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Sara and Shawn Gingue share the dreams, the excitement, and most of all, the planning for NEK Grains.
Paul and Sara Gingue line up the last of the sweet corn harvest at the Gingue Family Farm.
Sara Gingue with two successfully “bred” heifers at the barn.
Levi joins his dad in the combine to harvest a field of winter wheat.
Family farming means that Paul, at left, crawls under the combine with Shawn, center, to figure out what’s going wrong before the barley gets harvested.
The Gingues’ 2020 crop of pumpkins was great. The 2022 crop should be on hand as the October North Star Monthly reaches readers.
A 40-inch granite wheel for a New American Stone Mill like the one being built for the Gingues’ NEK Grains. Courtesy of North American Stone Mills.
Sara and Shawn Gingue share the dreams, the excitement, and most of all, the planning for NEK Grains.
Waterford's Paul Gingue remembers when he took over the family farm from his father, John. “I came back and made a lot of changes...Dad was pretty receptive.”
Decades later, Paul's son Shawn, and his wife Sara, are making changes of their own. It's not the kind of farming Shawn grew up with, or that Sara expected, but it comes with excitement and often surprise. It’s an adventure, requiring flexibility and adaptation.
“Every year it’s different," explains Shawn. "You could be dry, you could be wet, and things are going to invade your field. You have to plan at least a year in advance. I take a lot of notes throughout the season, all on different notepads. It’s kind of like I’m always looking about me all year.”
This season’s harvest of the Gingue Farm’s “wicked good” sweet corn is done; Brooklyn and Whitney, ages 13 and 10, helped pick the corn this year. Now the pumpkins and winter squash come in, while 4-year-old Kenna watches while the newly- expanded farm store gets built. About 35 miles away, in Wolcott, there’s a modern stone-grinding mill being built for the wheat that their brother Levi, 7, helped harvest at the end of the summer.
Meanwhile, their parents, Sara and Shawn, keep planning a rotation of fields at the home farm and beyond, while also taking time to be keynote speakers at an exciting conference in New Hampshire called Radically Rural, based on what they’re doing daily.
And that’s what Shawn’s father Paul Gingue gets to see, as the new generations refresh and reinvent his Waterford farm.
Paul and Sara Gingue line up the last of the sweet corn harvest at the Gingue Family Farm.
As you pass the Gingue farm, whether on Route 18 or on the interstate that cuts through some of the pastures, a warm-season view includes familiar black-and-white Holsteins, out grazing. But the “Got Milk?” sign that the barn once showed doesn’t apply any longer. Under the pressure of low milk prices that eliminated an income, Paul Gingue and his family sold off their dairy herd in 2015.
“For the first time in my life, the barn was empty,” Paul recalls with a shake of his head. “It was a pretty strange feeling. It took a few days to get past that, and then it was, what do we do now?”
Many dairy farmers in those shoes try raising heifers, the stage of life between a female calf’s birth and its readiness as a milker. Paul knew that could be financially chancy. But Paul Knox at Knoxland Farm in Bradford didn’t have room for all his heifers, so Paul Gingue invited some to his barn. “It didn’t take long,” the Waterford farmer says, “he kept bringing more, hundreds,” and they were Holsteins, like the ones he’d almost always nurtured (except for a short time with Jerseys that came from the nearby Patenaude farm).
Meanwhile, Paul’s sons were searching for their way forward. Two had stayed with farming: Shawn and his brother Dan, who moved in 2008 with their families to Fairfax, renting farmland for dairy. It was a seven-year experiment.
Sara, Shawn’s wife, picks up the story at this point. She grew up in Groton and met Shawn at Max’s Dance Hall in Sutton in 2005. The couple married in 2007, and when they moved to Fairfax with Dan and his then-fiancée, now wife, Mary, Sara was newly pregnant with their first child.
When the baby was born, Sara opted to stay home, and over the seven years that the two couples rented the Fairfax farm, Sara became increasingly involved in the logistics of dairy. As milk prices dropped at the end of 2014, she said, “The lease didn’t look viable and purchase numbers didn’t work. We decided to come back. Our hope was to continue full-time dairy farming here [at the home farm in Waterford].”
