Farmer Ground Flour is a farmer-owned stone mill in Trumansburg, New York, in the Finger Lakes. It began with two farmers, Thor Oechsner and Erick Smith, who were growing grain for organic dairy feed and wanted to grow wheat for bakeries and kitchens instead. In 2007 they bought a small Meadows stone mill from an ad in a farming newspaper. It sat in Thor's barn for almost two years until Greg Russo, a Cornell student who had met Thor through a class project, fired it up on the back of a flatbed truck. In 2009 Greg milled the first 50 tons of flour. The next year Neal Johnston, a union electrician, bought into the business and wired the mill, and Farmer Ground Flour has been milling ever since.
The mill was designed to keep the whole kernel together: bran, germ, and endosperm, ground on stone. The grain comes from a core group of organic and Regenerative Organic Certified farms, most of them in New York, and the mill is USDA Organic and Regenerative Organic Certified. Farmers, millers, and bakers there talk to each other about what is happening in the field and in the dough. That is the kind of grain economy we want our flour to come from.
