In this episode of the On-Farm Trials podcast, we have Eric Odberg from Odberg Farms in Genesee, Idaho return in season 2, to talk millet with Joni Kindwall-Moore of Snacktivist Foods based in Couer D’Alene, ID. Listen in as Eric and Joni share their trials with growing and marketing millet. The conversation explores the complexity of expanding alternative crops and markets, and how risk is distributed. We hear Eric’s experience of the agronomy for growing millet in Genesee, Joni shares more about millet varieties and quality traits, and why millet might be a good fit for a trial on your dinner plate!
Carol McFarland
Very excited to be welcoming Eric Odberg of Odberg Farms of Genesee, Idaho, back to the On Farm Trials podcast with special guest Joni Kindwall-Moore of Snacktivist Foods. And we’re here to talk about millet. Welcome to the podcast, guys.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
All right. Millet. Woo.
Eric Odberg
Thanks, Carol. Thanks. Good to see you here. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
I know you’ve been on the podcast and actually you’re one of the most listened to episodes as we’ve talked about, Eric, but would you mind just taking a moment and telling us a little bit about yourself, your farm and where, where your farm is and your farming conditions and the cropping system that you run?
Eric Odberg
Yeah, Eric Odberg, fourth generation farmer, Genesee, Idaho. We’re a twenty-two inch rainfall area zone. Farm with my wife Malia and our three boys Ethan, Evan, Nick and been no-tilling for over twenty years now. And the last couple couple years have been getting into regenerative farming and growing cover crops. We’ve been growing diverse rotations for the last ten years. But kind of the base still of our rotation is winter wheat, spring grain, canola, and the pulse crop.
Carol McFarland
But I think what we’re looking forward to talking about is your experience incorporating prospective warm season grasses into your rotation which you tried a little bit on your farm. But before we dive into that, let’s hear a little bit from Joni. And tell us a little bit about yourself and the lens you’re coming in from.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Sure. So I’m Joni Kindwell-Moore. And most people know me because of my work with a company called Snacktivist Inc that we founded actually way back in twenty-fifteen. And the goal of Snacktivist was to deliver great tasting foods, of course, that’s a huge part of any food company, but our underlying mission was to elevate opportunity crops or underutilized crops like millet, sorghum, teff, buckwheat, quinoa, and to drive that innovation and value chain access for those crops. We recognized really early on that we needed to drive the market to have more demand for diverse crops. And at that time, the gluten-free market was really, really hot. And those are definitely early adopters. Most people who eat a gluten-free diet are familiar with underutilized grains because they’re a lot of the base staples of many gluten-free flours, and so that’s what led to us launching a baking mix line. We’ve actually at times had whole different product lines, like including pizza crusts for several years that you could enjoy at Coeur d ‘Alene Resort and places like that. Finished cookies, grain bowls made from sorghum and millet. But recently, what I’m realizing is that through ten years of working to develop markets for opportunity crops, that our food system in general is up against a larger set of issues that has to do with lack of coordination through the value chain and accessing the infrastructure and people that you need to successfully implement product innovation and supply chain innovation. So Snacktivist is working really hard in that capacity as well, that’s a really important piece of the whole puzzle because no infrastructure, no markets. And Eric and I know that all too well, don’t we, Eric?
Eric Oderberg
Yes. Yes. You got to have storage and you need to have a market for it.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Correct.
Carol McFarland
Infrastructure is a big piece. I’ve heard it called the messy middle.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
It absolutely is. Yeah, or the missing middle. Like it’s there, but nobody can see it. It’s kind of opaque and it’s definitely disorganized from an industry standpoint. Like it doesn’t have formal organization like you’d think it would given how important it is to regional and national food security.
Carol McFarland
I mean, especially for the smaller, from what I understand, the smaller and more mid-level kind of scale of production chains rather than, you know, the large, large name brands. But I guess—and this is a whole can of worms that might actually be a whole different podcast theme— but one of the things I’m really curious about in this space is what comes first, our ability to explore growing something? Or the market availability? You guys want to speak to that? Eric, do you want to start?
Eric Oderberg
You need to have a market, first you need to be able to grow it and know that you can grow it and produce it successfully. Thankfully there are markets around that if you search for them you know that might not be the best, and you know I think that’s what Joni is trying to do is to find a real good market for these crops being able to grow them regeneratively and sustainably and, but you gotta you gotta be able to figure out how to grow them first and just get your feet wet so.
Carol McFarland
I have heard several people when they’re on the diversification journey, they’re reluctant to try without knowing where whatever they’re going to grow is going to go at the end. And they don’t want to try it without a market ahead of time. And that can be a barrier to trying new crops.
