Small flour mills(non cattle)

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aj

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With the wheat basis so high in our area.....I was wondering about the possility of starting a local flour mill. White wheat was pushed in our area for ten years or so and it is actually dropped here because of logistical problems.Has anyone had experience with small or big flour mills and what are some pitfalls. Is there a possibility of finding a niche market for small flourmill units. Organic? If we could mill flour and ship it direct to bakery somehow. Is there any organizations or information on the subject? I gues for us it would be kinda like taking a bushell of corn and making moonshine out of it. We'd be selling corn by the gallon instead of the bushel. ;D
 

knabe

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Hollister, CA
check into regulations as small companies that deal with food have a higher percent compliance cost per unit food and this must be factored into customer purchase decisions.

take a survey of potential customers.
 

aj

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Knabe......I was wondering about that stuff. Some states are different than others. Then you have the feds to worry about. I know that small locker plants can have a hard time surviving some regulations. I always wondered about the liability of selling even a locker beef. If you only produced flour seems like some risk would be taken out of equation. I don't think LLC's can sell across state lines in some states any way. It just seems like there should be some way for production agriculture to take their product down the food chain farther.
 

Shady Lane

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I have a cosuin that sold his organic meat/ natural foods business a couple years ago. Part of the deal when he sold that business was the her could not market meat for X # of years as a competition clause.

So he has started to grow a very small acreage of organic wheat and is now marketing organic pasta's from it.

I don't know if he is making any money off it or not but I do know you can grow a pile of pasta off a pretty small acreage!

I'm thinking if you bought yourself a hand crank grist mill you would look like Chris Griffin's Buff Hampster pretty quick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BCqegaPtJY

When I was a kid I can remember a hand cranked fanning mill for cleaning seed grain, boy did that get old quickly! Eventually a big large pulley was made by cutting a huge circle out of plywood so that an electric motor could be fitted to it with a belt and run at the correct speed.

I don't miss that thing!
 

aj

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I wonder if there would be a market for "mailing a package of unmilled Golden Organic Wheat from the Wonderfull State of Kansas" to the home bakers of the world. Grown with pure rain water and bagged and cleaned by a 5th generation sodbuster. Our special climate of wind and low humidity at an elevation of 3600 feet is a great climate for this special wheat. This product is a special aide for nutritional excellence and really benefits a health nutritional regime. People who eat this product have been known to burst out singing Judy Garland songs and skiipping down the yellow brick road. Tiger Woods father and Bob Dole cut their teeth on this amazingly nutritous product. This product will make you happy and you will most likely walk around with a wheat straw in your mouth and a Kansas wheat straw hat on all the live long day!
 

Shady Lane

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Anything is worth a try, there are people that sell pieces of used barbed wire on E-bay for good money!

::)

Maybe you could start selling the hand mills to go along with it, at an inflated price of course.

Then you can start breeding the buff hampsters to power them, this could be the biggest enterprise to ever come out of Kansas!

Nice knowing you AJ, please remember us "little people" after you have made your millions.

 

aj

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O.K. I may need a Canadian associate and dealer for this deal. I'll cut you in on it. ;D
 

pjkjr4

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Oklahoma
I know a farm family in central Oklahoma that also owns a cafe with lots and lots of traffic. Just about every bushel that they raise goes into dinner rolls, cinnamon rolls, flour, etc. for the cafe. I'm sure that they aren't griping about poor basis right now.
 

Shady Lane

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Saskatchewan Canada
Here is a simple Agriculture question that I'm sure I SHOULD know the answer to but don't.


How much flour is in a bushel of wheat?


I would think a bushel of wheat would make quite a few cinnamon rolls wouldn't it?
 

pjkjr4

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Oklahoma
It depends mostly on what type of flour they are making. Everything (or most everything) that they don't use in flour goes to wheat middlings, for use in range cubes, creep feed, hog feed, etc.
 

Silver

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Dietrich, ID
Shady Lane said:
Here is a simple Agriculture question that I'm sure I SHOULD know the answer to but don't.


How much flour is in a bushel of wheat?


I would think a bushel of wheat would make quite a few cinnamon rolls wouldn't it?

There are about 150 cups of grain in a bushel of wheat then converted to flour these 150 cups of kernels produce about 300 cups of flour. About 3 cups of flour are required to produce a 1.5 pound loaf of bread. Finally one bushel of flour produces roughly 100 loaves of bread each weighing 1.5 lbs.

 

Hilltop

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Mar 22, 2009
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Sask, Canada
I was thinking about that also so checked on how many 1 pound loaves of bread can be made from a bushel of wheat.

70 loaves of white........... and

95 loaves of brown :eek: :eek: :eek:

Sounds like a money maker to me!!
 
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