I’ve been experimenting with growing a variety of grains and pulses on a hand scale for the past ten years.  I’m someone who likes to know how things work, and for me that usually means starting at a very basic level - planting the seeds and watching them grow.  Part of the impetus for learning about grains and pulses went right along side learning how to grow vegetables.  Why should vegetables be the only food in the garden, it’s not typically where the majority of calories or protein come from (not to take too “nutritionist” a bent - for those of you, like me, who are reading Michael Pollan’s latest book).  Mostly, I really like bread, so I thought it would be fun to grow wheat.

    But why stop at wheat when there are so many other exciting grains out there?  So I’ve experimented with all kinds of grains from panic grass and teff, to wheat and oats, as well as a wide range of pulses, like chick peas, lentils and brown beans.  Starting at the hand scale, past which I have barely progressed, has given me a lot of insight into the reasons for mechanizing, the ease of mechanizing, and also how the machines are designed.

    Grain and pulse production is basically just seed production.  For the most part the difference is the scale that they are done on.  There’s no reason to produce billions of tons of lettuce seed every year, no one is going to eat the seed, but wheat is a different story.  A lot of what is applicable to vegetable seed production, also applies to grains, and a lot of pulses are also eaten as vegetables, so the seed production of those overlaps to some extent.

    Because vegetables are harder to mechanize and harder to handle than grains the economies of scale that everyone talks about have allowed vegetable growers to remain successful at very small scales.  The economics of grains require larger spaces than vegetables.  A simple 100 square foot planting of lettuce might yield well over 100 lbs of lettuce (mostly water weight) and sell for $2 a pound.  The same plot of wheat might yield more like 4 or 5 pounds of grain, which would have to sell for $40 a pound to make the same income per space as the lettuce.  When was the last time you considered paying $200 for a 5 pound bag of flour?

    The comparison is a little more complicated though because labor is also a factor.  That 100 square foot plot of lettuce would have labor costs measured in hours, the labor for wheat on 100 square feet of a large farm would be measured in seconds.  So, if space isn’t an issue, then the grains are factors of 100 times cheaper to produce.  

    In order to get to that speed of harvest and handling for the wheat you need to involve very expensive machinery, whereas the lettuce can be harvested and packed with relatively little capital expense.  I’m guessing here but a combine for harvesting wheat probably runs in the $100s of thousands of dollars.  Lettuce knives might cost $5.  I’m leaving out the cleaning and transport equipment costs for the two, but they are also widely divergent.

    Back and forth, back and forth.  What it adds up to is that grains are produced where there is abundant, cheap space, typically rural areas (climate does play a role as well).  In addition, those areas are farmed by fewer and fewer people, which makes them more rural, because the farming is so highly mechanized.  As the machines get bigger the cost of production goes down, thus, economies of scale.  The impact on the landscape of that economy of scale is to spread the farmers out because the larger machines require larger spaces, thousands of acres, to work at a scale that justifies their up front expense.  

    This should probably have been obvious to me at the outset, but I didn’t really think it all through until I started growing grains myself, and then trying to figure out how I could make money doing it.  I’m excited because I see a growing movement (no pun intended) of small farmers looking at grains, and especially pulses in the way that they’ve looked at vegetables over the past couple of decades.  The same thinking and innovations that have revived many heirloom vegetables, and generally have improved the supply of fresh, flavorful, healthy vegetables, is being applied to grains and pulses now.