Homegrown Grains: The Key to Food Security

By Gene Logsdon, Chelsea Green Publishing. Posted May 27, 2009.

A very important food use for grains is in making alcoholic beverages. The best moonshine I ever tasted was "made right" from fermented corn mash. It equaled in mellowness the most expensive firewater I can afford. Of course, other grains make other kinds of whiskey, and malt from barley, a leading crop in the northernmost states, is used for beer and other malt foods and drinks, and of course Scotch whiskey. Wheat beer has also become popular, as has vodka from wheat and other small grains.

Whole Grains for Your Livestock

But the use of whole grains directly in your own diet is only half the reason for growing them. The other half, just as important I think, is to ensure yourself and your family an economical, steady supply of milk, meat, and eggs, and possibly cheese, wool, or other animal products you need or desire as part of your goal of homegrown security. I believe in and practice grass farming or pasture farming, where animals get most of their nourishment from perennial grass and clover pastures. Pasture farming makes a small amount of grain in the animal’s ration practical because small-scale farmers simply do not have the wherewithal to raise large amounts of grain even if they wanted to. Pigs and chickens, both of which lack the multiple stomachs of grazing animals like cows, sheep, and goats, especially benefit from some grain in their diets. If you have to go to a store to buy the grains you need for your chickens or pigs, your own home-raised meat and eggs will cost you nearly as much as if you had bought them from the store. Furthermore, if you have to buy your grains in the marketplace, you may have to settle for less nutritional quality than what you could grow on rich organic soil and then air dry by traditional, natural methods rather than with artificial heat.

Grain plants often give you other important products besides the grain. Wheat and oats, rice and barley give you straw as a by-product -- the dried stalks left after the grain is threshed. Straw makes excellent bedding for animals and mulch for the garden. It can be woven into baskets too, and in recent years it has even been much in demand for building strawbale houses, a traditional form of "green" construction that is enjoying a renewed popularity. Corn leaves dried or silaged are good roughage feed for cows. Corn husks can be plaited into strong rope, fashioned into dolls and decorations, or used to fill a mattress in a pinch. Cane sorghum makes good syrup; buckwheat and clovers provide the bees with an abundant source of pollen for honey making. And, not to be outdone, oats provide the hulls that the manufacturer of Rolls Royce autos once used to polish the cylinder sleeves of their expensive cars. Maybe they still do.

Cultural Pros and Cons

Finally, the special advantage of grains for the organic gardener and farmer is that you can grow them more easily with organic methods than you can fruits and vegetables. All grains except corn will withstand low fertilization better than vegetables. Field beans, especially soybeans, will add nitrogen in the soil. Corn is easier to cultivate mechanically than fruits and vegetables because it grows well in confined rows, making mechanical weed cultivation easier. Fungal disease is less of a threat in grains than in fruit. Grains have their share of insect enemies, but control is not nearly as critical as it can be in fruits and vegetables.

Dry beans and buckwheat can be planted as late as July 10, except in the far north, so they can be double-cropped behind peas, early beans, lettuce, or strawberries. A late sweet-corn patch may work out well as a second crop too. Barley and wheat can be planted in the fall after other crops are finished and harvested the next summer in time to double-crop that soil to late vegetables.

How Much Grain?

Even a modest harvest of a peck of grain will make a lot of meals -- believe me. Excess ears of sweet corn needn’t go to waste, either. Dry the corn, shell it, and make cornmeal in the blender. Or parch the corn over the fireplace on a winter evening.

Almost everyone who becomes familiar with the tastiness of whole-grain cookery wants to pursue it. Even if you don’t grow your own grains, you’ll not find a better way to make your food dollar pay than to buy grains and cook from scratch. And you’ll soon find out how much grain you need or want to use for a year. It won’t be as much as you think, even if you bake all your own bread and pastries.

We bake bread every week, and my wife makes a variety of cookies, cakes, pancakes, shortcakes, pie crusts, and cooked dishes with our whole grains. If the grain is ground fine enough, it makes good bread without the addition of any white flour, though we do add a little because we think it makes the bread a little lighter.

A bushel of wheat makes about fifty 1-pound loaves of bread. Two ears of corn make enough cornmeal for a meal’s worth of corn muffins. The grain expands as it cooks with water, and so gives more food to eat than you would think the uncooked grain represented.

At most, figure a year’s supply of wheat at 4 pecks (1 bushel); corn, 2 pecks; popcorn, 2 pecks; soybeans, 4 pecks; grain sorghum, 2 pecks; buckwheat, 1 peck; oats, 1 peck; triticale or rye or barley, 1 peck; navy or other soup beans, 2 pecks; alfalfa for sprouting, 1 or 2 quarts; lentils, field peas, cane sorghum (for flour), about 2 quarts each. But only experience can give you the precise annual amounts needed. We don’t grow and eat as much as suggested here, but could if we wished, without increasing our production labor noticeably. Of course you can gauge your own family’s consumption by estimating how much flour, cornmeal, and other grain products you use now. But your own grains may prove so delicious that you will want more than that.

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Gene Logsdon farms in Upper Sandusky, Ohio. He has published more than two dozen books; his Chelsea Green books include Small-Scale Grain Raising (Second Edition), Living at Nature's Pace, The Contrary Farmer's Invitation to Gardening, Good Spirits, and The Contrary Farmer. He writes a popular blog at OrganicToBe.org, is a regular contributor to Farming magazine and The Draft Horse Journal, and writes an award-winning weekly column in the Carey, Ohio Progressor Times.

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