A tiny outfit in Winnipeg is showing that after 19 years in the business it still understands how to connect the urban consumer to the farmer.
And in their success so far, and their clearsighted view forward, they’re showing organic and local-market farmers a model of how to bridge that urban-rural divide.
The Tall Grass Prairie Bakery – about whom I have a feature that will be in the issue coming out Thursday – has just set up a 450 bushel bin and suction and auger system to allow grain trucks to unload directly, rather than force farmers to bag grain and carry the 60 pound loads from the parking lot to the bakery. The new system – for which the Canadian Wheat Board covered about $30,000 of the cost for the bin – has see-through tubes which let naive urban consumers see how grain comes in from the trucks, gets to the bin, gets moved to the bakery and gets milled. The purpose isn’t just to relieve the handful of farmer-suppliers from having to carry the bags, but mainly to give urbanites a chance to see how bread is actually made, and to feel all warm and glowy about farmers, grain and bread. They’re planning to increase production and are installing their own stoneground milling system.
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The tall grass folks are spectacularly successful for a small, specialized bakery. They make cinnamon buns that everyone in Winnipeg loves. The other day my wife sent me out to go to the bakery, buy half a dozen cinnamon buns, and pay $10 or $12 for them. (Honestly can’t remember) And I didn’t complain. Because they are wonderful. Best tasting cinnamon buns I’ve ever had, with the exception of the ones at Campion College at the University of Regina in the late 1980s. But two bucks per cinnamon bun might strike some of you as a tad high. That is precisely the point of Tall Grass, one of the owners told me. Nineteen years ago they decided to set up this bakery as a way of producing what they consider to be the world’s best quality and best tasting bakery products and at the same time pay farmers a good price for the grain. They always knew, she told me, that they’d need to charge extra for their products because they were paying farmers more than they could buy bulk flour for.
So the quality is what lets them squeeze those extra dollars out of the consumer. Without it, all the warm feelings about the supposed benefits of organic crops wouldn’t build nearly the same volume of sales, nor the abstract notion of buying local farmers’ grain do much to get more than a tiny core of fanatics to purchase the stuff. Quality was key. Large numbers of people in Winnipeg want to eat local, organic food – lots of my neighbors, friends, people at church always express an interest in this – but they aren’t likely to stick with it if it tastes crappy, or just ordinary at twice the price.
So this new unloading, moving, storage and milling system might seem mundane to a farmer who sees this all the time, but to the disconnected-from-agriculture person, it’ll probably be a pretty romantic thing, and a way to feel connected to the local farmers who are supplying the grains and the ex-ruralites who are baking the flour.
I’m always impressed with the long-term, dogged determination of people like this who go on year after year in a fringe business, facing all sorts of challenges those in the ordinary commercial market don’t face, wringing profits far lower than they could get if they were running a big industrial outfit. They’re literally making markets where there weren’t any before, and creating a high priced, high value demand that would have never existed without them.
I sometimes wonder why they don’t move over to the more lucrative big commercial part of the economy – with instincts like theirs any marketing company could probably give them a much more stable and less demanding life – with bigger bucks. But from dealing with them you realize they’re motivated not by greed or the idea of success for success’ sake, but by the notion of living in a way that is in keeping with their ideals. You get the sense that they’d rather crash and burn than compromise their ideals for an easier, wealthier life. (Something I’ve noticed with many hog farmers in the past two years: they don’t want to sell out or shut down because their operations are their life’s work, and the loss of money means less to them than the looming loss of the product of their creativity.)
And they feel guided by a higher power, which is maybe what you’d need to hang through the downs of a fringe industry over the years and not give up in despair and disgust. The Tall Grass folks and many of the farmers who supply them are intensely religious, and that motivates and propels them. They’re living in keeping with what they think the scriptures order them to do. This is another thing they stick with, regardless of the consequences. This announcement involved multiple interests and three types of government. There was the management of The Forks marketplace. There was the Canadian Wheat Board. There was not only the Manitoba minister of agriculture Rosann Wowchuk, but also NDP leadership contender Greg Selinger. So when the Tall Grass folks said they wanted to end the official unveiling with a sung hymn of praise, thanking God, they got a lot of pushback from all these levels of government. Having any sort of religious element at an event involving secular, elected officials is a generally forbidden practice. (Even here, in this space, I feel a bit creepy talking about someone’s religious nature, because religion, like sex and politics, is something you JUST DON”T TALK ABOUT.) But it wasn’t something the Tall Grassies were going to compromise on. “For us, that was a dealbreaker,” the co-owner told me.
Well, the deal got done, the thanksgiving hymn was sung, and urbanites can now see prairie farmers’ grain all the way from the truck to the loaf. And for that you’ve got to give thanks. And if you want you can pay $2 for a cinnamon bun. And you won’t regret it.
