Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on August 15, 2022
A historic flour mill in Oregon owned by the nation’s biggest independent flour milling company has been completely destroyed by a fire.
Authorities are describing the Grain Craft mill in Pendleton as a total loss after a small fire that began on Tuesday afternoon reignited early Wednesday morning while the building was empty, fully engulfing the mill due to the significant amount of dry grain it was housing as well as its wood structure.
Pendleton Assistant Fire Chief Tony Pierotti told the media that the fuel load was “extreme” because the silos were filled with finished grain.
Authorities have been keeping the area clear in anticipation of the potential collapse of the building, which is more than 100 years old, as well as the amount of slow-burning grain. The mill is surrounded by the county courthouse as well as businesses and homes.
The fire was reportedly caused by mechanical failure that may be related to a sifter’s filter. Police Chief Charles Byram said: “It happened in the mill itself, with one of the pieces of equipment, with a rubber bushing or housing that obviously got too hot and started the fire.”
There were no injuries, but some buildings in the immediate area sustained smoke and water damage. The mill had been processing a significant amount of flour as the fire occurred right in the middle of harvest season.
Although an exact figure was not available, employees of the mill have estimated that there were “hundreds of thousands of pounds of processed flour in the bins.” An estimated cost of the damages is not yet available.
The company is now working with Pacific Northwest wheat farmers to handle the excess supply. Although they have never disclosed the building’s production capacity and it is difficult to determine the full extent of the damage, the president of the Oregon Wheat Growers League, Ben Maney, said that a substantial number of area farmers bring their grain to the facility, which he described as a staple in the Pendleton community.
Fire yet another hit for struggling wheat farmers
Maney said the fire is just the latest hit for growers who are still struggling after the severe drought of last year. Some crops rebounded thanks to the spring rains this year, but many farmers lack home storage for their grain and relied on the mill.
He noted: “A lot of farmers don’t have home storage, and they can’t store that grain on their farm. For this heartbreaking event to happen today, it puts the community and a lot of the farmers in a tough situation. It hits the community hard.”
The farmer-owned flour company Shepherd’s Grain emailed customers to inform them of an interruption in flour supply as they work on a contingency plan and get wheat staged to be moved to another mill.
Byram pointed out that the fire will have a big impact on Pendleton, stating: “They’re a major employer; we are obviously an agricultural community that does a lot of dryland wheat farming. Wheat farmers from the surrounding area bring their wheat in here to the Pendleton flour mill. It’s yet to be determined what the impact is, but I can gauge it’s going to be significant.”
The mill makes flour for several types of foods, including tortillas and pizza. Oregon is America’s 11th biggest producer of wheat, and the crop is the third biggest cash crop for the state. Up to 90 percent of the wheat that is produced in Oregon is shipped to markets overseas, especially in Asia.
💭 Ancient Grain – Gluten-free “Super Food„– TEFF Takes Root on US Plains
💭 Exotic, Gluten-Free Grain Grows in Popularity — Enough to Cause a Dust-Up in Eastern Oregon
A little-known grain from the Horn of Africa — billed as the next wave in America’s quest for healthy foods — is proving that competition for a hot commodity can get downright nasty.
Only a few thousand acres of Oregon farmland are believed devoted to the production of teff. But people suffering from gluten intolerance together with immigrants hungry for traditional Ethiopian and Eritrean ethnic dishes are driving up the domestic demand for the iron-rich grain.
All of which appears to have played into an angry clash between rival teff traders in the out-of-the-way Starlite Cafe last year in Vale.
❖ Teff Hotspots in the US:
☆ Texas
☆ Idaho
☆ Oregon
☆ California
☆ Nevada
☆ TExas
☆ TEgray (Tigray)
☆ TEdros (Tigray Native)
☆ TEff
☆ Anagram: OREGON = NEGRO
💭 Cricket Apocalypse: ‘Biblical’ Swarms of Giant Mormon Crickets Destroying Crops in US West + Texas
💭 Biblical swarms of giant Crickets are turning US farms to dust
Northern Oregon rangeland, Jordan Maley and April Aamodt are on the lookout for Mormon crickets, giant insects that can ravage crops.
“There’s one right there,” Aamodt says.
They’re not hard to spot. The insects, which can grow larger than 2 inches (5 centimeters), blot the asphalt.
Mormon crickets are not new to Oregon. Native to western North America, their name dates back to the 1800s, when they ruined the fields of Mormon settlers in Utah. But amidst drought and warming temperatures — conditions favored by the insects — outbreaks across the West have worsened.
Can they be a secret tool in the battle against climate change?