Eric Oderberg
Oh, sure. That’s for sure. And like I said, you need to have some kind of market that you know that you’re going to be able to sell your crop to, but always be searching for a better market. And it all comes back to trying to get more diversity into our cropping rotation. Early on with no -till, I heard Dwayne Beck speak a number of different times, and he said, rotation, rotation, rotation, and in order to make no-till work, that is what you need. And so you need a diverse cropping system. And here on the Palouse where we do have a few different crops that we can grow, it’s still not, I think, diverse enough to make the system work well. And so that’s why I’ve always been, I’ve been looking for new crops and different crops to make the rotation work.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
It’s a complicated thing because I think all too often we do put a lot of risk on farmers to adopt crops because they’re needed for that rotational role. But then you’re taking the risk that there isn’t an offtake. They’re also taking the risk that many of those crops don’t have crop insurance in place or the other things that help de-risk trying something new. And, you know, one of the things I’ve learned being on the market side and talking to many larger players in the space that said, you know, we’d be interested in trying millet or trying sorghum or, you know, doing some innovation, but we really need to know a, that there’s some consistencies around supply and demand. So that way, if we commit to launching a line that we have the farmers in a network that are ready to go to grow it so that we don’t, you know, take a huge risk and lose a lot of money on the market side, because suddenly you’ve paid a million dollars in slotting fees to get into several major retailers, and then you’re out of stock. You can’t be out of stock if you’re on the market and you’re on the shelf. And so coordinating that supply and demand cycle is absolutely critical because there’s a stalemate on both sides. There’s a stalemate on the market because of the risk of adopting a new ingredient that doesn’t have a well-established supply chain. And then there’s a risk for the farmer to grow something without an established shop take. So how do we harmonize that little teeter-totter and create some mechanisms that help spread that risk throughout the web? You know, rather than putting it all on the farmers, which I feel is super inequitable. And so, you know, that’s something that I have heard so many times across the country that if we don’t get that right, we’ll never be able to drive true regeneration in the field because we’ll have this disconnect to the market. We need the market to drive the diversity and then the farming and producers can respond to that diversity. And then everybody can actually have a functioning economic model.
Carol McFarland
You both just said some really big stuff there. That’s awesome.
Eric Odberg
Well, I’d also like to add or back up that what helped me get started with millet. I was a grower of a producer for Shepherd’s Grain for wheat flour, and Jeremy Bunch, who is the CEO now, ten years ago, he was the primary guy for the research and he wanted to have an on-farm research project on the farmer’s ground but to try all you know numerous alternative crops. And because that was Karl Kupers, you know the founder, one of the founders of Shepherd’s Grain that was his original idea is to grow all these different crops then be able to market them directly to the consumer. And so I was fortunate to be asked by Jeremy to be part of this research project to grow these diverse alternative crops. And millet was one of the ones, you know, we researched it and went over all the different crops we could have in rotation. We decided on doing a trying a six-year rotation to really you know spread out the diversification there and we both decided on millet that would be the one that could be most adapted to the Palouse and that you know really would work. There’s been other people that had tried it quite a few years ago and had some success, so we thought we were pretty comfortable that it might work.
Carol McFarland
So what was in your six-year rotation?
Eric Oderberg
Well, of course, millet, sunflowers, flax, we tried sorghum, then we had wheat and regular spring grain,wheat or barley, and the pulse crop and canola. So you have the, with millet and sorghum you have the warm summer grasses— which we don’t have it’s not usually a normal part of a rotation on the Palouse. And then with sunflowers and flax they’re a warm season broadleaf, and it’s other the thing you don’t see on the Palouse. So that’s what we tried, and had some various amounts of success with things and then trying to find the markets for those crops and where Shepherd’s Grain is direct to the consume, you know marketer and they had various amounts of success with that as well.
