Update on Appalachian Bean, Grain, and Oilseed Project

AppStaple's picture

Hi all, Brandon here,

This message is intended to update all of you who are interested in the progress of the Staple Food Project in Southeastern Ohio. In particular, I will write herein about the "hardware" of this project- the nuts and bolts of production and processing of beans, grains, pseudo-cereals, and oilseed. Michelle will continue to report on other exciting aspects of this project, such as her funded work in forming a staple foods collaborative and in researcing potential and barriers in utilizing publicly owned and managed agricultural space for producing staple food and introducing that food to the supplies of local institutional buyers such as schools and food banks. She recently added The Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative as a group on this site, so check there as well to read updates (the notes from our most recent meeting are posted there.)

Many of you know that we received 6,000 dollars from the Stinner Endowment to run an experimental model of bean and grain production at Green Edge Gardens (see message entitled Stinner Endowment Proposal), and the last update on this project informed you that we had received 3,000 dollars from the Ohio Farm Bureau Foundation, which will support post-harvest processing of our crops.

Since then, we have also received funding from The Athens Foundation (3,100 dollars) to go toward storage and other supporting pieces, and from USDA-SARE (18,000 dollars), which allows us to fund involvement from an additional farmer, JB King, and to match the funds of the Stinner Endowment, the Ohio Farm Bureau Foundation, and The Athens Foundation to setup an experimental demo which will very likely ramp up into a sustainable business in bean, grain, pseudo-cereal, and oilseed crop production, processing, marketing, and distribution.

Additionally, we feel pretty confident that we will receive an additional 58,000 dollars from Ohio University's Sugar Bush Foundation to support my full-time coordination of this project, as well as the addition of two elements: 1. Community Food Initiatives Community Gardens and Edible Schoolyards in growing and minimally processing some of these crops and 2. Ohio University's Russ College of Mechanical Engineering, one full-time Grad student in developing some appropriate technology in the form of a portable/stationary thresher/cleaner/de-huller unit, which can make harvest of these crops much more flexible on the small, irregular plots of our region.

We have visited En-Hanced Products and Manufacturing, a family-owned business since the thirties, located in Westerville. They had long specialized in seed cleaners for farmers. During the "Get big or get out" period, they diversified in order to survive. When we visited and told them about our work, they offered us a discount on a seed-cleaner and screens in support of this project, and we feel that they are a great partner to include in all our our loops. Manufacturing is, after all, one of the pillars of healthy regional economies, and very important in the realm of food production. Ask us for their contact info

We have been developing a partnership with Butch Mitchell who is a coordinator of a project to develop appropriate technology in pressing oil from seeds to be used for on-farm fuel. This partnership is to manifest as an introduction to producing sunflower oil as a food product.

At Green Edge Gardens, I was able to get seed into the ground last week, just before this last bout of heavy rains: Amaranth, Millet, Adzuki and Black Turtle Beans, and Sunflower.

JB has not had a dry enough spell yet on his side of the county, but we hope that the heirloom meal corn and larger plots of beans will be able to be planted within a week.

Buckwheat will be planted in early summer, and spelts will be planted in the fall for harvest in early summer next year.

We are zero-ing in on what I think is a very appropriate mill, a SAMAP commercial mill, made in France. This lead came to us via a project very similar to ours, which we've just discovered, happening in Oregon. We had a lot to discuss with this group, and still do. This is an exciting new development, and a fine opportunity for mutual support across the continent.

Check out this link: http://www.mudcitypress.com/beanandgrain.html

This week, we had the pleasure of hosting Steve Bosserman and Steve Faivre in their tour of agriculture in the Southeastern part of Ohio, as part of their USDA-SCRI grant. I think they have learned a lot, particularly in regards to how this food network is working and how it can be improved, and also in regards to what kind of equipment is needed by the burgeoning population of small, sustainable farms, here and across the US.

The Steves gave us some great ideas and coaching from their wealth of experience and knowledge in the mechanics of technology in agricultural business ventures. Most notably of these are in the arena of crop storage and harvesting. The latter, in particular, may be of interest to many farmers/processors interested in grain production. This is removing the combine from the farm, replacing it with a mechanism that only cuts the crop just below the seed head, and then binds, bags, or bales the crop. Farmers can either cooperatively own a stationary threshing machine or take their crop to a processing business that owns one, in order to have their crop threshed and otherwise processed. This reduces the number of complicated and expensive harvesting units that are out in the field and also allows threshing to happen any time of day or night, and in any kind of weather. Of course, this is not a wholly new idea, but once again, we find ourselves turning to the solutions of our ancestors with the surprise and delight of children.

