-Woman owned rural small business making all organic breads and pastries with heritage grains & produce grown on Lopez Island.
-Started in 2012, we sell our baked goods throughout the San Juan islands in stores and restaurants and at the Farmer’s Market on Lopez.
-In our current 200 square foot bakehouse and tiny brick oven we bake 1000 loaves of bread each week along with crackers, shortbread, cookies, pastries, bagels, and occasionally pizza.
-We employ 4-7 people year round, providing stable well paid work.
– We’ve created a local grain economy in partnership with Steve Lillestol at Island Grist working with local farmers to bring our island soils back into production. On 30 acres we’re growing more grain for human use here on the island than has been grown in nearly 100 years.
-We’ve gone from $14k in sales in 2013 to $217k in sales in 2018.
-We’ve received a USDA SARE Grant in 2018 to study heritage grains and fertilizer, and are currently developing a no-till spring planted grain rotation. We are committed to finding a way to grow grain and build soil without off-island inputs of any kind.
It’s hard, asking for money! And we wrestled with the best way to go about it, if at all, and what we’d like to emphasize is that the dollars you donate here are repaid many times over in the dividends of stable livelihood for island residents, healthy soil, lower carbon footprints, climate resiliency, community seed stewardship, regenerative agriculture, no-till grain research, plastic free production, local food with the highest quality ingredients possible; all these things that we do that don’t maximize profit, but are the right thing to do and create benefits beyond our bakery. 40% of the fossil fuels embodied in a loaf of conventional bread come from the chemical fertilizers used to grow the wheat. We use only organic ingredients in our baked goods, and by growing the grain on Lopez Island we reduce transportation and processing, by not using any fertilizers we use the power of the sun and wisdom of the plants to create food and soil. We value seed diversity and only grow heritage and ancient grains, landraces are diverse populations of wheats that we see as being better suited to the unstable climate future we face. We love landraces and the bread they bake.
We cover crop, grow our grains in rotation with animals on pasture, and count the organic matter in our soil as our bottom line. If that organic carbon content is not going up, we need to change how we grow grain, which in turn changes our bread. Rather than starting with the ideal artisan loaf and looking for the flours that can make that loaf, we work backward and say here is the grain we can grow on our island with the soil we have, in a truly sustainable way, for a price that works for the farmers… what kind of bread does that grain make? That’s the bread of this place, full of flavor and nutrition and stories and passion for what we do, and we love sharing it with you.
In addition to the benefits our farming and baking has on the land, and beyond the offerings we have for donations, we are so excited about the benefits our expansion will have on the folks who eat and love our breads. We get at least one call per week asking to mail order our breads, specifically the gluten free sourdough, a unique and satisfying loaf not found elsewhere. Our new space and baking capacity would make it possible to use an online shop to have a mail order bread program, so that some of our breads can be shipped to fans farther afield. Donations beyond our oven costs with help greatly with setting up the online and physical space for this.
For local customers, our new space and oven allows us to deliver fresher bread more often so you can enjoy the loaves’ full life span throughout the week and expect fresher bread on store shelves as well as buy more breads and goodies direct for us at Grayling Farm. There will be a farmstand space for getting fresh breads and pastries and local flour to continue our “open house” model we have had at Midnight’s Farm.
The work we have done to the building allows for what was the “Grayling Gallery” to continue to provide a space for art shows, community workshops and events. We are so pleased with the space and hope you will use it!
For the last 7 years we’ve baked in a 3×4 foot brick oven we built by ourselves back in 2013. It’s served us well and we manage to get over a 1000 loaves a week plus pastries, crackers, bagels, and cookies out of it. We’ve pushed our bake shifts to 15 hours of hot, ashy, lung-clogging work, and our bodies and employees have paid the price. But it’s time for a larger, more efficient, more baker friendly oven. An oven that can meet our current needs and carry us forward as a growing business.
We’ve chosen a wood fired Bassanina oven imported from Italy via EM Baking in Vancouver BC. It’s a state of the art four deck bakery oven that’s been designed for heating with wood. Some of our favorite bakers: Dave Miller in Chico, Brickmaiden Breads in Pt Reyes, Paul up on Gabriola; they’ve all gone from a hand built brick oven to a Bassanina and they all love it. We were guided by these baking mentors to help our bakery and our work move forward and be better supported with a better oven. The bread quality improves, the bakers lives improves, and the amount of wood burned drops dramatically. This new oven quadruples our baking capacity while keeping the renewable wood energy we are rich in here in the islands. We expect to burn half the amount of wood to bake the same amount of bread.
The oven is currently on-site at the bakery just waiting to get finished and fired up. It’s the biggest single ticket item of the whole project; $60k. For a bakery oven, that’s actually pretty cheap, but it still smarts. In February of this year Sage was lucky enough to go to Washington DC and pitch our little bakery business to the NASDA Foundation and she came home with $20,000 for our new oven. We also put in for a grant from the USDA for energy efficiency upgrades, which if we get it would pitch in another $12k. That leaves the amount we’re trying to raise here, $28,000. This oven is the hot beating heart of everything we do, it’s the engine that drives the entire local grain economy we’ve built here, it’s what creates the bread that sustains us.