Carol McFarland
I mean it’s still like such an amazing model and vision that the founders had and that the power of that aggregate to help as you were saying Joni maybe kind of de-risk some of the supply side going to the market.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Yeah it’s a big deal because the risk is the thing that nobody ever talks about. Really, in a more of a holistic sense, because you think about from the buyer’s perspective too where they’re making a commitment to buying an underutilized crop. And, you know, they’re also thinking, okay, we’re making a commitment to this product innovation. It’s going to need the supply chain. You know, we want to make sure that we are pulling from farmers in a couple of different locations in case there’s some sort of horrible climate event or something that contributes to crop loss. So like there’s all of those pieces of the puzzle that come together that, you know, make people reluctant to, to scale projects that contain some of these underutilized crops. But what people don’t also realize is that we grow a ton of millet and sorghum in the United States. In fact, I think sorghum is the fifth most commonly grown commodity by volume. I may be wrong, but it’s something big. Like it’s in the top, the top handful of commodities. And also millet, there’s a huge amount of millet that’s planted, but we have this massive issue with nomenclature, and also great lack of grading standards, and lack of guidance around culinary varietals. And so when you look at these developing crops like proso millet, it’s one thing to find out what proso millet will grow where, well, where, you know, like whatever the specific climate is, soil type, et cetera. But we also need to make sure we’re selecting for varieties that are suited for culinary application. So not only for taste and flavor or bitterness or absence of bitterness, but color usually is the only driver that people really pay attention to. There’s so much more than that, especially if you’re using something as an addition to baking. We know how fussy baking is. Anyone who grows wheat and works in wheat trading understands that the specs drive the market. Sorghum and millet and crops like that don’t have any sort of formalized guidelines or guidance around seed varieties that are appropriate for certain culinary and industrial uses. At North American Millets Alliance, I’m also co-founder of that advocacy group— that’s some of the stuff we’re working on with proso millet specifically. First and foremost is how do we create some guidelines around grading standards so that when farmers take the risk and they grow millet and they want to sell it into a culinary grade market, that they’re choosing the right seed that’s going to have a good flavor profile or the right functional nutritional properties. And that, you know, that we have an understanding around what the quality expectation is for the market, because, again, I’ve talked to so many people that have done some experimenting, especially with sorghum, and they were like it was too variable. One load would show up and it was beautiful, great texture, great functionality, great flavor. The next load would show up and it would be radically different, and they couldn’t use it. And so we’ve successfully pioneered some projects into more commercial application with sorghum because we identified the seeds that were best suited for food use. And the industrial type processors on the other end that are doing really, really high quality, sophisticated processing of foods, they were like, we will buy sorghum from you all day long, but it needs to be this variety because this is great. This is the best sorghum we’ve ever had. I was like, well, I know the breeder. We know where the seed came from. We know the farmer. We’ve been to the farm and we know the handlers in the middle. So you get that security. We’ve de-risked that supply chain for you. And so that’s an interesting model that I think all of these diverse crops really need to think through because we can’t expect the market to just take that risk because they don’t know how to navigate it. And ultimately what they do is they just walk away from the opportunity and they want somebody else to figure it out. Or they just dump the risk on the farmers, which is more often what happens. That was a long-winded answer, but, you know, it’s like that whole piece of the puzzle.
Carol McFarland
It’s a big puzzle.
Eric Odberg
Well, I think that that’s a key pillar in this whole thing. One of the you know key things that Shepherd’s Grain had and is still doing is the wheat quality lab they find the varieties that perform, that the consumer likes, and the grower then is only able to grow those varieties and…
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Yes.
Eric Odberg
And then they have an identity preserved on the farm and then they’re able to mix and blend the varieties and you know, to get what the consumer wants.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
It’s a great model. It works. I mean, and that’s the thing like Shepherd’s Grain has been really successful in pioneering a lot of those market segments where people were looking for something that could have that IP preserve story. It has a humanized story. It’s not just a commodity anymore and there’s quality control. They know that it’s wheat that’s been selected for baker application. And those are the things that make market transformation come to life. And I think that Shepherd’s Grain is a very exceptional example of that.
Carol McFarland
Now, I want to touch on something that you said, Joni, and because I think you’ve been around not only the country, but also the world looking at some of these alternative crops. And Eric, you’ve had variety trials, from what I understand, in addition to your work with Shepherd’s Grain. You’ve had other variety trials of millet specifically on your farm. So I’d love to hear more about that, but Joni, you were talking about proso millet as being a really big target for culinary millets. But there’s other kinds of millets. Would you just kind of talk? Like what millets encompasses?
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Yeah it’s kind of a mess honestly like, you know I think there’s there’s eight to nine different types of separate genuses like they’re completely separate plants that are all called millet. And that’s where it gets really confusing is that the FDA regulatory oversight even today says that if you’re adding millet you just list it as millet on your ingredients on your bag. But the reality is that could be eight different genuses of plants. We’ve got proso millet is probably the most commonly planted one, but foxtail millet is everywhere. Pearl millet is everywhere. Finger millet. I mean, there’s so many and they have incredible nutritional applications. They have great animal applications, but because we don’t differentiate a lot of the time, you know, it’s just, it’s millet. Nobody really knows. It makes it really hard to ever do any commercialization. To my knowledge, there is nobody commercializing human grade foxtail millet or finger millet or pearl millet in any scale in North America today. And we would love to do that eventually. It’s alway been one of our dreams because you look at the nutritional properties of these crops and it’s incredible. The farmers who grow them love to grow them. They tend to be very resilient plants need very low input needs and very hardy when it comes to drought and heat. So there’s a lot of reasons to use them as a rotation, especially a summer rotation and eliminate some of the summer fallow. But because of the lack of coordination around nomenclature and processing, it’s very, very difficult. If someone were to give me a huge grant, like millions of dollars, like I literally would hire a team and we would start to commercialize those millets. Especially when you look at the role they play in managing diet related disease and things like diabetes. I mean, there’s just so many reasons to get behind them. Climate’s just one of them, you know.
Carol McFarland
Great. Thanks. I’d like to circle back to the nutritional side of the millets. But because we’ve got Eric here, could you describe a little bit more about some of the variety work that you’ve done and exploring maybe what is more likely to be successful and also some of the agronomy behind the millet that you’ve tried.
