A ground-up approach to baking

Chris McGann
Communications

Sage Dilts talks about her baking philosophy with WSDA
Director Derek Sandison in front of the Barn Owl Bakery's
wood fired oven. Dilts won a NASDA Foundation contest
for women in agriculture. 

When Barn Owl Bakery owner Sage Dilts explains the potential health benefits of the wild sourdough starter and heritage grains she uses in her artisan breads, she astutely points out -- the digestion process begins when you smell the food.

“That’s when you start salivating,” she says.

Walk into her tiny Lopez Island bakery and you’ll see what she means. The rich aroma of her craft bread, fresh out of the wood-fired oven, is sure to make your mouth water.

Wild Starter

Dilts says the yeast and bacteria in her wild leaven (or sourdough starter) provide the complex flavors that make the bread taste so good, and they also help break down parts of the grains that can be hard to digest, allowing the body to better absorb the nutrients.

WSDA Director Derek Sandison followed through on his
promise to visit Dilts' Lopez Island bakery after she won
a NASDA Foundation award in February. 

She is committed to using locally grown and milled grains and even grows her own specialty and heritage varieties of wheat, rye and barley that add to the distinctive flavors in her loaves.

In the 200-square-foot bakery she and her husband Nathan Hodges built in 2012, she has established a thriving niche market on the islands with baked goods made in ways she believes are healthy for the body and the planet.

Farm to Food Competition

This year, Dilts won the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) Foundation’s Women’s Farm to Food Competition. The contest is dedicated to fostering growth among women producers (i.e., farmers, fishers, ranchers) and women entrepreneurs with food and beverage businesses in Oregon and Washington.

Sage Dilts started baking bread on Lopez Island 8 years ago.
Now it's time to expand the Barn Owl Bakery.  

When competitors presented their business plans at NASDA’s Winter Policy Conference in Washington DC in February, WSDA Director Derek Sandison presented Dilts the $20,000 Grand Prize and promised to visit to the Barn Owl Bakery.

Barn Owl Bakery employee Ona Blue tends to the wood-fired
oven and some of the locally-grown ingredients.

Last week he followed up on his commitment and made the trip to the remote island in Northwest Washington.

Sandison said this type of competition and the awards are important because they help promote diversity in agriculture.

 “We are trying to encourage women to enter agriculture and for them to thrive once they are in it,” Sandison said.

A big challenge

“Particularly for small-scale operations, you have to develop your own markets,” Sandison said. “It’s not just that you have to grow or produce something, but you then have to find a way to market that product.”


Moving to the country

Sage Dilts bakes with locally grown and milled grain. She
recently won the National Association of State Departments
 of Agriculture (NASDA) Foundation’s Women’s Farm to Food
 Competition  

Dilts and her husband Nathan Hodges moved from the San Francisco Bay area eight years ago and set up shop on this laid-back island known for its artists, craftspeople, farmers, and fishermen. The area’s tight-knit, open-minded community was the perfect business micro-climate to start a bakery embracing ancient baking and farming methods, and adhering to Dilts’s ideals about health and nutrition.

Dilts makes her bread by hand from scratch using no commercial yeast or chemical leavening. Instead she maintains and relies on a wild leaven, rich with bacteria and yeasts, to impart flavor and nutrition to her breads and pastries.

A world of wheat varieties

Hodges, her husband, zealously experiments with heirloom grains trying to identify varieties that grow well in the area and taste good in the bread.

“There’s all these crazy flavors,” Hodges said. “It takes three or four years for us to get enough seed to mill up to actually taste the grain. So there’s always that moment where it’s like, what’s this one going to be? Sometimes it’s not that interesting but other times it’s really wild!”

Nathan Hodges shows Sandison a sample of the grain he is
drying at Barn Owl Bakery's granary.

In the past four years he had planted more than 50 varieties in search of a seed like the Ethiopian Blue Tinge emmer wheat, for example. His crop notes describe it as grain that threshes easily with an intriguing dark purple seed that makes a dough that darkens to the color of chocolate.

“In our baking trials, this is always a crowd favorite for taste,” he notes.

Hodges and Dilts hope to cultivate the connection between food and the land as part of their business model.

“Modern wheats tend to be ill-suited to our form of agriculture here,” he said. “We don’t water our wheats, we don’t fertilize our wheats, and our soils are relatively poor. But the older wheats, like the Landrace varieties, are perfectly suited to that form of agriculture because that’s the way they were grown for thousands of years.”

Locals pick out hand-made baked goods themselves and pay
on the honor system. 

The right niche

The Barn Owl Bakery’s business model may not be suited to other bakeries. They run a bakery with no counter help and customers pick out their own purchases and pay on the honor system in an open bowl on the baking rack.

But on this low-key, high-minded island, it seems to be working.

In fact, the bakery is expanding. Dilts can make 25 loaves an hour in her Allan Scott style wood-fired oven, but even with 13 hours of baking a day, that’s not enough bread to keep up with demand.

With the prize money from the NASDA Foundation competition, she is upgrading to a Bassanina wood-burning deck oven that will allow her to quadruple output.

“We really needed to expand to make this work for us as a family,” Dilts said.

