Milling Grain
What We Mill
Early Morning Harvest grows and mills rye, corn, buckwheat, soft wheat, and hard wheat (and coming soon, oats). With these grains and our mill, we produce twenty unique products all determined by the mill setup. The stone mill requires very little technology to produce Early Morning Harvest artisan flour. Jeff believes in labor over automation, so many processes are done by hand. We mill in small batches, which ensures our flours are ground fresh and delivered to you often within a few weeks of milling. The flours are sold in our store, other grocery stores, and online.
The Milling Process
STEP 1
After harvesting the grain, it goes through the cleaner to remove field debris, such as rocks and dirt. The clean grain funnels into totes where it is labeled with a field lot number. We do this to trace each batch of ground flour.
STEP 2
We prepare our mill for milling grain. Great care is taken to set the stones carefully to grind each flour for its intended purpose.
Our stone mill is unique in that it consists of only two stones, a motor, and sifters to make flour. This lends to flour that is truly whole grain (containing the bran, germ, and endosperm) as nothing is added or removed during the grinding process.
STEP 3
Different screens and grinding times are required to create different flours. For example, coarse flour like whole wheat requires a large mesh screen and less grinding time compared to general-purpose flour which requires a smaller mesh and longer grinding time.
(For food safety purposes, our milling staff must wear protective clothing.)
STEP 4
We store our cleaned grain in totes separate from the mill and roll them into the milling room when it is time to grind them into flour.
STEP 5
The grain pours into the hopper. The auger (the long tube) moves grain up to the stone mill in the loft, where it’s ground into flour.
STEP 6
The crushed grain drops into preset screens and is sifted for consistency. The flour and by-product collect in buckets, with the green bucket containing the sifted flour and the red bucket containing the high-protein fiber by-product. The high-protein fiber repurposes as livestock feed.
The flour and by-product need to cool before bagged for sale. They cool in large barrels and or totes.
STEP 7
Early Morning Harvest utilizes hand labor to bag flour and package it for retail sale. During the pandemic, we saw our online orders go from one a week to over 150+ online orders a day. In addition, our regular customers tripled their orders. Our people pulled together to streamline and improve packaging efficiencies to ship customers’ orders quickly.
STEP 8
The last step is loading our Early Morning Harvest product onto trucks for delivery to stores. Often these workers are up early in the morning and on the road before 6:00 a.m.
Our Mill
The stone mill was bought and built in 2011. Earl (owner Jeff’s dad) was making his cereal from the organic grains grown on the farm. As the demand for flour products grew, so did the mill in not only physical space but also licenses for production. The additions include:
Winter 2011-2012 • Built mill room and installed mill and sifter
February 2012 • Granted processing license by Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals
November 2012 • Granted organic processors license by Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship
Fall 2013 • Added the bagging room, small room for inventory, and the warehouse
Spring 2014 • Added the gravity table
2016 • Added the cleaning warehouse and 4-screen cleaner
2017 • Obtained non-GMO certification
2020 • Built another warehouse and a temperature-controlled inventory/shipping room
2022 • Installed three large grain bins specifically designed for holding grain