Eric Odberg
Sure. Well yeah you mentioned that I was in this WSU trial that’s called field and pellets I don’t even remember the exact title.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Diversifying Fields and Pallets.
Eric Odberg
Kevin Murphy was the head of it. And Taylor Reinman.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Julianne Kellogg, too.
Eric Odberg
Oh, yes. She started off of it. And we did try a number of different varieties. I guess the results were that they were very— none really stood out and it wasn’t one that was head and shoulders above the other one. So the main variety that I’ve had the most experience with is huntsman. If I had any advice of what I’ve learned from you know last ten years of experimenting with it is you don’t want to seed it too early. It’s a warm season grass. The temperature of the soil has to be at least fifty degrees and so my advice was not to even think about seeding it before Mother’s Day. And so you get the last two weeks of May up until the first week of June and I think that’s kind of the ideal planning window. It’s a fairly low nutrient requiring crop. I’ve also tried different nutrient rates. Nitrogen can go down to fifty pounds. I’ve gone up to ninety pounds. It doesn’t seem to really make a whole lot of difference. And then a little bit of phosphate, a little bit of sulfur, about eight to thirteen pounds of phosphate, nine to ten pounds of sulfur is all it needs. And you seed it about an inch and a half deep. And a lot of times when you get into the late spring, you know, the moisture situation is, you know, kind of variable. It depends if you’ve had rain or not, or going to be getting rain. Just like everything else, all the other crops that you grow on the farm and watch the weather. And just try to make a go of it.
Carol McFarland
What kind of conditions in your experience do you see that it likes or doesn’t like? And then I’m also interested to know what it does to your ground and what effects you’ve noticed from growing millet.
Eric Odberg
I guess I like to say the other real big attribute with it. Other than being a warm season grass and seeding it later. And so when you’re seeding it later, you’re getting another flush of weeds. So a big part of, probably our number one problematic weed that we have on our farm is Italian ryegrass. The reason that it’s difficult to control is it continues you’re getting moisture in the spring you just keep continuing to get flushes of it, and so when you have that delayed planting window you’re you’re getting a lot of the flushes and and then you seed it and then it’s a very competitive crop. It grows very quickly. I mean, the soil temperature is warm and it really out-competes any weeds that are out there. There’s no grass herbicide labeled for it at all. So you’re just totally relying on competition. And, you know, I spray, I do spray a broadleaf herbicide on it, Gramoxone SL and it’ll take care of any kind of broadleaves that are out there. And so yeah, this is a low input crop, very competitive and it’s also easy to harvest. It’s probably the only crop that I can really compare it to would be barley, but it’s even a little shorter than that. Barley and wheat are a very high carbon crop, and the straw organic matter weather is different with that warm season grass. It breaks up super easy and kind of makes the ground mellow. It doesn’t have a real deep root system to it. I’ve read about other growers that grow it after sunflowers because sunflowers are a deep-rooted crop and then the millet’s a shallow-rooted crop.
Carol McFarland
Have you noticed what that looks like in terms of moisture demand?
Eric Odberg
It doesn’t really require a whole lot of moisture for the crop, but you do need some summer rains. It really does better with that. In fact, a few years ago when we had a drought in twenty-one, I had fifty acres of millet and it didn’t make it because I seeded it late like I recommend, and it didn’t give any rain afterwards and it just dried up. And so it was a cover crop that year. Didn’t have goats yet for a thing, but it’s incorporated a lot in cover crop mixes and that’s what it became that year. But I would add that I then seeded winter wheat that fall into it, and the following year was my best winter wheat crop that was seeded in that middle of ground, so it was good for something.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. So it sounds like the no rain condition is not great. What about heat units? It seems like it would really like heat units being a warm season grass. Have you grown it at a time when we just really didn’t get the heat units to make it perform?
Eric Odberg
In twenty-two, the year after the drought, it was a very wet summer. I seeded those trials, those WSU trials like the seventeenth of June, so I mean super late and…
Carol McFarland
Yeah that deserves like a gasp in terms of seeding.
Eric Odberg
Yeah super late and it was fine, but then we ended up getting the heat units afterwards and yeah it all went around a ton. I was really surprised that even at that late seating date it performed well. So I’ve grown it in many very different climate conditions. And I think that’s one thing that we experience more now in the Pacific Northwest. You’ll have one year it’s super dry and the next year it’s not. And you have these prolonged extremes and that’s just normal now. So new normal.
Carol McFarland
Well, it makes sense in that case, you know, in this idea of exploring different crops, you know, around being able to have more tools in the toolbox to be able to adapt to different conditions, especially when you have something that can be planted as like in late June. And, you know, that allows you some flexibility to maybe, maybe I will throw in a little bit of that over here. So you did talk a little bit more about what you’ve seen in the field and the soil and that you had your best wheat crop afterwards and the organic matter. Is there any other kind of big takeaways and wins for growing millet that you’ve experienced?
