Great River Organic Milling Goes Against the Grain

By Ron Johnson Dairy Editor
Thursday, November 6, 2008 2:29 PM CST

Great River Organic Milling doesn’t mind going against the grain.

Most of the milling industry uses steel grinding mills. But at Great River, old-fashioned stone wheels are still employed.

“There aren’t a lot of mills like this…It’s a lot different than conventional milling,” says company owner Rick Halverson.

The mill nestles in a narrow Buffalo County valley, a six-mile crow’s fly from the Mississippi, the great river that lent its name to the business. On a typical working day the mill is abuzz with the sounds of electric motors turning the granite discs of the four stone mills, along with powering several hammer mills. A bit of grain dust floats in the air, giving the place a good-earth aroma.

Why grind with stones that are decades old and were shipped in from North Carolina?

“It’s a slower process,” Rick explains. “There’s less heat involved. We feel like that retains the nutritional value of the flour. The texture is different.”

Conventional millers, Rick says, “temper” grain before grinding it. They do that by soaking the grain in water so they can “pull” the bran layer apart and take out the germ and endosperm.

That kind of milling yields a flour that’s “nice and white,” Rick describes. But that kind of flour is also nutritionally inferior to whole-grain flour, and it contains less fiber, too.

Conventional milling can produce whole-wheat flour, Rick points out. But to do that, things that were taken out are blended back in.

“We don’t do that. We can’t do that,” Rick emphasizes. “All we can do is grind it the way it comes in and put it in a bag. It’s 100 percent whole grain.”

And that’s exactly what his customers want: 100 percent whole grain.

They also want organically grown grain. That’s why Great River Organic Milling grinds only organically grown grain and nothing else.

There are three aspects to this miller’s business. One is custom milling.

On the day Agri-View visited, mill employees had just finished grinding a batch of teff. It’s a grain native to East Africa. The flour was ready to be trucked back to Minnesota’s Twin Cities, where it would be sold to Ethiopian immigrants who make a bread called “injera.”

The Twin Cities market is also the recipient of another kind of flour the mill was producing that morning. This one is from a type of pea that’s also grown in east Africa.

Most of the time the custom milling involves grain that’s much less exotic. It might be a few hundred pounds of food-grade corn that a Wisconsin farmer wants ground.

Rick says he would like to be able to handle more of those kinds of smaller orders, but there is at least one roadblock.

The grain, he says, must be cleaned so that it contains no more than 0.5 percent foreign material, such as weed seeds. Many farmers don’t have access to cleaning equipment that can meet that strict standard, and Great River does not have grain-cleaning equipment.

“God bless the farmers who are growing organic grain,” Rick says. “But it’s not feasible for me to deal with every farmer that has 200 bushels of corn or 500 bushels of this or that, because we need to bring our grain in cleaned and ready to mill.”

The mill’s second part is its retail business. Great River Organic Milling sells flour blends, pancake mixes, and hot cereals that are distributed throughout the United States.

The retail side is “growing,” Rick says. “We’re in hundreds of stores now.”

A third component of the business is sales of bulk flour to baking companies and artisan bakers. A typical order might consist of a pallet of 50-pound bags of flour, for one ton total.

Even with the Mississippi River just a half-dozen miles away, Great River Organic Milling doesn’t do much business in the West. Rick says he gets some sales in Minnesota and the Dakotas, but most are farther east.

The grain itself comes from farms in several states and Canada. Again, it’s the Dakotas and Minnesota, plus Iowa, as well as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio. Rick’s farthest grain purchase is Arkansas, and that’s for brown rice.

“We basically mill all the hard cereal grains,” Rick says.

Softer seeds, like soybeans and oats, contain more fat. That higher fat content tends to plug the stone mills.

So instead, the mill concentrates on wheat, rice, barley, corn, millet, buckwheat, rye, the African teff, and spelt, a relative of wheat. Rick adds that the company does grind some flax seed, too. Flax is rather high in fat, but hammer mills grind that grain, not the decades-old granite stones.

These stone mills don’t look much like the mills of a century ago. Instead of one stone rolling across the face of another stone, these mills have two stones mounted vertically and facing each other.

They’re enclosed in metal housings, too, so the stones are not readily visible. One stone n the “face” stone n remains still. The other stone n the “mill” stone n turns, powered by an electric motor.

Grain flows into each mill and between the stones by way of a hopper above them. Starting at its center, each stone is grooved. The grooves are deepest in the middle, becoming shallower toward the edge of the stone, until there is finally no groove at all, just a gap between the two stones.

Grain moves along these grooves, becoming more finely ground as it does. It’s the final gap between the stones that determines a flour’s fineness.

Great River’s two main mills use 34-inch and 24-inch-diameter stones. The larger mill can grind 700 pounds of grain per hour, while its smaller cousin can turn out 200 pounds per hour.

Mill employees match the size of the batch to the mill. That makes the most efficient use of electricity, Rick says.

Rick, who has a background in the food ingredients business, bought Great River Organic Milling four-and-a-half years ago. From operating four days a week with one shift, the mill’s business has grown to the point that it runs five days a week with two shifts.

“My goal,” he says, “is to run 24 hours a day. To be efficient with a milling operation, you need to run.”

Sales are up, too. From a bit under $300,000 when he purchased the business, they are now up to $800,000 annually, Rick reports.

What’s more, he has been able to employ more people. From three employees, the workforce has grown to 10, counting Rick.

He says he likes seeing a business grow, contribute to the local economy, and build a “reputation for making a quality product.”

“Business is good, even with the economy,” Rick admits. “Our business is up 45 percent this year.”

That’s not to say there have not been the proverbial bumps in the road. For one thing, the Atkins diet craze of a few years ago, with its finger of blame pointed squarely at carbohydrates, “nearly destroyed the conventional flour industry,” Rick says.

Great River Organic Milling survived, Rick says, because so many of its customers “understand that good-quality, whole-grain foods are good for you.”

A recent potential problem is the price of grain. Rick points out that his cost for wheat has tripled in the last couple of years.

Still, people continue to buy his stone-milled, organically grown flours. He attributes that loyalty to many of them being devoted to organic foods for decades, “before organic was cool.”

Rick knows his milling business is on the small side. He also knows that the mill building is not exactly like the images portrayed in history books.

“It looks like a pole shed out in the country. I know it,” Rick says, smiling.

As for the mill’s size, he contrasts it to Bay State Milling, up the river a ways in Winona, Minn. “They,” he says, “sweep more off the floor in a day than we produce.”

But Rick and his employees don’t care. After all, they’re used to going against the grain.

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