Image © Shutterstock via GreenBiz.com

We all enjoy eating bread, whether it is gluten- or wheat-free, whole grain, French baguette, Italian ciabatta, or any of the myriad other styles of baking. In a new book called The New Bread Basket, author Amy Halloran explores, as her subtitle explains, “How the New Crop of Grain Growers, Plant Breeders, Millers, Maltsters, Bakers, Brewers, and Local Food Activists Are Redefining Our Daily Loaf.” An excerpt, via GreenBiz.com, follows:

People will keep studying one another and drawing on their ingenuity to build sustainable farms and food systems. Alan Scott jump-started a new old-fashioned approach to bread with his oven plans, offering an alternative route to a food that had been industrialized. Other innovators are fiddling with ovens and mills, turning dairy tanks and silo bottoms into malt systems, scaling down equipment and deindustrializing processing. They are making tools to fit a future they are shaping.

While my tendency is to think that grains alone will save the day, grains are just a part of a complex farming picture and the changes happening as food production is relocalized. Nathan and Jessie Rogers wanted to be farmers, not grain farmers. Grains are a part of a diverse operation for them, one that includes animals and crop rotations. Farm health is also at the root of the many projects undertaken by the Dewavrin family over the last two decades. Grains are not an end for them, but part of their general pursuits. They are, in Loic’s words, “trying to find the best combination of operations in the field to respect the environment as much as possible.”

Read the rest of the excerpt here.