Eric Odberg
Joni mentioned sorghum too is another crop that they are trying to market and grow. And I guess I just from my experience, I only tried it one year but then I listened to those growers that did their own research project last couple years with sorghum. And I think it— you’re talking about heat units, I think that crop does need more heat units in that millet doesn’t really and it’s more adapted to the climate of the Palouse in the inland northwest, and I’m not really certain that sorghum is. I think it needs possibly more heat units. You still want to seed it late because you want the warm soil temperature. And when you do that, what I’ve heard is you just kind of run out of season. And one thing when you get to harvesting time with millet, you can desiccate it with Roundup. But if I was going to market it with Joni and Snacktivist it wouldn’t be food grade. You would not be wanting to do that.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
And it doesn’t even work from what I’ve heard from farmers that I’ve talked to them about desiccants. It’s such a big seed. It’s like really hard to actually terminate it.
Eric Odberg
The sorghum, yes.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Yeah, I know people that have tried and they were like, we sprayed it with Roundup and nothing happened.
Eric Odberg
Swathing it and doing it that way is much better. And it works well. You don’t have much crop loss at all with swathing and you just need to have the equipment and you have to have a swather and pick up the header, and it works really well that way. And then it’ll be eligible for Joni to be able to market it.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Yeah because we won’t buy it if it has desiccant, but you know it’s it’s interesting because you know figuring out the equipment needed to create the ideal environment or the ideal harvesting knowing that fall’s coming and we get some really wet weather in September in the northwest, sometimes. Sometimes it’s super hot and dry and sometimes it’s really wet. This year it was really weird. It was wet and cold in August and that really hammered that sorghum when it needed to get those heat units and really get mature, but I’ve gone through some really impressive sorghum fields in eastern oregon in July, August that are just incredible. And the productivity of that plant is wild. And the roots that it sets are really impressive too. You mentioned the favorable wheat harvest the year following millet. I hear that a lot for sorghum as well. And in fact, I’ve even heard people claim that they are seeing up to like a twenty percent boost in productivity in their wheat following a sorghum rotation. We attribute that to like the excessive carbon exudates that sorghum puts into the soil. Millet doesn’t really have as much of a dynamic exudate profile as sorghum, but it’s interesting that there’s something with those C4 plants that conditions the soil in a way that wheat loves the next season. I’d love for some scientists to study that more. I’ve been talking to Melinda Yurka about that. She’s a sorghum breeder out of University of Nevada, Reno, but I think that’s something that also would be a benefit to farmers here where wheat’s our dominant crop. If we can have a crop rotation that sets up your wheat to be healthier and more robust and higher yields, that’s a big benefit.
Carol McFarland
I heard some questions around sorghum and it being allelopathic and also potentially suppressing subsequent crops, depending. So I feel like, you know, with sorghum in particular, maybe it could go a couple of directions.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Right. And is it suppressing is the allelopathic activities targeting some weeds that you don’t like, you know? And those are some of the interesting areas of soil and cropping science that I think we’re going to see really explode in the coming years. Intentionally planting out your weeds using allelopathy. And I don’t know if you guys have ever looked at that book, When Weeds Talk, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff written in there that I would love to see explored further.
Carol McFarland
And even, you know, whether it’s using more ecological practices for weed management, such as canopy closure and allelopathy as part of your integrated pest management, or, you know, being able to have the flexibility to plant a bit later and control a really problematic weed just because of timing, there is a lot of room for diversification. But, you know, as we’ve talked about, it’s like what comes first, the chicken or the egg in the market or the…
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Yeah. They need to be developed at the same time, honestly, like in tandem coordinated.
Carol McFarland
Joni, I know you’ve seen millets and sorghums around the world and also thought more about the nutritional quality of millets in particular. Do you want to talk a little bit more about like why why should I go home today and eat some millet?
