Sparked by pandemic-era baking trends, interest in small-batch, locally-milled flour is growing among commercial and home bakers. Operations like Camas Country Mill in Oregon and Cairnspring Mills in Washington supply restaurants, bakeries and amateur bakers with high-quality flour sourced from local farmers who use regenerative growing practices.
A new partnership between Cairnspring and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation will bring a flour mill to the reservation in Eastern Oregon. The new facility is expected to expand Cairnspring’s production capacity twelvefold and create 20-25 new jobs.
Kevin Morse is the co-founder and CEO of Cairnspring Mills. Bill Tovey is the director of the CTUIR Department of Economic & Community Development. They both join us to talk about the partnership.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Sparked by pandemic-era baking trends, interest in small-batch locally-milled flour is growing. Operations like Cairnspring Mills in Washington and Camus Country Mill in Oregon supply restaurants, bakeries and amateur bakers with high-quality flour sourced from local farmers. Now a new partnership between Cairnspring and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation will bring a flour mill to the reservation in Eastern Oregon. The new facility will expand Cairnsprings’ production capacity twelvefold and create about two dozen new jobs. Kevin Morse is the co-founder and CEO of Cairnspring Mills. Bill Tovey is the director of the Tribes’ Department of Economic and Community Development. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Bill Tovey: Thank you, Dave. It’s great to be here.
Kevin Morse: Thanks, Dave.
Miller: Kevin, first, what’s your definition of craft flour?
Morse: My definition of craft flour, I think the best analog I can give you is either craft beer or specialty coffee. I think, in order for the listeners to understand better, it’s important for them to understand how industrial flour is made and how we’re different. Craft flour and industrial flour are different in several ways. The industrial flour that our generations have been used to over the past century is based on the cheapest grain possible – high output, low cost. So they source grains that aren’t traceable, that aren’t necessarily selected for flavor or milling quality or baking quality, they’re based on certain specs for protein and yield. And then there’s no transparency throughout the supply chain process to the customer. They buy a lot of really cheap grain, mix in a little bit, and then put additives in there to make it work for the baker.
Then the milling process that they use to make white flour strips the natural flavor and nutrition out of the end product, and that’s why we have enriched flour today. Craft flour, on the other hand, we source non-commodity grains that we select for things like flavor, mill yield and disease resistance for the farmer. We source direct from the farmer who’s using regenerative practices that are better for people and the planet, and then we use a stone mill to mill the flour fresh. The stone milling process actually incorporates the natural nutrition and flavor into the end product, and we do not put any additives or enrichments in our flour. It’s just all natural.
Miller: You said that this has been the model for the last century. What was milling like before that?
Morse: Milling right before that was regional. We had over 20,000 mills in the United States 100 years ago.
Miller: 20,000. How many are there now, do you think?
Morse: There’s approximately 186.
Miller: It really does remind me, you said at the beginning that a way to think about it is like coffee or beer. We’ve heard over the years that there used to be what we would call craft or microbreweries. That used to be the norm before gigantic consolidation, Anheuser-Busch and InBev, whatever. And so it really does seem like it’s similar, that once upon a time everything was craft and local and then multinational corporations got involved and changed things and operated at scale. Well, what is the scale like? I mean, how much flour does an industrial commodity mill churn out in a day compared to what you might do?
Morse: That is a great question, and I think this helps everybody understand the scale at which we’re working at. Our Skagit mill made 7.5 million pounds of flour last year. That’s as much as one big industrial mill can make in a day. Even when we expand ten to twelvefold, that’s still what one big industrial mill can make in a couple of weeks, so we’re still working at a human scale compared to the industrial mills.
Miller: How did you decide to get in this business, to start a small-scale flour mill?
Morse: Well, that’s a long story, I don’t think we have time for. I’ll try to make it short. When I was 50 years old, I stepped back and took a look at my life. I had worked in conservation, economic development, and farming for 40-plus years. And all the things I cared about, clean food, conservation, clean water, viable farming, nutritious and healthy communities, what I discovered through my career was that so much of the things I was trying to fix or address was driven by the industrial food system.