ETHIOPIA IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S RICHEST CENTERS of major and minor crop diversity. Ethiopian farmers have grown wheat, barley, sorghum, and peas for millennia, passing seeds from one generation to the next through an informal community-based seed sharing network.
Despite this tradition of agricultural biodiversity, Ethiopia is also an arid region, one vulnerable to climate change and drought. At a time of increasing globalization, Ethiopian farmers in recent generations have discarded seeds from hundreds of traditional grains in favor of a select few non-native industrial hybrids, but after many of these modern crops failed—partially due to climate change—farmers are shifting away from “modern” crops to safeguard the future and livelihood of Ethiopian rural communities.
Beginning in 2014, an ambitious project called Seeds for Needs, created with joint support from Ethiopian farmers and researchers at Bioversity International, Mekelle University, and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, began researching Ethiopia’s past to reawaken ancient grains that might provide solutions to the country’s extreme vulnerability to drought and other environmental conditions.
TIGRAY IS ONE OF NINE REGIONAL STATES of the Federal Republic of Ethiopia, a country with over 100 million people. It is a small region, with only 5.5 million people, most of whom belong to the Tigrinya ethnic group, a vital cultural and political fixture in the country’s social landscape. While the Ethiopian population is growing rapidly—the average woman has four children in her lifetime (World Bank)— its food systems cannot keep up with growing demand. Consequently, undernutrition contributes to a child mortality rate of 28%, with stunting affecting 38% of children under the age of five (UNICEF).
Improving nutrition is made increasingly difficult by climate change, which now impacts healthcare, the environment, and the productivity of many crops and livestock. Thanks to its rich heritage of agricultural biodiversity, Ethiopia has the capacity to address undernutrition by enhancing agrobiodiversity, which spreads agricultural “risk” by growing a range of crops to meet the challenges of uncertain times. Unfortunately, most agronomic research is generally overlooked, while policymakers incorrectly assume that indigenous crops developed by hundreds of generations of farmers are less productive and unable to contribute significantly to food security. Policymakers have recently encouraged farmers to grow a small collection of modern grains to please food processors and international markets. This approach, which rarely includes traditional varieties, now threatens the country’s agricultural biodiversity and with it the survival of the country’s food production system.
One solution may come from the country’s near past. The Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute, the largest and oldest Seed Bank in Africa, holds 6,000 accessions (different varieties) of teff, 7,000 accessions of durum wheat, and 12,000 accessions of barley. Can the bio-regional genetics of these seeds provide clues that may aid in the struggle against climate change? The international coalition behind Seeds for Needs thinks so. Led by Bioversity International, Scuola S. Anna in Pisa, Mekelle University, Amhara Region Agricultural Research Institute (ARARI), and the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute (EBI), this project has adopted a holistic, participatory action-driven approach to researching whether traditional varieties can help solve today’s agricultural challenges. The program, which has grown to include GIZ, the World Bank, the Integrated Seed System Development (a Dutch initiative), and the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture, uses extremely simple yet effective logic: if 4000 ancient grain varieties kept in the National Gene Bank’s seed vaults survived and adapted for millennia on farmers’ fields, they may provide benefits if returned to the very farmers who first developed and saved them. In Tigrinya, the farmers have a name for the initiative: Wehabit … or “We got it back”.
💭 Exotic, Gluten-Free Grain Grows in Popularity — Enough to Cause a Dust-Up in Eastern Oregon
A little-known grain from the Horn of Africa — billed as the next wave in America’s quest for healthy foods — is proving that competition for a hot commodity can get downright nasty.
Only a few thousand acres of Oregon farmland are believed devoted to the production of teff. But people suffering from gluten intolerance together with immigrants hungry for traditional Ethiopian and Eritrean ethnic dishes are driving up the domestic demand for the iron-rich grain.
All of which appears to have played into an angry clash between rival teff traders in the out-of-the-way Starlite Cafe last year in Vale.
Tiny grain
In Ethiopia:
Sometimes known as “love-grass,” teff was domesticated in Ethiopia in ancient times and is commonly grown the country’s highlands. While it’s the preferred grain of the Ethiopian people, it also is the country’s most expensive grain. It covers the greatest area of farmland of any Ethiopian crop, but has low per-acre yields and requires labor-intensive harvesting and processing techniques.
In U.S.:
How much teff is grown here is difficult to determine. OSU Extension agent Rich Roseberg calls it a “specialty crop.” “It’s a very attractive plant,” he says. “There are some types that have a purplish seed head and leaf that we are looking at as potentially ornamental.”
Nutrition:
Teff is 11 percent protein, 80 percent complex carbohydrates and 3 percent fat, according to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. It’s an excellent source of essential amino acids, particularly lysine, often deficient in grain foods. It’s gluten-free, making it an alternative to wheat, rye and barley.
