The Story of This Year's Crop

By the time a bag of flour reaches your kitchen, the story behind it has already been unfolding for nearly ten months.

This year's story has included drought, late freezes, unexpected rain, and some of the toughest decisions a wheat farmer has to make.​

Winter wheat is remarkably resilient, but every crop hopes to wake up to adequate moisture. This one didn’t.

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As temperatures warmed, the wheat responded quickly.

The crop advanced faster than usual, looking healthy and getting a jump on the season. Early on, we were optimistic. Fields greened up beautifully, and it looked like the crop might outrun the dry conditions.

But farming has a way of reminding you that every season writes its own script.

After the wheat had already begun developing heads, late freezes swept across parts of Colorado.

At this stage, freezing temperatures can damage the developing grain months before harvest begins. The effects aren’t always obvious the next morning. Sometimes you don’t know what the freeze took until weeks later.

It’s one of those moments that reminds you farming is less about controlling nature than learning to work with it.

Rain is usually welcome. This year, however, it created a different challenge.

Instead of one uniform crop, some fields began producing what farmers call “sucker heads”—new wheat heads that emerged after the rains, weeks behind the rest of the crop. Now we’re looking at wheat maturing in two different stages within the same field.

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And to top it all off, we received a hail storm that took out a couple hundred more acres of wheat.

Even Rick, our lead farmer who has been harvesting wheat for more than 40 years, says this is one of the more unusual organic wheat crops he’s seen.​

That leaves us with a difficult decision.

Harvest too early, and those later heads never have a chance to fully mature.

Wait too long, and the wheat that’s already ready can begin losing quality.

There isn’t a perfect answer. Every field is different, and every day brings new information. That’s the balancing act of harvest.

Most people never see these decisions. They simply open a bag of flour and start baking. But every loaf begins with hundreds of choices made months earlier—many of them in fields that look very different from the day the seed was planted.

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This year has tested our patience, our flexibility, and our willingness to adapt. Because of this season's unusual weather, we've lost a little more than half of our Colorado crop. The harvest may not look exactly as we envisioned last fall, but it's far from over.

One advantage of farming in more than one region is that no two growing seasons are exactly alike. While Colorado has presented its share of challenges this year, our Washington wheat is helping provide the geographic diversity that strengthens our harvest and keeps flour moving to your kitchen.

Over the next several weeks, we'll continue making careful decisions—one field at a time—and we'll keep sharing the journey with you.

Because that's the reality of farming.

Nature doesn't follow a schedule.

Every harvest asks different questions.

Our job is simply to listen, adapt, and do everything we can to bring you the very best wheat possible.

Thanks for following along.

We'll see you in the fields.

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