Shepherd's Grain

 I recently saw a newspaper article that had this headline: Northwest farmers have banded together to market their own flour It ended up being a piece about a company called Sheperd’s Grain and Shepherd's Grain comes from an alliance of family farms dedicated to practicing what they call sustainable agriculture. Now, I keep hearing the term sustainable farming…Here’s what it means.

 The concept of sustainable agriculture has three main ideas:

Environmental Health: Taking care of the land, soil and animal life that exists on the land … Reducing erosion by direct seeding and eliminating the use of some pesticides.

 Socially Just: Being very transparent in an effort to inform and educate customers.

 Economic Profitability: Farming like any other occupation has a certain amount of risk involved. All of the work to preserve the environment and increase the quality of the end product would be wasted if farmers could not make a living while doing their job. The pricing structure used on Shepherd's Grain products is derived from local university data on the costs of producing our crops.

 Food Alliance is a nonprofit organization that certifies farms, ranches and food handlers for sustainable agriculture and here’s Scott Exo, Executive Director: “In the case of Sheperd’s Grain and we’ve seen other examples of this, farmers who have historically raised and sold their crops in the commodities markets are searching for alternatives to gain greater control over the markets to whom they sell and the price that they command for their products.”

 Products made from Shepherd's Grain can be found in local universities, select restaurants, and bakeries. They have recently expanded to the retail shelves through a partnership with Stone Buhr Flour.