We’ve been thinking about this next step in our bakery for a long time. It became clear maybe 3 years ago that we either needed to build a bigger bakery space with a bigger oven or we needed to quit. The tiny bakehouse here on Midnight’s Farm is sweet and we’ve made it work, but it’s scrappy and cramped and was never intended to be a production bakery. Our bakery life is inextricably tied to our family life, and we’ve lived for 8 years on Midnight’s Farm with the owners David and Faith and shared the land and the vision. We live in a 560 square foot two room two story cabin is a 100 year old farm house turned grain storage turned cabin, affectionately known as The Granary that is 50 feet from our bakery. We’ve raised our kids here with our two dogs and cat and chickens. We have an outhouse, we have an outdoor shower, it’s scrappy and funky but it has served its sweet purpose and has good energy. It’s worked for us for 8 years, but with the family growing and the business growing the kitchen table is getting pretty small to hold our homeschooling, the business office, and home cooked meals.
So, we started figuring out what our next step could be, and along the way had to let go of living here on Midnight’s Farm, the complexities of building a house and bakery on someone else’s land proved to be too great, despite our affection for the community we have here. Along the way we wrote our business plan, applied for loans, learned the language of real estate, met our angel investors, and finally found the place we’d been looking for. Grayling Farm was part of an original farmstead in the early 1900s, the 17 acre parcel sits at the edge of one Lopez’s most fertile valleys right on the shore of Hummel Lake, Lopez’s only natural lake and a true glacial relic.
The land was a mixture of farmed fields and grazed woods in the 1940s, then was bought by Earl Yost in the 1960s for him to build a barn for his lumber mill and lumber yard. He opened up a hardware store there in 1967 and many of the island old timers remember going there to get their building materials. In 1974 Earl sold it to a young artist Shirley Wright and and her boyfriend Bernie Sundell. Along with their art school friend Steve Hill they proceeded to transform Earl’s sturdy lumber barn into an art gallery, house, print making studio, ceramic studio, painting studio, foundry, woodshop, and gardens and community hub. For many years the Grayling Gallery was a Lopez icon, full of creative energy and community spirit, hosting events, local businesses and artist’s work.
Then in 1994 Shirley passed away, and the Grayling Gallery lapsed into disuse. A series of small business rented space in it, with artists coming and going through the years and Shirley’s family keeping it up as they could. When we found it one grey and stormy winter solstice day of 2018 the rain was sluicing down, the roof was leaking in half a dozen places, the building was full of old paintings, furniture, rat nests, garbage; the accumulated and forgotten possessions of 30 years, and we immediately, through it all, saw what it could be and what we had to do. One thing led to another, and we found ourselves stepping through doors that kept opening,with a series of surprising “yeses!”, and some enthusiastic and optimistic investors… we bought the farm.
We knew right away that this place would be our home, our bakery, a community gathering space and art gallery, farm, and heritage grain center. We saw the potential to bring back the Grayling as a community hub, where folks from around the world can visit, learn, teach, eat, farm, and share about bread, grains, and working with the land.
But turning the sagging old lumber barn and overgrown rose thickets into that dream is a real challenge. And expensive as all get out. We’ve spent the last 8 months putting every moment we have, our sweat and tears and blood into the building pulling it back from the brink of falling apart, trying to chase out the years of rats and stagnant energy and darkness and bring in the fresh air and light. There was a lot of months there as we slogged through it that we wondered if it would work at all. But here we are, just weeks away from the big move, and the place is made anew. Fresh paint, new floors, a new roof, new windows, a state of the art water filtration system, we even have reclaimed the old field, mowed the roses, and put in our first crop of rye. It feels good.
Along the way we had our most successful and busy year ever with Barn Owl, sales were up, the grain harvest came in beautifully, we got a Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant to study the impacts of fertilizer on heritage wheat. But also people in our little community died, got sick, left holes in our fabric. Deaths in the family and community, we got stressed, we worried about paying for all this, we gave up time with our friends, we grew rushed. In August our son Skye got hit hard in his left eye and will need his lens surgically removed in a few weeks in Seattle, we got pregnant with our third kid. It’s been intense, and we would be dishonest if we didn’t say that we are completely scared as we peek over the edge and try and see just what the heck we’re jumping into. But here we are, asking for help, for a few folks to say, yes, go for it, we can do it together.
Barn Owl Bakery is a fairly proven entity at this point and we have accounts and ideas waiting that we have been unable to fulfill and follow through on because of our limited space and inefficiently long and arduous bake times. We are ready to meet our current demand and follow some ideas getting bread and goodies out to some of our non-island customers.
The whole idea and concept of this expansion project to the new space and the better oven technology is to reduce the risks and challenges of the business and all that we have taken on. The more support we have from our local and wider community the better set up we will be to handle the loan payments and keep the bakery running with adequate resources.
All the heavy work of getting the land, renovating the building, ordering and installing the oven, and working on getting new systems in place has all been largely done, its all happening, we just need your help to get to the end and make our overall budget work. Without community support it is possible that the costs of the land and renovations are too high to be paid back by our bread work alone with the slim margin we have already once we buy high quality ingredients and pay out our living wages.