A Modular Curriculum for Growing Food Grain for the Local Market

View the project final report

Commodities

• Agronomic: grains and legumes (broad category)

Practices

• Education and Training: farmer to farmer, mentoring, technical assistance, resources

Grains and legumes are largely absent from the Mid-Atlantic’s otherwise strong local food system, notwithstanding the fact that historically, states like Virginia had a strong food grain economy. The Common Grain Alliance (CGA) is a nonprofit dedicated to rebuilding a localized food grain economy. Founded by thirteen members in 2018, CGA has recruited over 130 members. Some members come from long family lines of grain growers and millers, others are new to the scene.  Motivated by the absence of grain on the local food table, CGA members are dedicated to working with growers to help them realize the market opportunities in food grain and thereby strengthen the local grain value chain.

Most food grain currently grown in the region is sold on the commodity market despite the potential of a six-fold price premium or more on the small but growing local market. Existing food grain growers lack the connections, marketing strategies, and often the sustainable growing practices needed to access higher prices, while beginning growers face cost barriers, lack of know-how, and market uncertainty. The purpose of this project is to develop and implement a modular educational curriculum to train and recruit food grain growers for the local market in the Mid-Atlantic. The project will directly address the educational barriers to growing grain for the local market through partnerships with experts at Virginia Cooperative Extension (VCE), Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), and the Natural Resources & Conservation Service (NRCS), who will help develop, distribute, and conduct the curriculum and its associated resources. 

This project has met the following objectives: 

1. Provide grain farmers and people considering farming grain in the Mid-Atlantic with the flexible educational resources they need to start farming food grain for the local market. 

1. Establish the Common Grain Alliance as the key advocate for food grain producers in the Mid-Atlantic. 

Our methods for the first objective were conceived as a set of eight 60-90 minute classes that would travel to where farmers gather throughout the region and that could be customized to the intended audience. Pandemic shut-downs coincided with the beginning of our project period, canceling conferences and preventing in-person events. Consequently, we switched from an in-person format to webinar- and video-based education in the first year. As in-person events were slowly reinstated, we added some conference presentations and field days as well as a Growing Grain blog to our website.  In the final year of the project, we developed a handbook that is available on our website, and a rack card to promote the project resources at regional extension offices. In addition, we used funds from this project to develop indigenous crop info sheets (see Information Products) for the CGA Grain Stand pilot in Washington D.C., which was funded by the Farmer’s Market and Local Food Promotion Program in partnership with FRESHFARM.  

As a result of these efforts to achieve the first objective, the number of grain farmers, acres in food grain, enterprise diversity, and the quality of food grain available in the Mid-Atlantic have all increased since project inception. This work has also raised the visibility of grain in the public eye, exemplified by the first grain-focused issue of Edible Blue Ridge, a food magazine, published in September 2023 (https://www.commongrainalliance.org/news). This issue of Edible Blue Ridge was accompanied by a series of video interviews showcasing the regional food grain value chain on social media and YouTube (https://www.herdventures.org/edible-blue-ridge-case-study). 

Moreover, this project has helped create a farmer network that will continue to facilitate peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing. The rack card and social media posts will continue to promote the resources available on our website at extension offices and online. The resources produced by this project are being shared with the Agricultural Leadership Development Initiative (in partnership with Future Harvest) (https://futureharvest.org/programs/agricultural-leadership-initiative/), which targets BIPOC and veteran farmers. And as this report is being prepared, CGA is working with the Rodale Institute’s Consultancy (https://rodaleinstitute.org/consulting/) to make the SARE materials available to them for use in their education work, which has nationwide reach. So while the project took on a different shape than originally conceived, we have achieved our objective of producing farmer educational materials that can be adapted to a range of audiences.

To achieve the second objective, we have established a website (with funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation) that hosts our education resources and we have promoted the resources through our social media channels and newsletters. In addition to the full grain issue of Edible Blue Ridge, Common Grain Alliance and its members were featured in eleven press mentions, including Bon Appetit and NPR.  CGA has established new partnerships with FRESHFARM, Virginia Association for Biological Farmers, Future Harvest CASA, CRAFT Chatham, the Philadelphia Grain and Malt Symposium, Friends of Peirce Mill, and Carolina Ground. These partnerships with like-minded organizations throughout the Mid-Atlantic will continue to help CGA fulfill its mission. 

Finally, in October 2023, with the help of additional funding from the Farmer’s Market and Local Food Promotion Program, CRAFT Chatham, and the Philadelphia Grain and Malt Symposium, we teamed up with UDC-CAUSES and Friends of Peirce Mill to host the very first Mid-Atlantic Grain Fair and Conference.  The conference drew 142 attendees from North Carolina to Pennsylvania, the majority of whom (81) were not members of the organization. The previous day’s fair drew an estimated 2000 attendees, and was a huge success in exposing the general public to Mid-Atlantic grain producers. Specifically, funds from this project paid for all conference presentations to be recorded and edited for wider distribution on our website in early 2024. This includes sessions focused on “Growing Grains for Soil Health”, “Marketing Your Grains”, “Small Scale Growing and Processing”, and more (see the full conference program here: https://www.commongrainalliance.org/mid-atlantic-grain-conference-program). Overall, the event firmly established the Common Grain Alliance as the key advocate for food grain producers in the Mid-Atlantic.

1. Provide grain farmers and people considering farming grain in the Mid-Atlantic with the flexible educational resources they need to start farming food grain for the local market. This educational program will increase the number of food grain farmers, the number of acres in food grain, the enterprise diversity of existing farms, and the quality of food grain in this region. It will also create a network of grain farmers that will facilitate peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing on key issues like soil regeneration, variety selection, sustainable management of disease and pests, and marketing.

2. Continue to establish Common Grain Alliance as the key advocate for food grain producers in the Mid-Atlantic. This objective will help establish CGA as a key partner to other organizations involved in rural economic advancement, soil regeneration, and regional value-chain development. It will also help CGA connect with professionals and academics in the cooperative extension and research university network. These connections will be critical to ensuring that this project builds on existing research and policy and complements existing programming. The institutional relationships will also lay the groundwork for future collaborative research and educational programming, both of which are core elements of CGA’s mission and strategic plan (CGA 2019a).