Why are wheat berries so expensive?

I buy mine from a local reseller that has them drop shipped from Wheat Montana. They do this about four times a year. I understand Azure Standard does this on the west side of the US. You might check into Bread Beckers Co-ops.

Last time I checked my local feed and grain store sold 50 pounds of wheat for $12.50.  I'm need to get some more wheat soon so I'll see if the price is still the same.

Do you know any Mormons?  They have canneries that sell white and red hard wheat for fairly inexpensive.

They have them at www.organicwheatproducts.com

I agree. It makes no sense to me why whole grain is *at least* twice as expensive as an equivalent flour. I'm glad to meet someone else who is equally puzzled.

What a paradox! One would think that the costs of storing grain, cleaning grain, transporting grain, preparing grain for milling, milling grain, storing flour, packaging flour and transporting flour would *surely* outweigh the cost of storing grain, cleaning grain, packaging and transporting it.

Personally, I suspect it has to do with the scale of commercial flour milling, which is a huge, international business. A high percentage of a country's projected yeild of grain (wheat, corn, whatever...) can actually be "purchased" before it is ever harvested (think futures markets). The lowly home miller is an infinitesimal afterthought in this context.

If you live in the USA, you can realize competitive costs if you live in or close to the major wheat growing regions (or in CA, where everyone seems to be able to purchase everything).

Trying to live low down on the food chain frequently turns out to be more expensive than living on mass marketed, processed foodstuffs.

Add me to the list of people who are upset at the cost of wheat berries.  I live in Houston, and $0.99 / lb is the cheapest price I've seen.  I understand the economics of milling, and I'm not sure that volume of berriy sales would increase much if they were cheaper.  I belong to a vegetable coop, but don't know anyone else that mills their own flour.

Do you live anywhere near where wheat is grown?  Depending on the regulations governing sale of grain where you live, it is probably easiest to befriend a local farmer.  As a wheat farmer's daughter, I can assure you that farmers are paid a minute fraction of what you buy wheat berries for.  It's quite shocking, actually.  I think most grain farmers would be absolutely delighted at your appreciation of their wheat and would be happy to sell you it to you for very cheap.  But...again....this would depend very much on local laws governing grain farmers.

Karen

If you were a 50-lb bag of flour, where would you be?  Here are a few suggestions:

1. Look in the Yellow Pages for a baking goods distributor.
2. Ask a bakery or pizza place where they buy their flour.
3. Call the milling company for the flour you want and ask for the name of their local distributor.

We grow our own certified organic wheat  and other small grains. In order to have the wheat berries cleaned and bagged we have to have semi loads of wheat taken almost two hours from here to a certified organic plant. They charge for cleaning and bagging the wheat berries into 60 lb bags. We have to pay the trucking to and from the place that does this. Organic farming is very labor intensive as you have to use a tractor to control weeds as we can't use chemicals. The price of diesel fuel has not come down around here.  We have to pay for organic certification, certificates and inspections etc. If you end up with a crop of low protein wheat you basically are stuck with it as other organic farmers near here have come to find out.

We charge .50 per pound for our organic wheat berries. Our hard wheat berries are 14% protein, the soft berries are 12% protein.  I also have a small commercial stone mill and sell freshly ground flour for .60 per pound. Last time I checked these prices were lower than the store brand of non-organic flours, which by the way are a year old as there is still a large amount of flour being stored in the conventional mills from last year. There are not many organic farmers who sell wheat berries to the general public because of the extra costs and hassels of doing so. My guess is that you are paying the middle man if you being charged high prices for wheat berries.

www.organicwheatproducts.com

I have a very strange bent in the thinking process so it seemed that the only way that I was going to get the kinds of grain that I wanted was to grow it for myself. OK so I have some rather unusual friends and one of them let me farm a small corner of one of his fields. There is a lot that goes into the farming of wheat. and what comes out of the combine is not ready to be put into the grinder. It needs to be cleaned and that is more time and expense. If you are going to do it for yourself then there is getting the use of a cleaner. All this said this is truly the only way that you are going to know what you are eating. I would like to get to the point that I could offer some for sale but for now I don't have the cleaning to the point that I would want it to represent me to you. There may be a time when that might be able to happen but not for now. The first time that I went looking for wheat berries of a known variety I went to a certified seed dealer and talked them into selling some of the seed untreated. I got it for $40.00 dollars for a hundred pounds not bad but still had to hand pick the berries to make sure that there wasn't any ergot in the grain. Trust me ergot is not something that you want in your food. Salem is a good example of what can happen. There is a group of farmers that have banded together to sell grain in a known variety, they can be found on the net as shepherds grain. They use sustainable yield farming practices and for me that is at least as important as is organic. They sell to top-end bakeries that produce top-end artisan breads. I don't know if they sell the grain or just the flour.

