Edible Blue Ridge Fall 2022

SHARING THE BOUNTY Please make a point of supporting these locally owned businesses in our community

Little Hat Creek Farm WORDS LISA ARCHER PHOTOS COURTESY OF HEATHER COINER

Shopping at the farmers market is second nature to many of us. We anx iously await each weekend as peas, corn or squash make their seasonal debut. We bring our emptied egg cartons and exchange them for eggs colorful enough to make even the dye specialists at Paas jealous. We select cuts of beef, whole chickens and sausage. We know that what we purchase is locally grown, locally processed and prepared with skill. And while we may chat with a farmer about where her cows are pastured this week, or where the seafood purveyor gets his fish, how often do we ask where the grain the bakers are using comes from? For Heather Coiner, this wasn’t a question so much as an assump tion. “I didn’t really think about it…I loved having a short food chain between the land and my table — it just seemed natural to seek out local grain,” recalls Coiner. Coiner started baking with sourdough while she was a PhD student in Toronto. An interest quickly became a passion and Coiner started a bread subscription business, delivering loaves via bicycle and procuring local flours from a mill north of Toronto. But a move to Virginia to start Little Hat Creek, an ecological veg etable farm and bakery, with her now-husband, Ben Stowe, posed a problem. Coiner struggled to find locally grown and processed grain. The Shenandoah Valley used to be known as the leading wheat producing region of the South. The numerous creeks and steep terrain of the land led to the development of many water-powered mills (a few of which are still in operation today). Wheat in the area was so abundant, the Valley was dubbed “the breadbasket of the Confederacy” during the

Civil War. At the turn of the 20th century, however, farmers started to diversify and shifted their land to orchard and dairy production. By the 1940s, wheat production had declined dramatically, causing the closure of many of the area’s mills. As Coiner familiarized herself with her new home, she started to no tice that there were plenty of farmers still growing grain, but much of it was devoted to seed, feed or export. She connected with Michael Grantz of Great Day Gardens (Lynchburg), and as they were baking together one winter — using North Carolina grown and ground grain — they lamented the lack of local flours available, despite the infrastructures in place. An idea formed. “We decided to start Common Grain Alliance,” says Coiner. Their intuition was correct; there were farmers in the area grow ing grain, but they were struggling to connect to processors (millers) that could produce products that met commercial baking standards. In four short years, the Common Grain Alliance (CGA) has helped solve this problem, creating a networking powerhouse and resource for growers, millers, bakers and eaters throughout the Mid-Atlantic. (to find more about CGA and producers or processors near you visit www.commongrainalliance.org/) Although Coiner stepped down from the CGA board last year, she is still involved both on the back end, and loaves (or crackers) to the ground — so to speak. Committed to championing local grains, Coiner en sures all of her products contain 50% or more locally grown and milled flours. For her new packaged goods line, crackers, chocolate chip cookies

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