I was riding about five feet off the ground in the back of a truck, sharing the bed with a bread oven, mill, mixer, and workbench—all powered by a solar array on the roof. By day three of the Grain Gathering, this seemed like a perfectly reasonable place to be.
Marc Benoit built the mobile bakery and mill to shorten the chain from field to loaf and to push more of what a loaf costs back to the farmer who grew the grain in the first place. The truck buildout was a standout, but it was the crew—Marc, Baylin Speidel, and Thomas Vroom—that made the weekend for me. We milled and baked with Moon Family Farms’ Hollis, Chimacum Confluence, and Palouse Heritage Elwha River Spelt: twenty-odd loaves, three large-format focaccia, an armada of baguettes, and bialys topped with sesame and roasted vegetables. And the oven (a workhorse RackMaster) was still at temp when we quit.
The chain from breeder to farmer to miller to baker is longer than I had appreciated. But for three days, every pair of hands in the chain stood under one tent.
When I signed up for my first Grain Gathering, my worry was that it would lean too far into farming and wheat breeding—that it’d be industry folks talking to industry folks, with no place for a home baker. Then I started hopping between conversations and found bakers of every kind, from “two-loafer” home bakers to pros, geeking out about falling numbers, mixing techniques, and how best to run a community bakery.
But everything these people breed, grow, and mill ends up, eventually, in somebody’s oven, and often an oven like mine. The chain from breeder to farmer to miller to baker is longer than I had appreciated. For three days, every pair of hands in the chain stood under one tent. I’ve spent many years at the last link; it was something else to meet the rest.
The Grain Gathering is less a conference than a congregation of the grain-obsessed under this year’s theme, “Nourishing Communities.” The WSU Breadlab and the WSDA hosted the event July 19–21 in Washington’s Skagit Valley—the first gathering in eight years.
Over those three days, in and out of talks, masterclasses, and wheat fields, I kept running into the same few ideas.
Who Gets Paid for a Loaf of Bread
An “artisanal” loaf of sourdough bread runs $6 to $12 (and maybe higher?) these days. You could argue that bread is a staple and should be priced as one, that is, cheap enough for anyone to afford. While I agree, there’s a lot more happening in the field. The commodity grain system takes in grain and anonymizes it: all wheat turned into a single, static element with no identity and no price differential. Great for feeding the masses, which is important, but once the grain hits the pile, the care, attention to soil health, and the farmer’s growing obsession go unpaid.
The mobile mill and bakery is an unbroken chain of custody as grain goes in with a farmer’s name and comes out as bread that can be directly traced back to its grower. Think about the novelty of that for a moment: the farmer finally gets a spot on the bag alongside the baker.
And milling and baking in one place means the operator keeps the miller’s, distributor’s, and retailer’s margins. Put a trailer like this in the hands of the farmer, and suddenly it becomes a revenue stream that otherwise scatters down the chain.
As a home baker, when you buy identity-preserved grain directly from a farm or small mill—better yet, milling it fresh at home—you’re playing the same game to compress the supply chain and pay for the identity.
What a Wheat Breeder Optimizes For, and Why Grocery Flour Tastes the Way It Does
Almost every wheat variety grown is a pile of decisions someone made about what mattered at the time: yield, uniformity, disease resistance, baking performance, and ease of harvest. But what’s missing from that list? Flavor and nutrition.
This came up in nearly every conversation I had with breeders and bakers alike: how do you grow grain that still checks the farmer’s boxes (yield and performance) and get flavor and nutrition back into the loaf? Certainly what I’m always harping about—proper fermentation—but also using more whole grains and, frankly, the right grains to begin with.
The WSU Breadlab’s answer is to put flavor and nutrition on the scorecard. They breed varieties like Skagit 1109, Salish Blue, and Ruth (on my list to source and test!), to name a few, suited to thrive in specific growing conditions—not all conditions. Then they do the part most skip: mill and bake the candidates to see how they perform in a loaf.
In the home kitchen, this means you can have a bag labeled with a variety name and unique baking characteristics, because it’s precisely the opposite of the anonymous pile. The flavor has a name, and so does the farmer who grew it.
What Changes Back Home
It’s easy to come away beaming with energy from three days of fervent fermentation, claiming you’re going to overhaul your entire baking life.
To make a difference, it doesn’t have to be a complete upheaval of all you know and do. It can start small: swap one of your grains for an identity-preserved variety like Ruth, or source some grain directly from a farmer and mill it yourself.
If you traced my baking from start until now, you’d spot a trend toward more whole grains, more named varieties, and more freshly milled flour. Not everything I bake is along these lines (there’s a case to be made for high-quality sifted flour, too), but my goal is to keep pushing this evolution in my baking farther and farther.
Not because I feel like I “should,” but because I’m after the best flavor, the highest nutrition. And just maybe, with the right grain, you don’t have to choose between them.
The People
There were so many talented, passionate, and accomplished folks at the gathering it’s impossible for me to recount all our conversations and happenstance encounters, but here are a few:
Baylin Speidel, Head Baker, Chimacum: baking alongside you is always a pleasure, as was the running argument over why Star Trek is the work of a genius.
Thomas Vroom, who bakes on Vashon Island: we finally meet. I’m coming to see that island soon.
Marc Benoit: part madman, part renaissance man. The trailer speaks for itself, but thank you for who it speaks for—the farmers, millers, and everyone else who makes bread possible.
Crystie and Keith Kisler of Chimacum Valley Grainery: always inspiring and ever positive. Growing, milling, (and baking with and malting and…) some of the best grain anywhere.
Kevin Morse, Meech Crowley, and Jon Feldman of Cairnspring Mills: thank you for the mill tour, and for getting Skagit grain into kitchens like mine.
Andrew Heyn and Blair Marvin of Elmore Mountain Bread: I’ve followed your baking as long as I’ve been a baker. Talking milling, growing, and community with you both was a long time coming.
Jeffrey Hamelman: your book has been a north star since my earliest bakes. Meeting you continues to confirm everything it suggested about its author.
Katie Phelan: my handwriting-obsessed friend. Thanks for the chats about France and wood-fired baking—until the next adventure.
Brandon Buza: always a pleasure traveling and baking with you. Next trip, we’re capping the luggage count.
Cat Cox of Country Bird Bakery: thanks for our talks around community and what it means to make bread people love.
And thanks to Sandy A. and Ran C. for the help in the bakery and the hikes, and to everyone who stopped by the truck for a slice and a hello.
Parting
The Grain Gathering surprised me. But the theme had it right, too: it nourished. What I found was a congregation of the grain-obsessed, focused on feeding the people who eat their bread, whether they bake two loaves at a time or a hundred.
I don’t have a mobile bakery and mill, but what I do have is a small electric mill on the counter. When I flip the switch, the flour it makes comes from farmers I’ve now met, baked beside, and toured a wheat field with. After three days in the Skagit with this bunch of grain-heads, it really does seem like a perfectly reasonable place to end up.
