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 buzzing above our heads, and even on our busiest days we must make time for giving back here and there.

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.