Locally grown and freshly stone milled

A long-time dream for Farmer Josh was to grow grain and mill it into flour. Although it took many years, in 2021 Josh planted his first crop of rye and harvested it with an old “pull-type” combine from the 50’s that he was gifted by a good friend. Fast forward to now where Josh has imported a commercial scale stone mill from Austria, grows rye and red fife wheat on multiple acres, supplying flour to bakeries, grocers and households throughout eastern Ontario!

The grain

Fat Chance grows two varieties of grain: Red Fife wheat and rye. When the grain is harvested and separated from the rest of the plant is then referred to as a “berry”

Red Fife has a long history in this region and beyond, at one time it was the most popular variety of wheat planted in the country but has long since gone out of fashion for varieties that grow better with modern farming technologies and techniques. However, on this farm Red Fife fits in perfectly as things aren’t often done here the way they are on most other farms. One way Red Fife differs from modern wheat is how tall it grows. Sometimes there are lots of weeds or the covercrop growing down below get’s taller than normal, but luckily Red Fife can grow upto 4 feet tall! Outcompeting the other plants. A bigger stalk also means more straw which is used as fertilizer in the field but we also bale some of it to mulch our berries! In the pantry, Red Fife is an excellent bread flour and has become quite popular for artisan and home bakers.

Rye is a much less celebrated grain but that’s not the case here at Fat Chance! It was the first grain ever harvested here and has been used as a cover crop on the farm since 2013! Like Red Fife, Rye also grows very tall but on top of that it is extremely precocious, meaning it will outcompete almost anything and will germinate in soil temperatures of only 2 degrees!! It is Farmer Josh’s favourite grain to grow and harvest. With a bit more convincing and commitment it has also getting more and more love from bakers throughout whether putting it in their bread and desserts or simply feeding their soursough starter.

The harvest

Harvest time at Fat Chance is pretty old school. You won’t see this set up on most farms these days but the basic principles are the same. The combine used is from the 1950’s and is both powered and pulled by a tractor as it cannot operate on it’s own. It is also significantly smaller than modern combines making the number of acres you can harvest limited. However, since 100% of the grain grown here is either replanted or milled into flour to be sold in the community, it works for Fat Chance! It was also designed at a time when herbicides didn’t exist which meant fields had more weeds in them and so it has an easier time picking through those weeds today. This combine was a gift to Farmer Josh from a good friend and with proper care and storage is should last another 70+ years no problem! Head over to the farm’s social media to find videos of this machine in action!

The mill

Slow and stoned. That’s the type of flour milling done here at Fat Chance. This beautiful flour mill comes all the way from Tyrol in Austria. It uses two large millstones to crush the “berries” into flour making either “whole grain” flour or it can then be sent through the sifting machine to make a finer “sifted” flour by separating the different parts of the berry (bran, germ, and endosperm).