Gambling on Gluten-Free - Modern Farmer

Fallon, Neveda, an 8,500-person town an hour east of Reno, describes itself as the “Oasis of Nevada.” To get there you have to drive down State Route 50, “The Loneliest Road in America.” Doublewide mobile homes, sand dunes and yucca trees soon give way to acres of alfalfa, Fallon’s largest and most important industry for the last century.

But alfalfa’s dominance is now being challenged by a crop that, until recently, nobody here – and few in the United States – had heard of: teff.

Dave Eckert and John Getto, two local farmers with vision and lucky timing, founded Desert Oasis Teff five years ago, and since then the wheat-like grass has proliferated in these parts. Also known as love grass, teff is native to the Horn of Africa and a staple in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where it’s eaten with nearly every meal. It’s served as porridge, fermented into the spongy flatbread injera and brewed into a beer-like beverage. It’s the world’s smallest grain, yielding vastly more seeds per pound (1.33 million) than wheat (15,000 to 17,000).

Farmer John Getto (left) and researcher Jay Davison stroll through a teff test field in Nevada.

Irrigation ditches like this one are common in Fallon. The Lahontan Valley, in which the town sits, gets an average of just 4 inches of rain a year.

Getto examines teff seedlings. Teff is planted in June and harvested in September.

Teff’s most important quality, though, is what it lacks: gluten. Since Desert Oasis Teff was founded, products free of gluten, a protein found in wheat that many people find hard to digest, have become a $4.2 billion annual market; food companies of all sizes have scrambled to find wheat replacements. It’s a happy accident that Fallon has become the rising star of the country’s small but fast-growing teff business.

Gaga for Gluten-Free

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Gluten-free pizza. Gluten-free breakfast bars. Even pet food these days is marketed as “gluten-free.” In recent years, the number of gluten-free products has grown substantially, due in part to increasing awareness of the genetic autoimmune disorder known as celiac disease, which affects roughly 1 percent of Americans. According to Packaged Facts, the gluten-free market sustained 28 percent annual growth between 2008 and 2012, climbing to $4.2 billion in 2012, and is anticipated to surpass $6.6 billion by 2017. The most popular gluten substitutes include amaranth, brown rice, buckwheat, whole-grain cornmeal, Indian ricegrass, millet, quinoa, sorghum, teff and uncontaminated oats.
More restaurants are also beginning to stack their menus with gluten-free items. In a recent study, the online food ordering service GrubHub found that the number of gluten-free takeout orders since April 2012 had risen by 60 percent.
Kim Koeller, president of the health education company GlutenFree Passport, suggests that there is still significant room for the gluten-free market to grow. While only 1 percent of the U.S. population suffers from celiac disease, experts believe that just 17 percent of those people have been diagnosed. America still lags behind countries like the United Kingdom, Finland, Italy, Australia, Sweden and New Zealand with respect to celiac disease awareness. That contrast has been widened by the disparity in labeling laws in the U.S. compared to those in other nations. While American labels must list ingredients like wheat, dairy, fish and peanuts, among others, as allergens, they neglect to include gluten, which owns a spot on labels in the aforementioned countries. “That being said,” Koeller adds, “the U.S. is continuing to become more aware of celiac disease and gluten-free diets.” – Tom Wolf

A plain, squat office building on the Fallon campus of the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension hosts one of teff’s greatest champions. Jay Davison, a plant scientist, first learned about the crop from Wayne Carlson, who has been growing teff in southern Idaho for decades, selling it to Ethiopian communities and restaurants throughout the U.S. Carlson hoped to expand production into northern Nevada and came to Davison for help.

Thus began Davison’s research. Nevada is the driest state in the country, and this region is dependent entirely on irrigation. Teff, planted in June and harvested in September, demands little water compared to other crops. It’s also an excellent rotation crop for alfalfa, which needs to be fallowed every five or six years.

Davison, who researches crops, including those that aren’t traditionally grown in Nevada, saw an opportunity.

In 2004, he set up a meeting between Carlson and three dozen local farmers and tried to convince them to grow teff. But those were the days before avoiding gluten became a lucrative market, and they balked. Their families had been growing alfalfa for generations, and while not particularly profitable, alfalfa offered stability. “You could grow it in your sleep,” says Davison.

Food companies are scrambling to be part of an annual $4.2 billion gluten-free market. And Nevada farmers want a piece of the action.

Davison ended up planting a test plot with one willing farmer. It did well enough to convince a handful of Fallon’s risk-averse growers to give teff a shot. First, they grew for Carlson, who processed the grain at his factory in Idaho, paying the growers for the weight of the grain that remained after “cleanout” – basically, the amount of grain left once all the chaff, dirt and other seeds are filtered out, which fluctuated wildly. “When these guys would send it up there, maybe one time they’d get an 18 percent cleanout and the next time it’d be 10,” says Davison, over lunch at a busy local cafe. “One time he paid me for more than I sent him,” says Eckert, laughing.

Believing they would make more money independently, Fallon’s farmers broke off and Eckert and Getto launched their business in 2008. The company has grown from the side project of two lifelong alfalfa farmers to producing 600,000 pounds of teff a year. This year, despite widespread drought, Desert Oasis is pushing to nearly double production. But even if it succeeds, demand will outstrip supply. “All of a sudden, it’s just kind of exploded,” says Davison.

Teff has landed on Whole Foods shelves, and so the pioneering Nevada farmers have found themselves at a crossroads.

A worker readies teff for cleanout, which removes chaff, dirt and other undesirables.

Teff is so small, farmers must modify equipment, like the harvester, to manage.

A machine is used to spew tiny teff seeds into the field at the beginning of the growing season.

Oxen trample Ethiopian teff crops, threshing, or loosening, the edible parts of the grain.

A father and son pass teff grains back and forth, winnowing the chaff from the edible parts.

Sacks of teff await cleaning in Nevada.

In April, Eckert and Getto were approached by a broker representing an investment company in the market for gluten-free brands. The prospective buyer wanted to sell their teff to processed-foods companies to make mainstream products. But in order for the deal to work, Desert Oasis had to guarantee millions of pounds of grain. Large companies (Sara Lee was named as an example) need assurance that the supply is reliable enough to invest sizeable research and development dollars in cultivating supermarket-ready, gluten-free teff breakfast bars or whole-grain tortillas. By late July, the deal was off – an inadvertent consequence of the farmers speaking publicly about it. The Desert Oasis pair remains hopeful that other buyers will follow.

Scaling up is the next big hurdle for the farmers, according to Davison, because “what’s going to happen is somebody’s going to jump into it that has enough resources behind them.” Eckert and Getto know that if they don’t meet the demand, someone else will.

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