all bean, grain, and forage farms own and maintain their own harvesters for financial and practical reasons. Each year beginning in May, custom combiners put their equipment on trucks and haul them northwards from Texas to Saskatchewan, traveling farm to farm, harvesting crops and leaving them at nearby silos. Historically, custom combiners developed long-term partnerships with farms that they’d visit year after year. Today, with the increased consolidation of farmlands, I’m not sure how that looks.

Adapting the role of custom combiner:

Here and There Grain Project is adapting this model to fit the small farms in coastal Massachusetts and the Merrimack Valley of New Hampshire. Without chemicals, we can harvest tons of food right away. Glyphosate and other herbicides are used in conventional wheat production to dessicate weeds and sometimes to dry down green straw prior to inflexible, pre-scheduled harvest dates with custom combiners so that their harvesters don’t bind up in the field. This is the lazy, cost-cutting approach. A skilled combine operator can harvest a field with some weeds and green straw.

Here in the Northeast is, grain growers harvest when the sun shines. This isn’t the semi-arid climate of the Great Plains, but we still have plenty of sunny days in July. Still, this can create scheduling conflicts because every farmer wants their grain harvested on the sunny day when their grains are dry. We reduce some of this risk by segmenting the harvesting months. For example, we plan a harvesting route with farm locations, one with an early maturing barley, another with a July wheat, and our final stop at the north-most farm to harvest later-maturing rye. This allows us to build in some flexibility to our harvest schedule.

The reward for quality grains here in the Northeast can outweigh the challenges for farmers and custom combiners relative to the reward of the conventional grower. Livestock feed and commodity grain markets have lower payouts than the human consumable grains. Around here, we don’t lack demand for quality grains.

Why winter grains?

Winter rye and winter wheat can grow for 295 days, making them one of the longest annual crops. During this time they cover our soil, photosynthesizing in the shoulder seasons, their roots becoming the chip leaders at the microbial poker table in the rhizosphere. For the vegetable farmer, after periods of cultivation and productivity, it becomes important to rest their fields. Winter grains enable farmers to fallow their fields without entirely foregoing a marketable food offering.

In the late summer or fall, after a vegetable crop is harvested we plant wheat or rye. In the early spring, these hearty grasses with their firm hold on life can be grazed to promote tillering, giving our ruminant friends an opportunity to deposit some organic fertility on our fields. We often seed a nitrogen-fixing legume like clover near the final frost date, our winter grains act as a nursery for the clover and when the grain is harvested off as a mid-summer cash crop, the clover is ready to take off and nourish, aerate and protect the soil through another winter, readying the field to return to vegetable production the following summer.

Soil organic matter levels on this continent once averaged between 5 and 10 percent; now the national average for soil organic matter in the United States has declined to 1 percent level because we have cropped our farmland way too hard with too much added synthetic nitrogen [1, Jack Lazor]. Grasses grown to maturity, once they’ve turned from green to brown and their stalks have become woody, incorporated into soils can boost organic matter by a percentage or more. A common practice on small organic farms today is tarping their fields to smother or solarize crop residues. Winter cover cropping with seed heads harvested off can accomplish a similar goal with less labor on a larger field size.