Wayne Carlson of Caldwell Idaho, founder of The Teff Co., has pleaded guilty in Malheur County Circuit Court to a misdemeanor harassment charge in the incident with Tesfa Drar, who was born in Ethiopia and now lives in Minneapolis.
“This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” said Drar, a U.S. resident since 1981. “I was shocked.”
Court records say Carlson sat down beside Drar, who was meeting with a prospective teff grower in the cafe, and accused him of cheating growers and smuggling seed into the U.S. from Ethiopia. The two had never before met face-to-face, and Carlson allegedly used a racial epithet and told Drar to go back to his own country.
Carlson was sentenced in April to 12 months of probation, community service and ordered to write an apology to Drar.
The confrontation raised a lot of eyebrows. Teff production is a mere blip on the annual U.S. Department of Agriculture’s major agricultural crop charts. It stands in obscurity alongside organically grown Kamut, an ancient khorasan wheat from Egypt, and quinoa from the Andes of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, in the ranks of exotic grains newly popular among health food consumers.
Drar said he thinks Carlson is afraid he’s going to take over the international teff business. “I have better access to the consumers who buy it,” he said.
Carlson and his attorney, Mike Mahoney of Vale, didn’t return phone calls for comment.
Teff is increasingly embraced as a high-quality horse hay and grown in at least 25 states, according to the University of Nevada Extension Service. Nevada is emerging as a big teff state, with 15 variations grown in Churchill County alone, mostly for cattle and horse forage.
Farmers in Oregon cultivate about 3,000 acres of teff for hay, said Rich Roseberg, an
Oregon State University Extension agentin Klamath Falls. They grow another 1,000 acres for food grain, he estimated.
Nationally, fewer than 10,000 acres are believed dedicated to food grain production of teff for milling into flour.
That’s in stark contrast to 53 million acres of wheat, 73 million acres of corn and 73 million acres of soybeans harvested annually in the United States.
Consumers, however, are catching the buzz that teff is nutritious, gluten-free and can be baked into breads, cookies, pizza crusts and other pastries. It’s widely used in East Africa for a flatbread called injera, for a porridge similar to cream of wheat and as a fermented alcoholic beverage.
Neil Koberstein, purchasing manager at Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods of Milwaukie, buys about 18,000 pounds of teff every 45 days to be stone ground into flour and sold, he said. That’s up from 7,500 pounds a decade ago.
“We’ve had remarkable growth in the last 10 years,” Koberstein said.
Teff seeds are so tiny, about 1.25 million to the pound, that “if you were to puncture a bag, it pours out like water,” Koberstein said. It takes about 150 teff seeds to equal a single grain of wheat.
For some people, flat breads and other pastries made from teff flour are an acquired taste, he noted. Taste descriptions range from sour to bland to delicious.
“Injera is sort of like a sourdough pancake,” said Brian Charlton, an OSU Extension agronomist in Klamath Falls who enjoys Ethiopian cuisine. “I liked it right away. I wish somebody would open a restaurant in Klamath Falls. I’d eat there all the time.”
Drar is adamant: Teff is the food of the future, and he wants everybody to eat it. His enthusiasm for the offbeat grain borders on the mystical and mythic:
“Ethiopians are always No. 1 as marathoners. Why do you think?” he asked, having dinner recently in the Hamley Steakhouse in Pendleton, where teff is definitely not on the menu. “It’s teff! They eat it three times a day!”
The word teff in the ancient Ethiopic language means “lost,” because the grains are prone to blowing away in the faintest breeze, he said. Three-thousand-year-old teff seeds have been found in Egyptian pyramids, he says.
Then, stealing a march on the biblical mustard seed, Drar added, “This is the smallest seed on Earth!”
Drar immigrated to America to study computer science and later to earn his living as a commodities trader. He was dismayed to find the injera that he was accustomed to having with his meals was absent from stores. He longed for it constantly.
Eventually, Drar flew to Ethiopia and brought 20 pounds of teff seed back to Minneapolis. He began cultivating a few acres, talked others into doing likewise and ultimately marketed his “Selam” brand of teff flour to ethnic grocery stores and restaurants.
These days, he travels the nation six months a year, using his van, smartphone and laptop as a mobile office. He takes orders for teff from ethnic stores and restaurants and works hard to convince farmers to partner with him in growing and marketing the grain.
Someday, he hopes to export American-grown teff to Ethiopia, which is too parched to grow enough for itself, he said.
“Teff is in my blood,” Drar said. “I don’t want to see people hungry.”
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