I just spent my Christmas bonus. I made my first huge bulk food purchase. Rice, corn, beans, wheat. Hell yeah! 450 pounds of food that needs bagged. I'm psyched.
Anyway, I ran up to my local homebrew store to buy the wheat. I figure this can be used for flour down the road. My concern is that nearly half my bill was on the uncrushed wheat. When you buy flour from the grocery store it's $0.50 a pound. I'm paying $1.60 per pound of unworked flour. I'm happy to do it if that's what it takes, but it seems like uncrushed wheat should be a little cheaper. Where do you get yours from in bulk at a decent price?
Check on Breadbecker.com. They offer lots of grains. It's a co op so prices are sometimes less expensive. I believe they have a limited delivery area, it's a "meet the truck in a parking lot" type of drop off. Also Azure.com has bulk prices on a lot items. The Church of Latter Day Saints (The Mormon Church) has a website, ProvidentLiving.com and they offer number 10 cans of wheat berries, already packaged with OA's, fairly reasonable pricing there and shipping is very inexpensive if you don't live near a storage facility for a pick up.
It is not easy as a family or a small group to get a good price. I am lucky and have a LSD store within a couple of hours but is still not cheap. As mentioned above if you can get Azure is good but you need people to make it cost efficient. Here is a link do some research here. Shipping kill you Bear has a group they rent truck and buy 1000 lbs each and go to the source from what he has said.
Maybe shoot him an text on his phone and he (may) give you his contact???
https://wholegrainscouncil.org/find-whole-grains/mail-order-grain-sources
See if there is someone locally that sells animal feed. There is someone in my area that brings a couple of truck loads of various animal feed and sets up on the weekends and sells it off the truck. I stopped by a week ago and asked if the had wheat or could get it. They didn't have any on the trucks but assured me they could get it and it would be $15.00 a bag. Told them I needed four bags and I picked it up this Saturday. They were only able to get three from their supplier but would have more next week so I took the three and told them I would be back next weekend for more. I know some people get grossed out about the thought of animal feed but my understanding is it is not triple cleaned prior to packaging and I would be cleaning it prior to processing it anyways so I will take the savings. Mormon cannery is also a great place if there is one nearby.
Augason Farms has hard white wheat berries in 24 and 40 lb buckets for just over a dollar per pound.
Is that the going rate? Seems pretty expensive, unless our store is extremely cheap. Mhhhh
The hit and miss of wheat availability at a feed store would most likely be due to the season and not wanting to carry inventory over the rest of the year since they will be taxed for that inventory. So they will not want to carry inventory they aren't selling. I work for an ag chemical/ fertilizer company that sells to farmers and anyone else also. Most people dont realize the public can purchase from places like where I work. Most people dont even know what the business is even though they drive by it every day
To add to what I wrote earlier. At least at the location I work at in south texas we carry 50# bags of winter wheat and can get bulk depending on the amount you are looking for, as for spring wheat we can get bulk from 2000# on up. We would need a couple days notice to get the bulk for either one. I've never heard of anyone using the wheat we sell for making flour but I don't see why it couldn't be. And since we cant sell it unless it has 80%+ germ(most is in the 90%+) you could use it to grow your own without much issue. It would be a good cover crop for areas you may not have something else planted so the ground isn't fallow. Oats would be another good crop for this over winter
I'm curious to know. If you're not buying a skid of wheat, is a dollar a pound a reasonable buy?
For the winter wheat we sold this last season (Oct-mid Dec) in 50# bags it worked out to about $0.38# or so. that is what we were retailing it for. This is for south texas near the hill country where we purchased it from the farmer 10 miles from us that we picked up with our own equipment so there wasn't much in the way of freight added to our cost. So not knowing where you are and where the store you got your wheat from got the wheat I cant say if you over paid for your area. This is what it is here.
Looking at your original post again. You may paid more since it was from a brewery/ supply where they will (I'm assuming) mark up the price a great deal since they are a niche market. I know with fertilizer (I'm the fertilizer manager) we dont have very much margin on fertilizer and there are 2-3 customer we sell to that repackage and resell at a great great deal more than we did to them, so if that scenario played out with the brewery like I think it did I would be looking for a farmers Co-OP or some other agricultural supply store that sells wheat for any further purchases.
My recent purchase of 50 pound bags ends up being 30 cents a pound. A few years ago it was 20 cents a pound. This is from a animal feed seller who gets it from the mill so it is not triple cleaned so it does have some chaff in it but I will take the savings and clean it before processing.
Nothing wrong with getting bin run seed. If we weren't selling it to farmers who use seed drills we would be getting the bin run also to sell but all the junk clogs up seed planters and then I have angry customers. When we get oats we get just the bin run stuff cause most of what we sell goes out broadcast not through a drill. I just recently was able to start saving up food and am working on just having a few months on hand to start with.
Around here we pay 31 for 50 pounds of berries and 34 for 50 pounds of flour. HOWEVER, it's the whole wheat, non bleached, non GMOs etc....
I've been looking at purchasing some wheat from the co-op and had a few questions....the difference between the grades is animal is still 'dirty'? Is there anything spray wise that people can't eat but animals can? Thank you!
If I'm not mistaken it isn't that they treat the crop differently, it just might have a few more bugs, grass, rocks, etc in it. It's less refined and you'll have to go over it yourself to make sure you aren't packaging up a little extra protein from the upcoming cicadas. :)