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Looking for a place to eat while watching the Super Bowl? Hopscotch, on Southeast Hawthorne, hopes to be open February 1st, offering a range of pub staples.

You know that an ingredient is pretty special when a restaurant or bakery lets you know the name brand. One way to highlight your commitment to quality is to make sure you explicitly let people know that you use Shepherd’s Grain flour for your pizzas, as Hopscotch does here:

The pizzas at Hopscotch will start with dough made using Shepherd’s Grain flours, rolled thin with a rolling pin. Pies will come with typical toppings, like green peppers, onions, olives, fresh tomatoes, and pepperoni.

Shepherd’s Grain flours provide excellent pizza baking qualities, including the New Jersey style thin crust pizza that Hopscotch is throwing out. Read the full article on Eater here, and go support this new Portland restaurant.

Agricultural food processors are coming up with all sorts of creative ways to provide services to help farmers invest in regenerative farming practices. But there is nothing more impactful than purchasing these food ingredients directly from those regenerative farms. Shepherd’s Grain is unique in its ability to put together a supply chain that brings direct monetary value to its regenerative farmers based on each pound of flour sold.

Beyond the monetary value that rewards these farmers for doing the right thing for the environment, identity-preserving the wheat from the farm through the milling process allows for superior quality management.

There are many risks associated with adopting agricultural practices that are not conventional. The most impactful way to support regenerative farmers as they take these risks is to buy their flour. Recently, PMQ Pizza Magazine highlighted this in an article about Shepherd’s Grain, which you can read here.

In the Palouse region of Idaho & Washington, agricultural lands are dominated by wheat production. The higher rainfall zones are largely in a three-year rotation of wheat-wheat-legume. In the lower rainfall zones continuous wheat is grown, or a two-year system of wheat-fallow is implemented. Whitman County, Washington, which encompasses the western part of the Palouse, is the largest wheat producing county in the nation.

Before the Palouse was settled by pioneers in the latter half of the 19th century, the region was a prairie with a diversity of vegetation, including broadleaf plants, grass plants, sedges, and various forbs. But once settled, it became clear that the Palouse was an ideal ecosystem for wheat production. Wheat handling infrastructure was built to accommodate this, and the export market in the Pacific Rim nations stood ready to support the mass production of wheat.

Shepherd’s Grain farmers recognize that bringing diversity back to the ecosystem within their farm operations is necessary for sustainable farming. Starting in 2014, Shepherd’s Grain helped subsidize on-farm research by Shepherd’s Grain grower Eric Odberg of Genesee, Idaho. The project entailed 32 acres to be used to try a lengthened crop rotation of six years that included a diversity of crops. Read more about the project here.

The first year of the project saw the 32 acres planted to proso millet, a crop that had not been grown commercially on the Palouse (or at least had not been tried for a long time). From planting date to harvest, it was a learning experience. But in the end it showed great promise. Since that time, Odberg has planted proso millet several times.

Washington State University (WSU) has had an ongoing program to research proso millet production in the Palouse region. Recently, WSU was awarded a grant by WSARE to research millet varieties best suited for growers and end-users. Shepherd’s Grain growers were eager to partner with WSU on this project, in hopes of learning more about millet production and of developing more local markets.

Capital Press recently put out an article highlighting WSU’s program, along with Eric Odberg’s and Shepherd’s Grain’s leadership in advancing millet production.