Sustainable farming is not an easy sell

That might be the simplest way to describe a guiding principle of Shepherd's Grain, a small, commercial cooperative launched by Pacific Northwest farmers hoping to market their wheat flour grown using "no-till" agricultural methods.

"The single most important factor in sustainable farming today is preventing soil erosion and maintaining healthy soil," said Karl Kupers, one of the founders of Shepherd's Grain.

"We want our farming methods to be sustainable, but we have to make this sustainable as a business also," Kupers said. "You can hug and kiss and talk about sustainability all you like, but this still has to pay the bills."

The financial incentive of U.S. agriculture, he said, still heavily favors tilling fields for single-crop operations. Even the consumer push for organic food tends to favor big operations over the small farms, he said.

"Heck, today you can buy organic food in Seattle that was made in China," Kupers said. It's a hotly debated topic, he said, but consumers shouldn't assume that all organic food is necessarily better for the environment, or for the soil.

The primary mission of Shepherd's Grain, he said, was to figure out how to get the marketplace to reward local, no-till farmers. Kupers and Fred Fleming, along with a dozen family farms in Eastern Washington, Oregon and Idaho, have tried for the past few years to get bakers, bread makers and other grain buyers to use only no-till flour.

It's been a tough sell, but some are starting to get on board.

"We had planned to go organic," said Josh Dorf, chief executive of the Stone-Buhr Flour Co. Five years ago, Dorf bought the 100-year-old Seattle brand name back from its parent company, Unilever, with the aim of resurrecting it as a small, natural flour and grain maker.