LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Louismill is an organic micro-mill that produces stone-ground flour and grits. Stone-ground flour tastes better and is better for you than flour from a production-type mill. Louismill owner Tom Edwards sees that, along with milling corn into grits, as a way to support small Kentucky farms.

“We grow soft white wheat here in Kentucky,” Edwards said. “The biggest challenge with farming small-lot wheat production is harvesting it. There are two methods: One is you have to cut it, thrash it and winnow it, then clean it. That requires a lot of handwork. The second method is using a combine. They’re expensive, large pieces of equipment.”

Generating a lot of organic wheat in Kentucky is tough, Edwards said. He works with small-scale farmers, often with less than 10 acres. Farmers are familiar with corn, however. When they are finished with their organic vegetables and other things for the season, the corn for grits makes a nice cash crop.

As Louismill’s production increased, rather than asking one farmer for more production, Edwards chose a different approach. As he needed more product, he would add another farmer and allow them to share the benefits.

Edwards deals mostly with Mennonite farmers in the Liberty, Ky., area, he said. They do their work by hand. They harvest the corn when it is ready, not when it is convenient to get the combine in the field. They dry it on the stalks, which allows additional sugars to go into the corn.

At first, Edwards wasn’t sure how much to pay the farmers. He knew the commodity price was not reflective of the true cost of farming. Rather than going with the commodity price, he asked a farmer what he would get at the feedlot.

“He gave me a price,” Edwards said. “I said, ‘if I paid you double that would that be attractive to you?’ He said, ‘absolutely!’ It was an experiment where I saw could I do something where I break traditional rules concerning commodity and food production and create a winning environment where my customers get great ingredients that are grown responsibly in a sustainable environment by people who enjoy farming.”

But would it work? It does, he said. Pre COVID they were shipping 4,000 pounds of grits a month to Washington, D.C., to a large restaurant group. Plus they sell quite a bit of retail.

“The economic impact for the farmers that we work with has been great,” he explained. “It shows that a working farm model can work. We are willing to pay proper pricing for our food, it’s just that the economics and the politics behind where we’ve gotten, no one is willing to change that.”

Looking at traditional economics and applying it to the food supply chain doesn’t work, Edwards said. Rather if the model got flipped, if one looked at microeconomics instead of macroeconomics, where you have thousands of small farmers nurturing and growing the land sustainably and responsibly, the consumers get better, healthier food at an economic cost.

“It’s good for the farmer and also good for our society,” Edwards said. “Our model economy is a little bit distorted right now. It is slow to change but I’m optimistic about it. We as consumers have to demand it. Hopefully, we can rekindle the small ag market to be able to have these kinds of local products.”

Edwards is also the proprietor of MozzaPi Pizza, a restaurant on the site of the mill. He is a world-renowned artisan baker and has led artisan bread pizza classes in the United States and Europe.