Alaska Flour Futures

All over the world, grains exist at the intersection of the mundane and the sacred, the commodified and traditional, the status quo and subversive. According to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, 60 percent of the world’s food energy intake is provided by just three crops: corn, rice, and wheat. While commodity agriculture and a problematic diet are at the core of these metrics, so are some of the oldest relationships between humans and cultivated plants. Of the three, only wheat has been grown extensively in northern climates. Both Siberian Russia and Scandinavia have ancient histories of cultivating wheat, barley, oat, and other closely related crops, while in modern times, central Canada supports a huge wheat-producing agricultural industry. With this latitudinal hope, an Alaskan baker can really start to wonder, “Why not here?”

In 1906, the U.S. Department of Agriculture opened the Fairbanks Agricultural Experiment Station. The researchers were tasked with finding optimal crops for the burgeoning population in interior Alaska. Russian and American settlers had experienced years of varying success and hardship with their colonizing crops—wheat, oats, and barley among them. Fast forward to 2014, when the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services commissioned a report titled “Building Food Security in Alaska.” If you’ve attended any forums about these kinds of topics since then, you’ve probably heard its findings: “95 percent of the food purchased in Alaska is imported.” So what happened to grain farming in those 100-plus years?

Bob Van Veldhuizen and Dr. Mingchu Zhang are the two remaining research agronomists employed through the University of Alaska system. In 1970, when Van Veldhuizen started his career with the UAF Agriculture and Forestry Experimental Station (AFES), there was a strong partnership between the university and the USDA Agriculture Research Service (ARS). Between these two funders, there was a robust staff of researchers whose influential work is documented in their online archive, “Agroborealis.” They conducted trials on various grains and grain legumes, from rye to quinoa to chickpeas, but in the late 1970s, there was a special focus on wheat and barley.

At that time, Alaska Governor Jay Hammond set aside a large plot of state-owned land near Delta Junction to become the new center for grain farming and livestock. The state lent money vfor people to buy and clear land. By the late ’80s however, these pastoral dreams dried up alongside the oil money. Delta Junction still boasts the only community of grain farmers in the state, who almost exclusively grow feed barley. This period of focus on wheat breeding also brought about the two most promising candidates for wheat farming in Alaska—ingal and nogal. Both are suitable to mature in Alaska’s shorter growing seasons, but aren’t yet able to produce a consistent grain from season to season, which makes them economically infeasible to grow at scale. As Van Veldhuizen puts it, these varieties have a quality problem, not a quantity problem. Quality, of course, has everything to do with who is able to process it and who is willing to pay for it.

By the 1990s, funding at state and federal levels decreased to the point that only a few agronomists and a single plant breeder remained. This team focused on determining the genetic diversity of small grains in the circumpolar north, which was foundational to the eventual release of sunshine hulless barley in 2001. It took 15 years from first cross to seed release before this first ever, Alaska-bred grain for human consumption was ready to be grown at commercial scale. Yet, this success was met with all too little fanfare, as the turn of the century also marked the ultimate decline in financial support for the agronomy research program at UAF. For the past 20 years, the program has looked like it does today: Van Veldhuizen as the research technician at the Matanuska Experiment Farm and Zhang as the primary investigator at the Fairbanks Experiment Farm. Their whole budget—to maintain and build upon a century’s worth of research and breeding—is funded by outside grants that Zhang personally applies for during the academic year. The fact is, if brewers want a malting barley, if bakers want a wheat with reliable gluten, if foodies want their toast to be locally grown, then the state needs a reinvestment in research.

Bryce Wrigley grew feed barley with his family in Delta Junction for three decades before deciding to grow something people could eat. During the supply chain disruptions of 9/11, Alaska food security started to really trouble him, but in 2005, after watching the localized devastation of Hurricane Katrina, he resolved “to stop waiting for someone else to do it.” Despite the academic accomplishment of sunshine hulless barley, it took more than switching seed to be its commercial champion. He needed both a mill and a market. Thankfully, it seems that resourcefulness and economic risk tolerance are second nature to those who have dedicated their life to farming. Wrigley purchased the only commercial-scale mill in Alaska through incremental loans, and welcomed his son home from college with a major branding project. Thus, the Alaska Flour Company (AFC) was born.

After a slow start in the flour business, Wrigley and his family caught their stride in value-added products. Some of their greatest successes, the barley couscous and cream of barley breakfast cereal, were humble discoveries—they’re both varying sizes of cracked barley that were byproducts of the milling process. Wrigley got curious and decided to cook them up in the same manner as their more familiar counterparts. Now these nutritiously superior alternatives to grocery store staples can be found at retailers all across the state. AFC also has contracts with a Kenai school district and the Alaska Railroad, which helps to reduce the variability that surrounds retail markets. Still, only 40 percent of their sales are in-state.

AFC isn’t the only place where there is added value to Alaska grown grains. Anchorage’s Fire Island Rustic Bakeshop has been purchasing and baking with local grains from VanderWeele Farm in the Matanuska Valley for over five years. While VanderWeele Farm’s potatoes and carrots are household staples, their lesser-known, grain-growing ventures are at the heart of products like Fire Island’s “vollkornbrot”—a dark rye loaf that’s likely the first of its commercial-scale, locally grown kind. Tyler Murphy, General Manager of Fire Island, explained: “A couple years ago, we even had a 100 percent whole wheat loaf made from VanderWeele Farm’s wheat, but they weren’t able to dry the kernels thoroughly enough in their existing facilities, so they’d get stuck in our small, stone mill.” This is an example of those situations where failure is far more valuable than not having tried. As VanderWeele Farm operates within their limited capital resources and has to protect their bottom line, they’re making invaluable contributions to the collective knowledge of what works and doesn’t work in Alaska. They’re essentially bearing the burden of experimentation that academia would otherwise provide. No matter where you are in the world, it takes special people, with special businesses, to grow grains outside of the commodity market. In Alaska, however, the infrastructure is especially challenging and the associated financial risks are especially prominent. The harvests, processes, and investments of operations like Alaska Flour Company and VanderWeele Farm are nothing short of visionary.

It’s important to recognize that the way Alaska grain farming exists today is limited not so much by what is biologically possible as by what has been institutionally valued—or more precisely, undervalued. The potential of grain farming in Alaska is curtailed by a lack of investment in research, education, infrastructure, and consumer awareness. If Alaskans could grow, process, and store a high percentage of the grain consumed in-state, that would be a transformative step towards food security.

And yet, the duality of grains returns: the institutional is also personal. As I buy a $6 loaf of bread, I wonder, “How can my community express the value of this when so many people can’t afford it?” As I pull salmon out of the freezer, I wonder, “What about the fate of wild foods, when agriculture, especially grain farming, requires so much land?” As I sit down to a bowl of barley couscous, I wonder, “While these grasses are invaluable to my food heritage, what kind of relationship do they have to the land I call home?” If grain farming is the answer, then the question of food security must expand—“how will the action steps align with food sovereignty in Alaska?” When it comes to grain, the only way forward is holistically.