Joni Kindwall-Moore
Yeah. I think for the typical like north american citizen for most of us some of the more provocative reasons to choose a millet as a grain piece of your dinner plate is that they do tend to contribute to regulation of blood sugar, and oddly enough it’s not because they’re low carb because they’re not. I mean they have, they’re they’re a seed that has starch in it so they do have carbohydrates, but there’s a there’s a lot going on there that we don’t yet understand about how millets contribute to blood sugar regulation. I do have a friend and colleague who is, he’s actually a molecular geneticist, but he was a plant breeder for Syngenta for many, many years and then went into, you know, not the big consolidated type of plant breeding programs and really took a deep dive into how the tertiary, like the secondary and tertiary metabolites that these millets create have some regulatory effect on our blood sugar, maybe even similar to GLP-one agonists like the weight loss drugs that are really popular in America today. Nobody really knows. It’s not been explored, but there are some studies out there from around the world, China and India, mainly that do provide some really good baseline indication that we should be exploring the role of millets in diabetic friendly foods. To me, I think that that is one of the most provocative reasons to opt to eat millet. They’re a whole grain. They taste good. I like them. And they also have really good, especially sorghum and some of the other ones as well, but gut microbiome effects as well. So we did a very informal trial here at Snacktivist Headquarters with our grain bowl, which is like a really awesome product that we were developing with a partner in California, which unfortunately we had to set aside due to loss of our manufacturing access, but it was a whole grain cooked sorghum, whole grain cooked proso millet with an oat pudding. And we sent out samples to multiple people across the country and asked them to eat it every day for ten days. And people enjoyed it. They loved it. It was filling. They reported that it decreased their appetite through the day. So if they had that in the morning, throughout the day, they just had better appetite control, which was an interesting, very, you know, wishy-washy observation because there’s no science behind this. This is just observational. But also they reported that they had better regularity with their intestines, and that they just felt better through the day. So I thought that was interesting. I’d love for somebody who actually could put that through some scientific rigor. Dr. Andy Benson at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and his team, they are exploring the gut health components in sorghum. And there’s been some really great labs published, or results published out of their lab in the last couple of years, actually. So there’s some cool stuff. So gut microbiome and blood sugar, you know, diabetes friendly type starches, I think that those are the two kinds of champion things. But, you know, even when you look at sorghum, the nutritional profile is outstanding, especially when you compare it to rice, sorry, rice, like I love you, you’re delicious, but you don’t offer a lot of nutrition. So when you look at the fact that in the United States, we have a population of people who are overly fed with calories, but generally malnourished, especially from a micronutrient standpoint, staples like sorghum are really important because the micronutrient profile of those grains is incredible. And so if, you know, again, there’s some really cool research being done to select better seed varieties that have a nicer culinary experience for people. They can cook it up and eat it like rice, but it could effectively be a gut health positive, more diabetic friendly type rice. I get really excited about those projects. We’ve not had the money to commercialize them, but someday we will. It’s pretty cool.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, thanks. I was trying to sneak in a snarky comment about if all those nice gut microbiome effects happen if you drink the sorghum beer.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Well, you know, that’s a freebie.
Eric Odberg
I learned from Joni earlier this year, she was talking about foxtail millet and how it really has this low glycemic index and it’s really good for diabetic patients. I have a son who has type one diabetes, and I immediately told him about that. And then when I saw him over Christmas, I go, so do you have your, your jar, your bag of foxtail millet that you’re using to bake stuff with? And he was like, no, no.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
It’s hard to get. Yeah Eric, it’s very hard to find. You have to import it.
Eric Odberg
Not Safeway, or Albertsons, or anything like that.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
No, even on Amazon, like you can buy it, but it comes from India and about half the time when we purchase it, it comes in and it’s, I have a really sensitive nose for mycotoxins and it’s mycotoxin contaminated. So I just pitch it. I reach out to the company, I tell them and they don’t ever reply. So again, this is where I think like, there’s a huge opportunity to commercialize foxtail millet. Again, it’s lower glycemic index than rice, but it does have some property where, especially with type two diabetes, they’ve done studies in India where people eliminated rice and substituted it for all the foxtail millet they wanted to eat, and they dropped their A one C, which is indicative of better glycemic control. So I think we really need to get serious about studying those things because they grow foxtail millet across the nation and they usually just roller crimp it. They don’t even harvest it unless they’re growing it for seed. I’ve actually de-hulled some of the foxtail millet that Steve Tucker grew in Nebraska and we ate it and it was fantastic. You know, as we have more infrastructure and we can solve for the missing middle, then we can start to commercialize those crops. And for people like the farmers that I know that do grow it and just roller crimp it, they would love to let it go to maturation and harvest it and have a profit, a value add off of that cover crop. And so because they’re growing it, regardless of if they get an ROA off of a harvestable end product, because they like what it does for the soil. They like what it does for their pasture. You know, there’s a lot of reasons for farmers to love it especially in the midwest.
Carol McFarland
The things I hear in this conversation too and sitting here with Eric and knowing about your soil health, your on-farm soil health mission, and you know I imagine that the nutritional benefit that you’re describing Joni we can extrapolate that healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy people.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Yes.
Carol McFarland
So how how do we get more market-based valuation for really great soil health practices? So what do you do? What’s your take?
Joni Kindwell-Moore
That’s the holy grail, Carol. Yes, we’re all looking for that.