When the opportunity came up here in the Skagit Valley, this wasn’t my idea. This was really an old-fashioned barn raising started by Dr. Jones and his team at the WSU Breadlab. Actually, Tom and Sue Hunton were inspiration for it too, and they’re co-founders of Cairnspring. The Port of Skagit, the farmers, they had all gotten together looking at how we can maintain viable agriculture here for another century, and they chose cereal grains because it had been a rotation crop the farmers were using to keep their soils healthy by adding organic matter and breaking disease cycles, but they had mostly lost money on it for the past 100 years.
That was the opportunity here to add value, and that’s a key theme of what we do. And when I saw the opportunity to do something here, but that could also be replicated and have impact across the country and possibly across the world, I was all in.
Miller: What were your requirements in the last couple of years, when you were looking to expand and figuring out where you wanted to expand and how?
Morse: Yeah, great question. So we had hard criteria. One, we just had to find a location that had the utilities, the capacity, the access to supply chain, the access to a market that was affordable, that would work for the business. The other, softer, criteria that were just as important were finding a value-aligned partner, finding a location where we could have a positive impact in another distressed farming community. And also, so that we could continue to build the supply chain and have the positive economic impact on farmers that really mattered. That’s a short list of their criteria.
Miller: Bill, let’s go to you. As I mentioned, you’re the director of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservations Department of Economic and Community Development. Can you tell us about the site that Kevin and his team ultimately said yes to?
Tovey: It’s Coyote Business Park, and it’s 120 acres, 38 lots. We call ourselves the hub of the Northwest, about 210 miles to Portland, Spokane, Boise, and 280 miles to Seattle. It’s a perfect fit, it’s just right off the interstate on both the north and south side. And again, farming here, wheat is king, so it really worked out with Cairnsprings when they came here.
Miller: What did you have in mind for that site?
Tovey: On the south side, mostly industrial like Cairnspring Mills. On the north side, more commercial. We have our Arrowhead Truck Stop as well as our casino on the north side, and we’ve got like a Subway and McDonald’s and the road traffic on the north side and then the south is again, industrial.
Miller: Have you done a partnership like the one that you’re putting together with Cairnspring Mills before?
Tovey: One is Cayuse Technologies, which was with Accenture, and we built that in 2009, they do technology type work as well as call centers, those types of things. They wanted to onshore from India and those foreign countries to the United States and they chose Coyote Business Park for that back in 2009.
Miller: Kevin, why did you choose this spot on the Umatilla Indian Reservation?
Morse: It met all of the hard criteria. It was shovel ready, but that’s not really the whole story. This was actually the last site I looked at. Business Oregon took me on tours of more than a dozen sites just in Umatilla County, and none of them quite fit. Ryan DeGroft, who is the representative from Business Oregon, kept telling me about this business park. And I was looking for a fee-simple land, land we could buy. The Coyote Business Park is owned and leased by the Umatilla Tribe. And so I was like, well, I’m really not looking for leased land. And then finally I acquiesced and he took me out to the site. And as soon as I stepped on the ground and I looked up at the Blue Mountains and I looked at the fact that all of the infrastructure was there, I just knew that was the right location. And then, when I met Bill and his team and the board of trustees and discovered our value alignment, it was a home run.
Miller: What do you mean by “the value alignment?”
Morse: Cairnspring is a for-profit business, but we’re also a social-purpose corporation. We believe that by rebuilding these local food systems you can actually make communities more healthy, prosperous, and resilient. So we’re looking at a return for investments in a profitable business, and we’re looking for impact. After meeting with Bill and his team, I found we were aligned on building resilience, food sovereignty, taking good care of the earth, feeding our community nutritious grains, and I couldn’t think of a better partner to align with in building our next mill.
Miller: Bill, what is this going to mean in terms of jobs?
