Naked Oats & the Grain CSA
Conscious food consumers continue to seek and support all kinds of new ways to support local farms and to buy the best foods.
WINNIPEGGERS ACT NOW!
December 16th is the final day to order your winter grain bundle (link to the website here), and then we get to celebrate local food together at the January pick-up day. If you love food and the farmers who care about raising it, this is an opportunity you won’t want to miss!
Today’s report is an opportunity for readers to understand a new way to vote with our dollars for better groceries. Adagio Acres is one of the most impressive, earnest and dedicated small food brands, and a rare success story in regional distribution.
Building on the popularity of Naked* Oatmeal, Adagio Acres’ owner Amy set up a ‘Grain CSA’ offering ‘Winter Bundles’ made up of all sorts of great dry bulk foods. She has sourced from other farms a wide variety of hard-to-find and hard-to-market ‘less-than-truckload quantities’ of dry goods, cleaned them up in her oat mill, and is offering bulk shares (without unnecessary packaging) directly to local household customers.
What Are Less-Than-Truckload Quantities?
Grain bins are used to store harvested crops in yards near the fields. Grain crops, especially in climates like cold Manitoba, store almost indefinitely if the moisture content is low enough and the bins are sealed to keep out birds, bugs, deer, etc.
Grain trucks are used to haul crops from bins to buyers, in order to collect revenues from the harvest, and this happens throughout the year. At the end of emptying a bin, farmers are often left with less than a full truckload of the harvested crop.
Due to the distance and cost of hauling grain to buyers, it’s sometimes not worth it take a smaller load to market. What’s left may get used for livestock feed at a discount to the crops’ food market value, or discarded.
Adagio Acres’ Grain CSA was designed to capture this valuable food and to create an alternative marketing outlet for local organic grain farms. At the same time, customers get to load up on foods that are better than their packaged grocery retail alternatives in a number of ways.
Why Go Out of Your Way?
It’s obviously not for everyone, but many consumers these days worry about the quality, toxicity, environmental impact, etc. of the foods available in grocery stores. The option to buy consciously better food, directly from farms, hardly exists in most regions apart from vegetables (sometimes) and grass-fed bulk beef.
The ideal customer of the Grain CSA is a curious home cook, with a taste for grains and legumes, who is also price conscious. If you’re going to eat dry bulk foods, this is the most cost-effective option by far.
Try to compare the price-per between this $3/lb of pure food, with the retail cost of related products - by nutrient, by calorie, unit protein… whatever metric matters to you. For the most part, you won’t even be able to find competitive alternatives because consumer packaged goods (CPG) food brands rely heavily on crops like corn, soybeans and canola to adulterate healthy food ingredients into ultra-high processed retail items.
*‘Naked’ Oats?
Back in pioneering days, homesteaders typically had two separate plots of oats on their farms: one for the family, and one for the horses. Horse oats have a hull stuck to the inner groat, that livestock can digest and humans can’t.
Horse oats are higher yielding so over the years, the commercial food industry adapted formulations and processing practices to be able to use horse oats in modern products, by steaming off the hull. Naked oats have an indigestible hull too, but it can be removed through mechanical cleaning, i.e. shaking and dropping the kernels through a series of sieves, with a far smaller energy footprint.
Because they’re a heritage variety, naked oats are considerably more flavorful and nutrient dense, as well as being better for the environment than commercial oats. Every order of the Grain CSA comes with a healthy portion of Adagio Acres’ naked oats, either rolled, steel-cut, or both - otherwise known as ‘quick’ oats.