Eric Odberg
Yes, I think we’re wanting to, by the way we’re producing our food now with more regenerative practices. We’re trying to grow nutrient-dense food, and it really sounds to me like millet is a crop that can really encompass that, and that is nutrient-dense in the first place even without good soil health. And so I think it’s just, it seems like it’s a really important piece of the puzzle. And so we really need to have this in the United States. Grow millet all across the globe. It’s an important crop. You know, twenty-twenty three was UN’s year of millet. And that’s what they celebrated and promoted.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Eric, I’m glad you brought up UN Year of Millets because that was really a fantastic initiative championed by India, and India has done a really incredible job taking a very systemic approach, top down and bottom up orchestrated approach where they’re like, look, we need India to re-embrace millets because millets are the historical staple of India. And it wasn’t really until recently, like the colonial period that China and India they started to consider rice as the predominant starch staple. And so that’s a recent thing. And their diabetes epidemic is very reflective of that dietary shift. India has the highest incidence of type two diabetes in the world. And so China is right behind them. Everybody thinks it’s just the US and Australia, but in reality, it’s actually very, very high in those populations. And so they they recognize that we have got to re-embrace these staple grains that people once lived on across around the globe, honestly like from, from the Roman empire to the ancient empires of China. China was built on millet. It was not built on rice. And so it wasn’t until the most recent dynasties that that became the state preferred staple grains. So, you know, India really led the way with that UN Year of Millets and they infused a lot of infrastructure money into diversified processing infrastructure and catalyzing entrepreneurial communities. Predominantly, a lot of women like doing small scale, you know, kind of village focused initiatives where they’re doing pastas and all these different things made out of millets. And there’s some incredible leadership in India. Unfortunately, like, you know, we had this great human year of millets. We did so much stuff here, even in North America, but we’ve yet to see the market respond at all. And I had really interesting conversations. I, you know, tried to bring it up with so many retailers, all the major retailers in the United States. Whole Foods didn’t care. Sprouts didn’t care. They didn’t want to hear about it. But guess who called me? Walmart, and then Giant, a big grocery store chain on the East Coast said, we want to get behind this. So I thought that that right there is a major problem. If, you know, the so-called leaders of the natural products, healthy food world are too cool to hear about UN Year of Millets. Like they need a real wake up call. Like that really schooled me on ever wanting to even do business with them, to be honest.
Carol Mcfarland
Wow.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
It was insulting, honestly, to the global initiative behind millets.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. Well, something from the UN, I can, I can appreciate that. So hearing that just really big picture, I really appreciate your bringing that knowledge and expertise to this region too. I also, I’ve got a question for Eric about really like micro level agronomy production of millet here on the Palouse. How did you decide your seeding rate? And did you seed it with your super cool AgPro drill that you talked about the last time we visited on the podcast?
Eric Oderberg
I have seeded it for two years with that drill, a hoe type drill, and it worked just fine. And thirty pounds is the seeding rate that I’ve used with it.
Carol McFarland
How did you dial that in?
Eric Oderberg
Well, I have this— since no one really grew it in this area here, you know, our universities didn’t have an experience with it. I had to search for— there’s a proso millet guide for the great plains and it’s produced by University of Wyoming and Colorado State and USDA ARS, and it has just a lot of you know basic agronomy information about millet, and that is essentially what I use.
Carol McFarland
Has it been pretty transferable?
Eric Odberg
Yeah yeah. I guess that’s one thing I like, one of the things I like to drive home is that it’s not a difficult crop to grow and it’s pretty easy, it’s pretty resilient. Except when we just don’t get any rain.
Carol McFarland
Which I’m sure several listeners on this podcast do in fact experience
Eric Odberg
Yeah yeah.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
You need that support though honestly and there’s not a lot of documented stuff. Gary Whitescruff is one of our leaders at North American Millets Alliance, and he wrote a book on proso millet cultivation and agronomy and processing and it’s a really good one if you’ve not if you’ve not seen it. Eric we’ll have to get a copy for you. He’s fantastic. We got to put a plug in for Gary. He’s like he’s the ultimate millet champion honestly it’s amazing.
Eric Odberg
Oh you mean I have competition?
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Move over, Eric. Just kidding.
Eric Odberg
Yeah, that’s fine by me.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Yeah, well, you guys need to be an expert on so many things as farmers. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’m so passionate about helping elevate farmers’ work is that I feel like you guys are the quintessential entrepreneurs. Where you are, you have to master so many things so well. And so kudos to the farmers who take the steps to innovate and think outside the box and do what they need to do to respond to the needs of their soil. Because it’s a heavy lift and it’s just very admirable. So thank you, Eric.
Eric Odberg
Just trying to make the whole system work. I think the millet has a place and could have a very important place of a cropping mix.
Carol McFarland
Well, to appreciate and share the sentiment that you just expressed, Joni, about our innovative farmers, in particular in this region, it is absolutely the kind of thing that we celebrate with the On Farm Trials podcast. And, you know, I just really want to appreciate and recognize those who are willing to share their experiences. So I just really want to give another big thank you to you for being on the podcast in season two, Eric, and Joni for being on the podcast for the first time. So I really appreciate the views and perspectives that have really come out today.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Thanks for having me.
Carol McFarland
Do either of you guys have any kind of last takeaways that you’d like to share?
Carol McFarland
There’s a lot, I know, still.