Baking from 'scratch' is almost always more beneficial healthwise and taste-wise. If we  plant a seed and go through all the stages until the finished 'product' arrives at our table, we are rewarded tenfold.  However, in this day and age, for many, it is impracticable. For those who live on or near a farm or mill, have lots of time and bake lots of bread every day, it is  probably no great effort to grind the wheat.  When I had children at home, I also had a full time job and was only able to bake bread about once or twice a month. When we moved to a village which had a mill with a shop, there was no point in me continuing to make bread myself when I could buy better bread every morning a few steps away from my home, which backed on to the field where the wheat grew. Those days are long gone and I now live in suburbia with the closest mill about 2 hrs. drive away.  I now bake my own bread and am starting to buy my flour at this mill.  Now I have more time, retired with no children at home, I have been contemplating grinding my own flour.  Although the cost is no problem, it is worth considering all the facts.  A good home grain mill  seems to be about $400-$600. How often is one going to use it before that money is recouped?  At the mill here, their hard wheat berries are $18.48 Cdn. (about on par with US right now) for 12kg. (26 1/4 lbs). Their hard whole wheat flour is $20.88 for 12 kg. My question is, "Do the ground wheat berries result in the same weight of finished flour?

Glad you found a good source of wheat berries.  I used to live in Taos, NM - at the ski valley - great country.

BTW, you might want to look into using FireFox or Google Chrome for a browser instead of IE - or updating IE so it doesn't leave all those tracks!  ;-)

Look for all commodity prices to go up. As the Federal Reserve continues to destroy the dollar, you can count on it.  Stock up!

Check out Breadbeckers.com for a co-op near you. They will put in a bulk order for those in your area. The result is that ordering by the truckload saves a bunch on shipping.

Peace.

carries wheat and other grain berries, if there is one in your area. Many health food stores do, too, though only the more common varieties.

I had more difficulties finding organic spelt berries, my whole grocer did carry them. But the natural food store that sells my breads was able to order me 25 lb bags at a discount - though they don't sell them in the store.

Karin

$8.00 for a 25 pound plastic bin.  I've been using them, milling several scoops at a time, and I'm still no where near denting 25#'s.  Can't beat the quality or taste, either.  Check out a food coop in your state.  But, when I googled grain purveyors I found that the larger supply houses were absurd in their pricing and the cost to ship prohibitive.  Check your local state extension office for possible names of organic wheat growers and other grain growers in your region.  Good luck, inexpensive great grain is out there, just look for it.

Bernie PIel

I am amazed that our local WalMart carries 25# bags of white and red wheatberries.  Can't quote the price as I don't have tha ability to mill my own grains so I haven't compared prices, but I wasn't really looking for these locally either. Seeing whole wheatberries sure made me think about getting a mill, though.  I am in a city of 50000 in Wisconsin, so others around the country might look at WalMart.

Don't forget supply and demand.

Check your local Feed-n-Seed type farm store ...ours carries lots of human food too, including wheat berries in bulk bags, soup mixes in bulk, etcetera. 

Brian

I know that we sell organic grains but I just wanted to put this out there for those people that are buying grains from unknown sources. Many non-organic growers wait until JUST before harvest when the grains are ripe and the seeds are the most exposed and then they spray the entire crop with Roundup to finish drying off the wheat. This means that the wheat is contaminated with Roundup or another such herbicide. This is a fact that many people are unaware of. You might want to check your grain source if you are at all concerned with this type of contamination.  

We are selling our certified organic wheat for LESS than the generic Walmart wheat.

