Here and There Grain Project is a service provider that offers a harvesting service and post-harvest drying and cleaning assistance for cereal grain production. Primarily working farms rotating vegetables with winter grains using soil-building practices, our mobile harvesting service alleviates the limited availability of combines for farmers getting started with grains like winter wheat, rye, barley, and oats in southern New Hampshire and coastal Massachusetts.

Andrew Dixon is the lead crescent wrench at Here and There Grain Project which has been growing and harvesting grains since 2021.

Hi, I’m Andrew! Previously, I ran a small flour mill selling direct to consumer, bakeries, and partnering CSAs. Now, I’m following my interests in farm equipment and agroecology as I get set up to offer a mobile harvesting service. Farming part-time since 2021, I've worked in commercial-scale compost facility construction, wood-fired baking, and as a software engineer. I earned my B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at UMass Amherst and bring an enthusiasm for peer-to-peer learning to my workplaces. I'm glad to be working in barns, shops, and fields these days.

How often do you see a loaf of bread labeled with a farm you know?

The organic grain grower is a rare one, cereal grains are uniquely challenging, especially at the small scale because the infrastructure to fit is only just returning. Winter grains grow well here in the Northeast. They’re an excellent crop for building soil, and they’re a tool for farmers that want to extend rotations, break-up pest cycles, add organic matter, and increase biodiversity.

Knowing your regional flour mill is a step towards nutritional, sustainably-grown grains, but the local grain grower could use your support too. Many aspiring grain growers are approaching this challenge for ecological and culinary reasons. Their work is improving innovative, regenerative growing practices so look for their names on your next loaf of bread or beer can label. At the heart of this project is a commitment to supporting small farms.

Welcome! You’ll notice that the Here and There Grain Project website remains under construction. Since 2021, this small business has been able to make its way largely by word-of-mouth flour sales. Our monthly “We’re firing up the stone-mill!” emails morphed into a newsletter that picked up the Here and There Grain Project narrative where the website left off. Photos, stories of harvests, and quite a few recipes can be found in our newsletters, linked below if you’re catching up.

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About

What we do

Here and There Grain Project works with farmers on an individual basis to plan harvests and end-use markets, as well as install grain dryers and facilitate seed cleaning. Value-added processing, like stone milling, rolling, pearling, or malting, are excellent options for partnering farms, but at the outset this role can be shared with nearby businesses—a testament to the interconnectedness of the grain chain.

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 in the Northeast. 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, cover cropping, and mulching—to regenerate is to heal.

As machine operators, we aim to minimize the amount of fossil fuels we burn, and we are transparent about the amount of burn. The best way to understand our carbon footprint is to measure it. We attempt to schedule the most efficient routes for our harvesters and count the miles and gallons each year.

The toll that commodification of foods 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 we share these fields with the life beneath our feet and above our heads, and even on our busiest days we must make time for giving back here and there.

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. Often we work on traditional Abenaki lands. To learn more about these lands, check out the Abenaki Trails Project.

History of a custom combiner

Americans on both of the coasts are largely unaware of the “custom combiner.” A quick wikipedia search, and you’ll learn that this industry has historically contributed to a large portion of commodity grain harvests beginning in the 1920s in the United States. Not all bean, grain, and forage farms own and maintain their own harvesters for financial and practical reasons. Each year in May, as field crops dry down, custom combiners put their gear on trailers and haul it northwards farm-to-farm from Texas to Saskatchewan. Before corporate consolidation of farmlands, this was often a family-run business.

Adapting the role of custom combiner

Here and There Grain Project is adapting this model to fit the organic farms in southern New Hampshire and coastal Massachusetts.

In the semi-arid climate of the Great Plains with dry Julys, custom combiners pre-schedule harvests with farms. Their schedules can be rather inflexible so conventional farms rely on the use of an herbicide like glyphosate to prepare their fields for harvest, dessicating green weeds that bind up combines and, in the worst case, spraying entire fields to force senescence for immature crops. Unfortunately, this is better than going belly up to the banker. Still, this is a lazy, cost-cutting approach. A skilled combine operator can harvest a field with some weeds and green straw. Here and There Grain Project has some ideas for how to adapt this model.

