A future in ancient grains

Stretched along the rolling hills in southern Michigan, Maple Drive Farms is a quintessential picture of agriculture.

Sheep graze in white-fenced pastures, Hereford cattle peek between outbuildings for treats, and wild turkeys hasten along the gravel roads. The more than 2,000 acres consist of roughly three-quarters tillable land in mostly fields of corn, soybean, and wheat crops.

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But there’s more to Maple Drive Farms if you take a longer look.

Brad Smith, the sixth generation to operate the almost 200-year-old family farm, and his wife, Diane, have introduced ancient, specialty grains into the crop rotation. They’ve also built a gluten-free, 2,400-square-foot processing facility on site that churns out high-quality teff, millet, and buckwheat.

This business unit of the farm, Tenera Grains, sells the processed ingredients to the Smiths’ daughter, Claire, who uses them to produce and sell granola and other packaged goods through her company, Teffola.

The forming of Tenera Grains and Teffola in 2018 coincided perfectly with the needs of both parties. Brad and Diane saw the potential in specialty grains to create a profitable future, one that could attract the next generation back to the farm.

Claire, who was living in western Canada, was poised to build a business using the raw grain, and she returned to Michigan to do so.

Nearly 200 Years of Lessons

While this all makes the farm look quite different from its founding, the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit that drives Brad, Diane, and Claire was passed down through the generations.

The acres of Maple Drive Farms were first cleared by Azariel Smith, a native of Connecticut, in 1837, the same year Michigan became a state. Azariel built a clapboard house for his bride to move into and began subsistence farming.

The Smiths were influential in developing the community. Farmers in the township typically raised sheep and dairy cows, and they grew row crops.

Over the years, as agriculture evolved, Maple Drive Farms had to follow.

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Nick Smith, Brad’s father, recalls the changes his father, LeGrand, had to make for their 80-acre dairy operation when a law was passed requiring an electric cooler for the sale of Class 1 milk.

“It was expensive to buy the electric cooler, and many farms in the area with just six or eight cows decided to sell. That’s when my dad realized if we were going to survive, we needed to expand. He sent me to the auctions, but I didn’t know anything about a good cow vs. a bad cow,” Nick says.

Nick, who had returned home to farm in the 1960s after serving in the Air Force, had to learn quickly. The same advice Nick’s father gave to him, he has passed on to the generations that follow. “Dad always said, ‘If you can make just 51% of your decisions correctly, that means most of the time you’ve made the right choice.’ ”

Nick and Brad share the perspective that farming requires them to work hard and work smart, but there are also elements of luck and factors out of your control.

“Whoever I am is what my ancestors influenced me to be,” Nick says. “I was taught that the way a farmer competes is doing a job more efficiently and better than the rest of the farmers around.”

By the 1980s, when farms were selling out and acres were inexpensive, the Smiths added land. Nick began no-tilling the fields in those years to lower the cost of production and promote better quality of soil.

Today, the farm is 95% no-till and has good levels of soil fertility because of that continuous practice. Brad has tiled quite a bit of the land and continues to experiment with cover crops, whether drilling in seed or applying it with a fertilizer spreader.

He has also been working with a crop consultant for the past four years who conducts soil sampling, evaluates yield data, and recommends best practices to improve production. It’s an investment, but one that is paying off. Brad says the 2022 crop season is his best year yet, and he attributes the success in part to his agronomist’s guidance.

The farm’s tillable acres are parceled into irregularly shaped fields around the rolling typography. That and substantial wildlife pressure have inhibited them from being as productive as other Midwest corn and soybean powerhouses. It influences how the Smiths manage the land with equipment, and it contributed to the idea of experimenting with different crops.

Modern History

Maple Drive Farms is a true team effort. In addition to Brad, who left his full-time career in law after buying the family farm in 2012, Dean Bowman has managed the operation continuously since 1982, and Kurt Kuntz leads the processing facility operations.

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Everyone plays an integral role in keeping the operation profitable, which is a priority Brad and Diane have stuck to over the years. It’s one of the reasons the Smiths decided to try teff, which is native to Ethiopia.

“In 2014, prices for corn and soybeans were starting to fall, and I was looking to diversify by growing alternatives like hops and malting barley, but a good friend suggested teff, so we tried it,” Brad says. “The first year was an experiment but it was also a big success.”

After the harvest, the Smiths shipped the grain to a facility in south-central Illinois to be cleaned, and as Brad says, they were hooked.

“After the first year, we invested in our own clipper cleaner and added pieces of equipment over time,” he explains. “In 2018, we decided to build our own facility with equipment sourced from Commodity Traders International in Illinois.”

Becoming vertically integrated enables the Smiths to save more than half of what it would cost to ship the thousands of pounds of grain out and pay another company the time and labor costs instead.

Just like the electric milk cooler of Nick’s early days on the farm, the investment in specialty grains is one for the farm’s future.

While cleaning the tiny, protein-packed teff is difficult, the Smiths are set up to do it well.

Cleaning specialty grains generally follows these steps:

The grain is scalped. This is a rough cleaning that removes the largest debris harvested with the teff.
Further cleaning is done via a four-deck grain cleaning machine referred to as the clipper.
A gravity table and a destoner sequentially sort the grain based on density.
For some grains, a color sorter further refines the grain, based upon the color spectrum and shape.
Some grains, such as millet and buckwheat, are dehulled using a “peeler” dehuller. This equipment was sourced and shipped from the Czech Republic.

Depending on the type and condition of grain, some steps may be repeated several times. Brad says it has taken them years to refine the process, which is continuously modified.

Each device can be modified and the process refined with loads of grain. Brad likens it to driving, when every so often, you check the mirrors, the gauges, the traffic around you, adjust, and move forward.

The same can be said about crops. Raising teff has its challenges. Brad battles weed pressure in the fields because teff has only one broadleaf herbicide labeled for the crop.

“We’re still learning how to farm teff the best,” he says. “Teff likes very moist conditions at the start of the season, and around harvest, it would prefer dry conditions, which isn’t always how Michigan behaves.”

Planting teff prompted the Smiths to try buckwheat, which so far seems to be more suited to the state’s climate, and millet, although Brad says it will take more seasons to really determine how successful it is.

Check in, adjust, and move forward.

A Bright Future

In the first year of Tenera Grains, the Smiths set out to mill teff for flour, but as a small producer, found the market difficult to penetrate.

Since then, Claire has pivoted and sourced 30 ingredients, done extensive product and recipe development, and produced Teffola’s line of clean-label granola. As of this fall, Claire has brought on a co-manufacturer, a national distributor, and has a new product on the horizon.

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“I really see Teffola emerging as an industry leader in the ancient grain space,” Claire says. “We care about sustainable sourcing and regenerative agriculture, and our big-picture vision is that all ingredients are grown with regenerative practices.”

The other big-picture vision is for Tenera Grains to take on farmer customers who need specialty grain cleaning and processing in a gluten-free facility. The Smiths’ is one of the only such facilities in the Midwest.

“The timing of what’s happening on our farm is beautiful, because now we’ve cleaned buckwheat and oats for a couple of customers, and we know we have a really good product,” says Diane. “The cleaning facility has influenced our journey and could be a blessing for the wider community, because as Teffola grows, we could expand and contract out other farmers to grow for us.”

Maple Drive Farms has in its past and will in its future serve a greater purpose.

“What has made it easier to face the challenges in agriculture is changing my mind-set to farm as a service for God and the community,” says Brad. “It’s a different mind-set. Instead of farming to get rich, instead of farming to be the first guy to get your crops into the fields. Instead, I’m going to farm and do my little bit to make the world a better place.”