We're starting a gluten free mill!

Another experiment is in the works folks! We’re starting a gluten free mill in Addison, Michigan so we can further process the buckwheat and teff that we grow on our family farm. In this blog, I’ll go through some light history and then answer why we’re doing this. 

The Farm at Tenera Grains has been growing teff and buckwheat for many years now. In 2020, my dad, the farmer, built the gluten free shed (40’x60’) for cleaning and dehulling gluten free grains. A full time employee plus a newly hired part timer are dedicated to processing buckwheat for clients. This is really exciting for us because while we’re crossing year 5, it feels like we’re just hitting our stride. 

The cleaning and dehulling process is pretty involved. The different pieces of equipment we use include: air screener (beautiful wooden Clipper), destoner, gravity table, dehuller and color sorter. We run buckwheat through these machines sometimes once, other multiple times to yield a high quality finished product. In this case, the finished product is whole buckwheat groats.

There are several byproducts to this process. Immature buckwheat which is smaller/underdeveloped and promptly fed to the cows, hulls, and broken buckwheat groats. The hulls have been put out into the fields for composting. We don’t have a good outlet for them yet but not for lack of trying! I pitched a buckwheat hull pillow manufacturer on them but the hulls weren’t clean enough for them and the price we’d get wasn’t worth the cost of the extra cleaning.

Which leads us to the broken groats. Groats are different sizes so when it goes through the dehuller, sometimes the stones crack the bigger ones. The color sorter is able to sort out those broken ones because the inside of the groat is white and the outside/whole ones are a yellowish beigey with a hint of green. Generally the clients don’t want the broken groats which leaves us with a perfectly good food grade product to sell. Teffola uses the broken grit (or has been while we’ve been out of our own inventory of Tenera Grains buckwheat) and a pallet or two was sold to a bakery who had a mill. 

This surplus of broken groats led to the grant application for a small mill. There are very few small-scale dedicated gluten free mills in the Midwest and we’re on the path to becoming one of them! Being able to turn broken groats into a flour that bakers or brands can use to make gluten free goodies would be a great accomplishment in furthering our goal of simplifying the supply chain. We’ll be cleaning, dehulling and milling and in the case of our buckwheat, also growing it! 

We’re starting extremely small. The tabletop mill has a capacity of 25 pounds an hour and the sifter seems slower which is a bit worrying if I’m honest. We’ve submitted the license application with the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (health department) and are working on sending out samples to interested buyers. At this time, we don’t plan on selling in retail sizes as wholesale has the advantage of volume albeit a smaller margin. That could change in the future though.

From an operation point of view, the process has been to mill a bunch of buckwheat then sift all of it. But to save time, I’d like to build a table for the table so the flour that’s coming out of the mill goes directly into the sifter. And since the hopper (the part where you pour the grain into the mill) can only hold 2.8 pounds of grain, I need a bigger one so I can pour in 50 pounds of broken groats and walk away to a certain extent. That’s the tentative plan! I can confidently say that based on my experience, agriculture based businesses are slow to build and grow. This is an experiment so the pressure is minimal. If after 2-3 years we don’t have anything, we’ll close up shop with the satisfaction of knowing that we tried something.

And because I’m always selling…if you’re interested in purchasing freshly milled gluten free flour, please reach out! Contact me here.