To avoid conflicting harvest dates we attempt to segment the harvesting months. For example, we plan a harvesting route where one farm grows an early maturing barley, another grows a July wheat, and a third, northern-most farm grows a later-maturing rye. This allows us to build in some flexibility to our harvest schedule. Additionally, harvesters with padded threshing bars can help harvest grains that are still green without cracking the berries.

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.

Newsletters:

Core Values

  1. Adapting to changing climates

    Here and There Grain Project recognizes that as a result of wars and the excessive extraction of natural resources, ecosystems have been degraded, biodiversity has been lost, and the perils of biosphere collapse are approaching. No individual or business is solely responsible for these damages, but it is time that we speak up for our lands. Humans only save what they love. It is time that we demonstrate care by shifting our food production towards gentler methods, reconnecting with our agroecology.

  2. People

    Regenerative agriculture is first and foremost about people. People are inseparable from the land, yet so often in commodity-based food production the people involved are hidden because their labor has been exploited or because their lands have been taken away. This carelessness for human life leads to carelessness for farmlands.

  3. Healing

    To be practicing regenerative agriculture is to be “healing” soils. Here and There Grain Project likes this definition because it recognizes that there has been damage done. It’s important to understand and learn what each farm soil wants. Nutrients and numbers and all of that other heady stuff are important, but nourishment is the real mover and shaker. This healing work feeds people and farmlands, but is very often missed by financial and regulatory agencies.

  4. Establishing a farm culture of diversity and inclusivity

    Here and There Grain Project is committed to cultivating safety and space on farms and in shops and garages for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ farmers and mechanics. It is important to imagine the future we want to see from the seat of a tractor.

  5. Technology

    Innovations are best evaluated before they are adopted and those advancements which give people greater connection to the land—especially those which do so for historically marginalized communities—ought to be given preference. Fossil fuel burning technology got us into this mess, and we must look to reduce our burn in every step forward. The best way to do this is to measure our inputs.

  6. Food and art as activism

    Artists who develop a dialogue with nature can be catalysts for change and are excellent collaborators in agricultural and culinary spaces. Given increasing global disconnect with what is on our plates, participating in food production and preparation is not only subversive, it can be a form of activism. Environmental justice and social justice are inextricably linked. Small scale food producers are often doing the important work of educating eaters, but this responsibility can be readily shared unlike fieldwork and kitchenwork.

Beyond the Horizon:

Here and There Grain Project is a slow growing operation dedicated to long-term partnerships. The horizon for this stage of growth is a reliable harvesting service for three farms in 2026. Once this horizon is more clearly in reach, Here and There Grain Project will increase its effort to advocate for policy changes to support small farms.

One example of a piece of legislation which could be improved is the chapter 61A property tax advantage for landowners who have five or more acres of land “actively devoted” to agricultural or horticultural purposes (Massachusetts). This tax advantage could be improved if the requirements were more granular, incentivizing landowners to put their properties into agricultural uses that better for their soil and communities. This could improve land-access for aspiring farmers. The current requirements for land to be designated as agriculturally in-use is insanely low. There is generally consensus in the farm community that this could be improved, but the political will is not there because many land-owners take advantage of this loophole.

Resources

[1] The Organic Grain Grower by Jack Lazor, book preview: https://books.google.com/books?id=nvXAz2w50FIC&lpg=PR1&dq=The%20Organic%20Grain%20Gro

[2] https://wholegrainscouncil.org/blog/2017/12/behind-scenes-vienna%E2%80%99s-whole-grain-summit?utm_source=consumers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Blog&utm_content=0118

[3] Lisa Kissing Kucek, The Grounded Guide to Gluten, 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E88V7F_aYDg

[4] UMaine ext bulletin #1019 - Understanding Wheat Quality https://extension.umaine.edu/publications/1019e/

[5] Pancakes https://youtu.be/7ERjB76Nf88

[6] "The Foot" by Bread and Puppet

[7] Ecological Rye Production, a UVM Extension NW Crop & Soil 2022 Grain Growers Series presentation with Sandy Syberg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8YfQdMqhYk