A germ of an idea for wheat

A group based in Pittsboro is testing regional possibilities for organic wheat

Jeff Preddy's tobacco farm, a half an hour north of Raleigh, has for seven decades catered to the tastes of smokers. It may soon serve another clientele: connoisseurs of organic bread.

Commercial production of wheat used in bread baking is an experiment never before tried in North Carolina.

But a local farm group is trying to establish the ancient grain in this state. This month the Pittsboro-based Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, backed by $139,000 from the state Tobacco Trust and a New Mexico tobacco maker, started a two-year undertaking to create a wheat market and build a small flour mill.

If they succeed, North Carolina's farmers will have a new cash crop and local bakeries will be less dependent on Midwestern wheat supplies.

But the enterprise is not without risk. Sales of organic food -- which have soared in recent years -- have suffered as the economy has tumbled.

And then there is the state's weather. High humidity spoils the plant with disease, and heavy rains prompt the grain to germinate prematurely. New disease-resistant varieties have solved that problem, but wheat enthusiasts will still have to overcome ingrained skepticism from farmers and bakers who have been taught that it's impossible to produce quality bread-making wheat in the Southeast's humid climate.

"North Carolina has never grown hard wheat before -- that's why Southerners eat so many biscuits," said Chris Reberg-Horton, an organic crop specialist at N.C. State University.

Filling a need

Lionel Vatinet, an owner of La Farm Bakery in Cary, stopped using organic wheat flour from the Midwest this year after the price more than doubled.

He said buying flour from state farmers sounds terrific in concept. But he warned it would need to be "bread-friendly" to find a market.

That means the wheat will need to offer consistent yields from field to field, farm to farm, county to county. Bakers will not tolerate sacrificing their loaves to the trial-and-error of adjusting recipes for each batch of flour.

"One of the biggest things for baking is you want a product that doesn't vary from batch to batch," said Rob Nichols, bread bakery manager at the Weaver Street Market in Hillsborough.

La Farm and Weaver Street are the kinds of bakeries the project organizers hope to enlist into their network of small, artisan bake shops and patisseries.

During the next two years, farmers and bakers will be invited on field trips and seminars to make the case for local wheat by the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, the sustainable agriculture group that is overseeing the project.

They hope to enlist at least 20 bakeries and 20 farms to create a market that can support a small custom mill.

Already a few farmers in the state are testing new wheat varieties on a small scale, and they say the results are encouraging. Looking Back Farms in Chowan County successfully grew the crop on less than one-third of an acre last year and plans to sow 30 acres this month for next year's harvest, said owner Ben Haines.

Preddy also is growing wheat on his farm, but as a cover crop to guard against erosion and for compost in years he's not growing tobacco for the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co., which is supporting the organic wheat initiative.

To qualify for the organic label, Santa Fe's tobacco farmers must rotate their crops. Farmers typically grow tobacco just one year out of every three. The crops in rotation must also be grown organically -- without chemical fertilizers or pesticides -- to maintain organic status.

Preddy doesn't bother weeding or harvesting the wheat because he has no assurance that there's a market for the flour.