For a short time, the newly reassembled generations explored going high-tech at the home farm, with a robotic milking parlor, renovated barns, and more. But again, even though they got close to placing an order for the gear, the numbers didn’t work with three families to support—Paul and Rosemary’s, Shawn and Sara’s, Dan and Mary’s—and Paul made the hard decision to sell the dairy herd.
Shawn’s focus at St. Johnsbury Academy led him to be “the equipment guy,” because that’s what he enjoyed. “Being in the field and growing crops was where I started to find my passion,” he says now. An easy option was growing and selling horse hay from the home farm. In 2018 he began growing barley, too, adding wheat to his crop plan in 2019. Then he got a fellowship from the Northeast Grainshed Alliance and Stone Barns of New York for training in grain growing and regenerative agriculture, training that he was able to take online as the COVID-19 pandemic began.
The basics of regenerative agriculture weren’t new to Shawn: cover crops, crop rotation, and multi-year planning. But the fellowship gave him a framework that tied these practices to the carbon cycle of plants and land, to “build soil health, crop resilience, and nutrient density,” as the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative explains.
Levi joins his dad in the combine to harvest a field of winter wheat.
Shawn and Sara’s farm plans became tailored to these ideals. Not all of the recommended practices worked well on the home farm. “The hard thing for me is how to be no-till [avoid breaking up the soil] with no chemicals and yet not plow the soil,” Shawn admits. “It’s such a struggle to out-compete weeds, outsmart bugs. You need extreme diversity with something always growing in the soil—ideally, your next crop.” He says he’s still learning and experimenting.
“We’ve been planting grains, then corn, and soybeans,” he explains. After the grain, a field may grow clover, to add nitrogen to the soil and prepare for its next seeding.
“I feel like regenerative agriculture is a buzzword being used. I’d like to get there. It takes years to convert a field,” Shawn cautions. “And a big part of regenerative agriculture is cattle.”
Yes, those heifers in the barns have a vital role in the new management of the fields. They add manure, and Shawn points out, “Even the way they graze, with their saliva, benefits plants.”
With Shawn managing the seven tractors, two skid-steer loaders, and a grain combine, plus the fields, someone needed to handle the 350 to 450 heifers that would play a vital role in the grain operation.
This year, Shawn and Sara trained in how to get the heifers pregnant from artificial or other insemination—with the highest possible success rate. After all, the point of raising them for Knoxland Farm was to return them as milkers. A cow gives milk once it’s had a calf.
Sara Gingue with two successfully “bred” heifers at the barn.
Sara began to take over this labor as the spring and summer crop work took Shawn out to the fields. Nothing’s simple about breeding. A heifer has to be “in heat” for the insemination to work, so all the animals’ body cycles needed observation. The Gingues added an electronic “heat sensor” that identifies the right moment for each animal. It does depend on broadband Internet, so technology is critical. Sara’s first-season results were outstanding: 57 heifers on the list to be checked and 52 were confirmed pregnant.
All components of the “regenerated” farm operation were working. Of course, that also includes its traditional roadside stand of fresh sweet corn and other vegetables, now backed up by a store that includes farm-raised beef, maple syrup, and an exciting result of this new grain-focused agriculture: flour milled from the Gingue wheat.
Transforming the direction of a large farm wasn’t simple, or quick. It started, of course, with collaboration with Paul, who owns the farm. Shawn and Sara hope to purchase it from him, in the future.
Barley was the Gingues’ first grain crop, planting 50 acres. Someone was starting a Vermont “malt house,” the necessary transition facility to change the barley grain—via sprouting, then drying, and often more steps—into malt, which is used in brewing the now-popular craft beers.
In the fall of 2018, they planted their first crop of winter wheat plus barley. Then in the fall of 2019, they put in their first actual flour crop, winter wheat they harvested in 2020. That year, they formed NEK Grains, depending on the home farm but separate in purpose. All their connections of the past—across the state and beyond—were already providing resource for this direction.
“We could see there was definitely a market for grains,” Sara explained, “and we wanted to pursue that.” The next step: turning their wheat “berries” into flour.