I have no idea what other WalMarts are selling for wheat berries but the local WalMart in Leavenworth, KS stocks WheatMontana berries as do other WalMarts in the KC, MO area. They aren't claimed to be organic as Flourgirl51 offers, just chemical free according to the WheatMontana website. I have no way to verify their claim.

I just get my wheatberries from a neighbor who gets them from her local food co-op.

I get 50 lbs at a time.  They tend not to go bad.

Just as an aside: Archeologists found wheat berries in the pyramids - and they were able to sprout them!

At GrainsFromThePlains.com, my husband and I grow wheat organically here on the prairie of Colorado. We sell directly to the consumer. 

To answer your question, on our farm, we have higher expenses selling directly to the consumer than we would if we sold our harvest to the local grain elevators (to go into the whole commodity system). We also have higher expenses and perhaps slightly lower yields being organic. We ship nationwide and also must unfortunately include shipping in our prices. 

We do try to keep our prices low. We also arrange for free local delivery to parts of the Colorado Front Range. We also ship as economically and safely as possible.

Please do check out our grain at our virtual farmstead here GrainsFromThePlains.com. 

Laura

I also find it really odd how much many places charge for wheat berries.   I think a lot of it is just the increase cost of shipping.   Ideally you would live near where the grain is grown and buy locally.    If you can find a local food co-op where they get regular deliveries, you should be able to find good prices.

In the past, I've lived in Utah, Idaho and Montana and I could buy 50 lb bags of wheat for $12-18 depending on the year.  Now I live where it's difficult to find 50 lb bags.  The bulk food sections of natural food stores sell it for around $2/lb (compared to 25 cents/lb I'm used to with 50 lb bags).   

My sister lives in Montana.  Wheat Montana (which is my favorite wheat anyway) goes for about $15-16 for 50 lbs.   So I grab several bags when I visit.    But to have it shipped takes the price up to ridiculous prices/lb - but it's still cheaper than the $80-100 that many online places charge for 50 lbs.

I'm glad I'm not the only one with this question. I've been baking bread for almost 30 years now and never considered grinding my own flour. However, as retirement approaches and I find myself with a little more time on my hands, I started looking into a home flour mill. I was shocked to see the prices of grain! It's 2x to 3x the cost of ground flour.

My recent purchases from a local co-op or "drop", there are a few, like Bread Becker's I believe, I used Azure... Keep in mind everything here is ORGANIC. Most of these prices are essentially unheard of when it comes to organic, quality flours, let alone fresher when milled yourself. Berries? I had never even heard of them in this form until a cookbook I live from had a few wheat berry recipes. A lot of these grains I cook and eat whole, but many of them I mill as well, some more than others.

The only questionable item here is the classic "all-purpose style" flour, the hard white wheat... I have seen garbage quality organic all-purpose flour for around $0.80 in Walmart, up to around $1.6/lb for non-organic Bob's Red Mill artisan bread flour. so $0.90 is not bad for better quality. Only thing I've seen cheaper on this entire list, and most things I can't find locally unless I drive to this co-op drop once a month. There are a few I'm sure I'm missing, like organic white and blue corn for tortillas which were more expensive.

This list is 100% organic, unmilled berries/grains:

• Rye : 5lbs, $0.98/lb
• Buckwheat: 5lbs, $1.58/lb
• Spelt: 5lbs, $1.45/lb
• Kamut: 5lbs, $1.73/lb
• Amaranth: 5lbs, $1.91/lb
• Millet: 5lbs, $1.46/lb
• Hard Red Wheat: 25lbs, $0.64/lb
• Soft White Wheat: 25lbs, $0.55/lb
• Hard white Wheat: 50lbs, $0.90/lb

I raise poultry, and buy my feed from a feed store. I see that they sell:

Whole corn (40 pound bags) for $13.25
Hard Red Wheat Berries (40 pound bag) for $16.95
Soft White Wheat Berries (40 pound bag) for $13.95
Whole Oats (40 pound bag) for $15.95
Whole Barley (50 pound bag) for $18.95

I was wondering if there is a difference between grain sold as Feed grain for livestock verses grain sold in stores for milling our bread?  I read somewhere that you have to avoid Seed grain because it could be coated with stuff that would be bad to feed to livestock.  I am wondering if these Feed grains would be good for milling flour (and a good deal) or if there is a reason I should avoid using them.

Thanks,
Ron