Tovey: Hopefully, we get some pretty good jobs out of this, 20 to 25 is what we’re estimating. Our farm enterprise started in 1968, and by ’97, we’re just leasing land and in 1997 we hired a manager. We oversee about 15,000 acres right now, and, as Kevin’s talking about the food sovereignty, from the pandemic, that really put it into the minds of our leaders, we need to grow stuff here on the reservation or locally, and not rely on grocery stores. So this partnership worked out just perfect. Pendleton had their flour mill burn down about two years ago, and that brings a core of employees that have worked in flour mills in the past.
Miller: Kevin, do you already have relationships and sourcing agreements with Eastern Oregon wheat farmers or Eastern Washington wheat farmers that will feed this mill, or are you on the hunt now for growers?
Morse: Both, actually. We source regionally here at our current mill to manage risk and quality, and we’ve been working with growers in Eastern Washington and Oregon for 10 years. Over the past three years, as we’ve gone through the planning and development phase, we’ve met even more growers in that area, and there’s an amazing group of growers in Oregon and Southeast Washington that are already doing regenerative practices and that was one of the reasons why it was an ideal location for us.
And now, you know, especially with the commodity market prices in the gutter, more and more farmers are seeking us out because of our model of paying them a fair, higher-than-commodity profitable price for their regenerative grains.
Miller: Why are commodity prices in the gutter?
Morse: That’s another long conversation. I guess the short answer is, this is a situation the farmers have been in for decades since the 70’s when the Ag policy was, get bigger or get out, and the commodity prices are unpredictable. They can be affected by droughts in Australia, booming crops in India, Russian and Ukrainian supply, so it’s really unpredictable and it’s a race to the bottom for the grower. It’s rarely profitable. The only reason they can stay in it is usually through government subsidies, and that’s the system we’re trying to change. We’re trying to keep the farmer on the ground, pay them a profitable price, reward them for their good stewardship, and pull them out of the commodity market.
Miller: Have tariffs and trade disruptions affected your business or are you much more domestically focused?
Morse: We’re domestically focused, and yes, they have impacted us. Not directly, but they’ve impacted our growers. As we build the mill, we are seeing some cost of material increases, as well because of tariffs, and I guess some of them are still possible, depending on the Supreme Court ruling coming up. What most people don’t know is a lot of the milling equipment is made in Europe and South America. So we’re working to make sure that we’re exempted or they have minimal impacts.
Miller: Bill, do you have other big announcements coming up in terms of economic development on the Umatilla Reservation?
Tovey: Boy, I’m not supposed to say… on those of any, we haven’t any signed leases. We’ve got a couple that we’re working with right now, but until we have board approved and signed leases, we don’t discuss those. We did open a food truck park which was pretty nice, and we’re doing a lot of housing right now.
Miller: And Kevin, before we say goodbye, we’re heading into the holiday season right now. Are you a baker yourself?
Morse: I am, yeah, I am a baker.
Miller: Are you planning on baking anything in particular in the coming weeks?
Morse: Yeah, we are. We’re going to be having the whole family together for Christmas. My youngest son is now a baker working for a restaurant here, and so we’ll be making everything from some of our Italian heritage cultural specialties like sausage bread, but my favorite is just a country loaf. It just doesn’t get better than a sourdough country loaf.
Miller: Bill, what about you? Are you a baker already? Are you going to become a baker with this new mill in your backyard?
Tovey: I’m not a baker. My wife does baking, and so, she’ll surprise me, I think.
Miller: Bill Tovey and Kevin Morse, thanks very much.
Morse: Thank you, Dave.
Tovey: Thanks.
Miller: Bill Tovey is the director of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservations Department of Economic and Community Development. Kevin Morse is a co-founder and CEO of Cairnspring Mills. The mill and the Tribes recently announced a partnership. They’re gonna be building a large new – for the scale of craft flour, that is, – a large new mill on the CTUIR’s reservation.
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