Eric Odberg
Well, there’s one more thing I’d like to mention. When I was working with Shepherd’s Grain and millet. And we found we had a market for it. I was going to grow it and had a buyer, a malting facility, somewhat local, and they were going to switch over to gluten-free beer and they were going to use millet for it. And that’s great. And so I grew like a fifty acre field of it. And anyway, things didn’t turn out. They decided not to do it, and so you know that was a big big risk, but fortunately in our area we have a backup market we have Global Harvest Foods which is a bird seed manufacturer. And I was able to sell to them and and but what we really need is that that premium food grade market for it and that’s what Joni is trying to do.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
Slowly but surely, Eric. We’re working on it. It’s taking way too long, but thank you.
Eric Odberg
Oh, no. I’m definitely used to that. And it’ll happen. And hopefully all of us will be having that millet sorghum cereal bowl that you were talking about earlier.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
It’s so good. We’re applying for a grant to get our regenerative rotation pasta that we start with food service, but we do a gluten-free one that’s sorghum, millet, garbanzo. And we need one other thing. We’re working through that. Probably not grown in the Northwest, but unfortunately, but the other one, the wheat one, I’m really excited about, is like a Northwest grown durham and then sorghum, millet and garbanzo. So it’s like actually a rotation. Like you can taste like a part of an agricultural rotation that’s appropriate for our region with that pasta. So those are the kind of things we’re going to need to really advance the market. But the grain bowls, Colleen of Zico Food, and she’s the woman behind the Civic Project, and they’ll be doing the processing of the proso millet. And they’ve got a lot of really great innovation lined up for proso millet under her brand as well. And she’s got a really great footprint. I think that, you know, it’s coming. It’s definitely coming, but it just takes time. And that’s where entrepreneurs are not always very good, is that we want it done yesterday. And that just doesn’t happen when you’re changing the market. So.
Carol McFarland
Like steering the Titanic. So is that the rotation pasta? Is that going to be a rotini? So we can get the regenerative rotation rotini.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
I, it might actually, and like a penne. Yeah. Like we’re, you know. There’s a really cool pasta manufacturer in the Northwest that they’ve got the cool equipment. So if we can get this grant to activate that, we’ll get that launched going into next fall and hopefully into schools and college campuses and food service places so people can actually participate in a regenerative food that is recognizable and easy to eat and understand. Pasta, everybody knows what to do with a noodle. It’s really easy. So, yeah, I’m pretty excited about that project. That could be really fun.
Carol McFarland
So my last burning question before we wrap up here, I really got to ask, both of you have used the term regenerative quite a bit through this interview. And can I ask, what does regenerative mean to you when we talk about production practices?
Eric Oderberg
You have no-till. That’s the first thing. And then not using any synthetic herbicides, fertilizers, and then having cover crops, and then also integrating livestock with cover crops. And so those are the things. And there’s very few growers that have achieved that holy grail and are doing all of those practices. And I’m just on that path and started, like I said, for the last couple of years. But if you really want to have healthy soil and you really want to have nutrient-dense food, that’s the way to do it. You got to be regenerative, and I’m convinced of that. So we’re on that path, and it’s working toward that goal.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. You’re on the journey.
Eric Odberg
Yep.
Carol McFarland
How about you, Joni? What does regenerative mean to you?
Joni
Yeah, that’s always a tough one to really define. But the way I look at it is regenerative is a complex and unique set of management interventions that lead to outcomes that drive for better health of the plants, better nutrient profile of the food, and less dependency on inputs coming from outside the farm. And so those are like the three, you know, kind of signals that when I’m looking at a system and I’m looking at a farming system, talking to the farmers, those are the things that I’m looking for because I’m looking for outcomes, validation that’s indicative that whatever the mix of things they’re doing— because that’s going to be different if you’re a farmer in Arizona, it’s going to be different than if you’re a farmer in Georgia or a farmer back here in our own backyard in the Palouse. And so what I like to see is proof that their system is responding favorably to what they’re doing. And those favorable benchmarks are a noted reduction in imported things coming from the outside, either nutrition or management, chemical management interventions like herbicides, fungicides, etc. And then that increase in health of the plants and nutrition of the food. So that’s a very outcomes focused answer, but that’s kind of where my head’s at.
Carol McFarland
Great. I just want to really, again, acknowledge both of you and the great work that you’re doing and taking your time to navigate the experience of coordinating the podcast. But also just really appreciate you sharing your knowledge and experience in this space.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
It’s been fun. It’s always great to see the two of you. I always enjoy it, so yeah twice in two weeks we’re on a roll guys.
Eric Odberg
Thanks Carol
Carol McFarland
Look forward to the next time as well. If you keep trying all this stuff Eric you’re gonna have to be on season three of this thing.
Eric Odberg
I’ll be on season three, so I gotta try.
Joni Kindwell-Moore
It sounds like a great plan. Yeah. It’s great. So thanks so much for having me. It was wonderful. Thanks you guys.