I find the One Local Summer challenge going on over at Pocket Farm so inspiring, but I’ve never participated. While our meat and veggies obviously come from our own farm, I don’t know where to get locally grown/manufactured staples such as flour or cheese.
So how do you find out if such things exist? I’m looking for things within about a 100-mile radius of here. This would include the cities of Mankato, Red Wing, Rochester and Winona, MN; LaCrosse, and Prairie du Chien, WI; and Waterloo, Marshalltown, Ames, Fort Dodge, Estherville, and Mason City, IA.
Suggestions, anyone?
If you want to grind your own wheat into flour you can get organic wheat”seed” in Albert Lea along with a few other organic grains.http://www.alseed.com/product.php You can probably ask down at K-Kupboard if any of their flour etc is local. Local cheese should not be to hard to find.
There are many resources to help people find local products like localharvest.org and eatwild.com (which you might want to consider listing your own farm in). If you have a farmers market nearby, that’s a great place to find small cheesemakers. Grain is harder… around here, I can get locally milled wheat (and other) flours. Maine-grown wheat is a very small business, and much of it goes to a Maine bread company, so I try to buy that bread whenever I’m feeling lazy. ;)It’s intimidating when you start trying to find local products, but eventually they start popping up where you least expect… you can look at it as an adventure. Check to see if Iowa’s Department of Ag has a listing of small producers… Maine has a searchable database to find local growers, and specifies where they sell their goods.Good luck!
Hmmmm, don’t know about grain, we buy ours in bulk from the Amish….but a quick e-mail search from a few months ago from planning a trip to McGregor turned up this site: http://www.wistravel.com/cheese.htmHope it helps!
http://www.localharvest.org/search.jsp?st=17&ty=0&nm=wheatlocalharvest.org can track down local sources, if any, of many things. are you listed?
There’s an organic grain farm in our neck of the woods (Marshalltown). Pauls Grains http://www.paulsgrains.com/ in Laurel has a huge assortment of ground and whole grains – wheat, barley, buckwheat etc.