It all started with a bucket...or two...

Harvesting Hard Red Spring Wheat

Meet Rick! He is my ORIGINAL grain buyer, my first direct to consumer sale and the inspiration that drove me to launch Guardian Grains.

It all started 2 years ago, I happened to stumble across his ad on a local classified page....he was "ISO cleaned desiccant free wheat berries for home milling" . My first thought was..."what the HECK is a wheat berry"🤪! My second thought was "what exactly is home milling". These are 2 things that I was not familiar with, after a quick Google search I was like "OMG!!! I have that!" Long story short, we agreed to meet the next day in my nearest town to deliver his grain.

I scrambled to find food grade buckets because naturally I could not deliver milling grain in used oil buckets of which we have an

abundance on our farm.

Me getting ready to meet my very first grain buyer

After Kelly filled my buckets with clean grain, I decided I had better label these buckets in some way so that when the bucket was empty(I underestimated how fast a bucket of wheat disappears when you are home milling) he would remember WHO he purchased from and so our logo was born.

Before there was a name, there was a symbol

I wanted the logo to represent our pride for farming in North Dakota, so naturally I started with the shape of our state. I incorporated roots reaching out across it because as many of you know our focus on is on soil health and that starts with living roots. In retrospect, these roots also represent the regeneration of our farm reaching out to communities through better food. The tip of the heart is quite nearly where our farm sits on a map. And the wheat? Well, it was a way to demonstrate that we are a GLUTEN FULL farm and proud of it.

We grow wheat you can eat©

Filling up his original grain bucket and grabbing pasta

Meeting Rick has truly been an awakening on so many levels (did I mention his daughter was a good friend in high school but I never actually met him). I had no idea people were looking for a source of grain for home milling. We were at the point where the regeneration of our farm could now spread out into the community through food. After all that is what we grow....FOOD.. even though so many of us get stuck on the hamster wheel of growing commodities. And so, Guardian Grains was born as a way to deliver grains that were better for our planet and our bodies.

My very first cinnamon rolls from our freshly milled wheat

I really want you all to absorb the ripple effect here. Your voice as a consumer matters and has the power to change the lives of many. Ask for what you want, stand firm on your commitment to sourcing better ingredients and I will meet you there 😃. Meeting this man and now so many other customers changed my purpose in life. It changed how I nourish our family. It sounds crazy but up until meeting Rick, we had not been eating our own grains, 100% was sold and commingled into the commodity market and I inevitably bought some version of it back as loaf of nutrient deplete bread on the grocery store shelf or as "frankenflour"(that's my snarky reference to flours available at scale). Now we mill our own grains for all of our baking, we eat whole grains for breakfast and have a new found appreciation for what we are doing to influence soil health, human health and animal health.

Thank You for supporting our farm with every purchase you make!