Regulations for a grain processing facility are a confusing element of the project. It seems as though the ODA doesn't really know exactly what is required of such a facility, but we are hoping to have that figured out within the next month. We have several options for a facility site, and the most likely is ACEnet.

We are now turning our attention to the Value-Added Producer Grant from the USDA. We are considering multiple avenues of approach with this step, and we will probably soon be submitting queries to this site to get some feedback on our ideas pertaining to that.

All along, we are also continuing to educate ourselves in the principles and techniques of Permaculture, Edible Forest design, and other systems that emphasize working with the characteristics of one's bioregion in producing the food and non-food products that one's community needs. We have taken the very first steps in discussion with farmers about starting down that road, as we feel that it will be very important in the future of agriculture.

I have attached two helpful documents describing this project. One is a flowchart, which I produced for one of our prospective funders, The Sugar Bush Foundation. The other is an excell sheet that I have drafted to organize the distribution of funds for the hardware pieces of the project. Please enjoy, and please make comments.

So, I think that about covers it for now. We will keep you posted, but, meanwhile, please feel free to send questions and comments our way.

Thanks for all of the work that you do!

Michelle and Brandon

 

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Wow, phenomenal

webadmin's picture

Wow, phenomenal work!

 

Transparency, appropriate technology, permaculture and edible forest exploration.

I wonder if some existing open design cores for farming equipment might also be worth exploring for the AFSC Project, to ramp up access to technology and potentially possibly even maximize the budget.

Particularly the LifeTrac http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=LifeTrac and MicroTrac http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=MicroTrac both of which are designed in a modular-enough way to allow them to be easily extended to meet custom needs like those described in your post above. 

This could be coupled with those of us who are already starting to explore "flexible fabrication" of machinery on this scale, which can effectively reduce the cost of appropriate technology needs even more. 

Even if this is not explored within your existing context and project scope, I am sure you can see where this could lead to, and would probably be worth at least an exploratory discussion and outlining of potential possibilities. If you are interested, let's seriously talk about usable open source technology as it could apply to what AFSC is working towards doing. Cost factor on LifeTrac (which has a working model example) and MicroTrac are exponentially lower than the almost non-existent alternatives, and projects like yours seem to me to be a prime place to apply open licensed, flexibly customizeable technology.

In any case, great work, and thank you as always for keeping us updated.

Also, some other thoughts related to your post:

While there are existing knowledge bases like http://www.permaculture.info/index.php/Main_Page related to permaculture knowledge and practices, my question is: how might we improve these, or create a way to combine them into one view-stream where you might also mix-in knowledge you are collecting about your own practices (not just permaculture practices, but also the work you are doing with bean, grain, oilseed, etc)?

What would make it easy for you to post replicable knowledge and data somewhere, or practical "how-to" style libraries of information, if you are interested or tasked with doing this? How can you can collect and store the useful knowledge that you are creating "on the fly" as you are working? Do you have an existing model that you are mapping your work to? Existig categories that others might find useful. It could potentially be relatively easy to accomodate this here in Local food systems, and perhaps place a creative commons or other license on this work to keep it open as a reusable resource. I would like to propose that this is worth discussing.

Keep up the good work!

Casey Hoy's picture

 

Hi Michelle and Brandon,

Finally getting a chance to look over the progress in more detail.  Thanks for the update on your exciting project, it is really going well.

 

Your struggles with ODA and permitting reminded me of what the Hartzler Family Dairy went through to become the first new dairy licensed in about 60 years.  That was quite a few years ago now but it sounds like the same issue, the process hasn't been used in a long time, or hasn't been invented.  The state budget cuts probably aren't helping ODA with having the resources to address it either, they're no doubt struggling with getting all of the routine stuff done.  It may take time, but I think they would certainly be supportive of what you're doing and they eventually got it done for the Hartzlers.

 

One other tip -  Sam Rose shared a software package that does the kind of flow charts you shared called CMap Tools. as in cognitive mapping.   It can be downloaded from their site, free, and is very handy for the kind of mapping you were doing.  You have enough going on that it should come in very handy!

 

Best wishes,  Casey