Their first flour-type wheat harvest was about 60 tons, although technically it belonged to Paul, since it had grown in his fields. Blair Marvin and Andrew Heyn at Elmore Mountain Bread in Wolcott wanted 10 tons of the wheat berries, to “source” all of their grains from Vermont.
“That really piqued our interest in the flour business,” Sara pointed out. The bread bakers offered better pricing than the Gingues would get if they sold to the malt house again. Blair and Andrew were also willing to mill the grain to flour for Sara and Shawn.
They began to visit bakeries. The way the math looked, they had 50 tons more in the bin to sell. Sara did a lot of praying and kept getting a specific answer: every single grain. She decided this meant they should buy the entire 60 tons of wheat berries from Paul. “When we buy it all, we know we need to sell it all,” Shawn confirmed.
The new bakery visits paid off. They sold 50 tons, with 20 going to home brewers who would malt it for beer and the rest to places that milled flour. One of those was Polly’s Pancake Parlor in Sugar Hill, N.H., 25 miles from the farm.
Kathie Aldrich Cote, third-generation co-owner of Polly’s, kept in contact with Shawn and Sara, needing to know whether NEK Grains could keep up with her use of 600 pounds per month.
“We use it for our breads, our whole wheat pancake mix, and our oatmeal pancake mix,” Kathie explained. In the mid to late 1970s, her father Roger started grinding the grains for their recipes: wheat, corn, and whole wheat flour. “We like to control the quality and freshness.” Kathie enthuses the Gingues’ flour, saying, “I love that it’s a local product. I love that it has a bit lower carbon footprint.” And she described Sara and Shawn as “committed and responsive.”
Family farming means that Paul, at left, crawls under the combine with Shawn, center, to figure out what’s going wrong before the barley gets harvested.
That’s both a reward and an inspiration to Sara. “One thing that dairy farming taught us is that you can’t rely on one income source,” she said. They added more flour customers, and now sell to Trenchers Farmhouse in Lyndonville, which makes fresh pasta (and sells some of that in the Gingue’s farm store); Local Donut, based in Woodbury and selling in Hardwick (at Front Seat Coffee and Buffalo Mountain Co-op there); and Foam Brewers of Burlington.
Connecting with local businesses this way broadened what the couple had already learned about their change in farming: it relied on the people they met and the knowledge all around them. Shawn described a network of farmers from Maine to western New York, Connecticut, and even Iowa: “We can just text a question to key farmers who’ve been doing it a lot.” Sara nodded: “There’s a wealth of knowledge that you can only get through experience. That’s not something you find everywhere. I think that’s wonderful!”
The Gingues’ 2020 crop of pumpkins was great. The 2022 crop should be on hand as the October North Star Monthly reaches readers.
This year, Shawn and Sara planted 65 acres of winter wheat for flour, 70 acres of spring barley all going for malting and craft beer, a trial plot of 10 acres of oats, plus, as part of the regenerative cycle, 70 acres of non-GMO soybeans, a crop that goes to Morrison Feeds in St. Johnsbury where it’s pressed to remove oil (the remaining “meal” becomes food rations for animals).
This is also the first year all of their children are in school five days a week. Their new farm store should be ready in early winter; the children already help pick summer corn, and they’ll be involved with the store, too.
A 40-inch granite wheel for a New American Stone Mill like the one being built for the Gingues’ NEK Grains. Courtesy of North American Stone Mills.
Shawn outlines their other goals: purchasing the home farm from his father and expanding distribution of their grains to general stores and co-ops across Vermont. Their flour business has found a limit in what Blair and Andrew could take time to mill for them, so they’ve ordered a custom 40-inch granite stone mill, one of the New American Stone Mills that Andrew designs and assembles in his Morristown workshop. They plan to start working with Farm Connects [part of the Hardwick-based Center for an Agricultural Economy] for distribution.”
And that won’t be just the bread flour. Shawn outlines a plan for other varieties of grains, including heritage grains, and different specialty flours for niches like pizza and pastry. They also hope to expand their beef cattle herd, from its current 20 to 24 animals a year, as well as the heifer operation that helps feed their fields.
How does it feel to watch Sara and Shawn change the farm now? Paul, turning 68 and looking forward to a shorter work week, grins: “I’m having a lot better time than if I was by myself!”
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