Results in: Woman-owned business competition, report and ag survey

Micha Ide, Bright Ide Acres, Orting, WA
Image courtesy of The Female Farmer Project

Chris McGann
Communications

Earlier this year, WSDA announced a partnership with the Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA) and the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) Foundation, for a new program to help farm women launch or boost their businesses.
The partnership commenced by

• Sponsoring a Women Farm to Food Business Competition
• Conducting a gap analysis of existing training resources
• Administering a survey of female farmers and entrepreneurs in Washington and Oregon to better understand their business needs and goals. 

Competition winners

Sage Dilts, owner of Barn Owl Bakery on Lopez Island, Wash. won the competition’s $20,000 grand prize. A list of the other prize winners are posted on NASDA Foundation’s Women in Agriculture webpage.

Gap analysis results

Of 49 training programs reviewed for the gap analysis, the report revealed that there are many programs designed to help women farmers launch businesses but far fewer available for the next step.

After starting up, business owners had only a handful of resources to turn to for training that would help expand their offerings to reach statewide and regional markets. Just six business development programs in Oregon and Washington served food entrepreneurs, the study found.

The Women in Agriculture program aims to provide resources to help bridge the gap in training for those in the “grow” stage of business development, the point between the initial business launch and scaling up to reach into national and international markets.

2019 Women in Agriculture Survey 

Lauren Anderson, Grain Artisan Bakery, Snohomish, WA
image courtesy of The Female Farmer Project

NASDA Foundation, WSDA and Oregon Department of Agriculture promoted the effort on social media and collected data from the online surveys from November 1, 2018 to February 28, 2019. A total of 301 women, the majority in Oregon and Washington, completed surveys. They posted the results this month.



Results

Most of the women

• Sell products at small, local markets (56 percent)
• Own or worked on a farm (74 percent).
• Have been developing their business for more than six years (60 percent)
• Produce plant-based products (52 percent)
• Have gross annual sales of less than $50,000 (82 percent)
• Large percentages of those who completed the surveys said they were interested in activities such as help with: 
• Learning from other women (75 percent)
• Communication about products (69 percent)
• Refining products and manufacturing (49 percent)
• and scaling business teams (49 percent)

Going forward

The results will inform the program’s Women's Farm to Food Accelerator which will begin development in October. The 90-day accelerator will provide training in product development, food safety, marketing and business development to help female farmers bring their products to new state and regional markets. The accelerator will include online modules, peer-to-peer learning, a women’s mentor network, and one-on-one consultations with experts.

For more information about the program contact the (NASDA) Foundation.

A "world of work" in agriculture

Chris McGann
Communications

Eighth grader, Addie Barker calibrates a class F metric weight
set used by WSDA Weights and Measures inspectors.

The white cotton glove on Addie Barker’s left hand gave her the look of a museum curator or gemologist. With a steady hand, the 14-year-old gripped a tiny metal weight with a large tweezer and placed it gingerly on the digital scale next to her laptop.

State Metrologist Leslie German watched attentively, guiding her through each step and adding occasional pointers.

Anything from the room’s temperature or humidity to the manner in which Addie sets the weight on the scale could influence the reading.

The eighth grader from NOVA Middle School had ventured beyond the confines of her Olympia classroom to WSDA’s Metrology Laboratory last week as part of the school’s “World of Work” project. She was there to experience a slice of the work life she might expect if she pursues a science-based career.

State Metrologist Leslie German shows Addie Barker how to log data from a
calibration.

This job shadow is an example of the many opportunities the agriculture industry holds for young people exploring career options – some of which may not be the first to come to mind when thinking of agriculture.

Though farming and ranching are cornerstones and what most people think of first at the mention of agriculture, some might not realize how fundamental science is to the entire agriculture industry.

As such, work in agriculture offers myriad job opportunities for aspiring scientists – careers in chemistry, microbiology, genetics, process management and ecology to name just a few.

The little-known, analytical world of metrology, or the science of measurement and measurement uncertainties, is another example.

It is the heart and soul of WDSA’s Weights and Measures Program, which tests and inspects commercial devices to provide price verification and equity for commercial transactions. The program is responsible for package inspection, public education, fuel quality monitoring, and complaint investigations.

The state Metrology Laboratory provides the verified standards and analysis for Weights and Measures field inspectors.

Without an accurate reference for a gallon or a gram or a metric ton, there would be no way to assure the public and private companies that they are getting what they’re paying for at gas pumps, grocery scales or highway weight stations.

A standard used to calibrate an official scale.

Metrology, a field that is, in a very literal sense, defined by precision, the hard sciences such as mathematics, statistics and physics are paramount.

Addie says she’s just “OK” at math, but when pressed she admitted that she currently carries a 98 percent average in her algebra class.

German, a former educator, said it was encouraging to see a young woman like Addie going into science.

“She really does have interest and I’m really tickled about that,” German said.

If Addie is really inspired by metrology, employment opportunities are plentiful.

Weighing the standards is more complicated than you might think.

“Oh my gosh! there are so many, there are labs at Boeing, medical research laboratories, it’s all over the state,” German said. “You don’t realize it, there are labs everywhere. Every state has at least one lab and a lot of biotech companies have metrologists on staff.”

German is the first woman to hold the position of Washington’s State Metrologist and industry-wide she says women are under-represented.

Although Addie clearly has the mathematical aptitude to pursue a career in metrology, she said parts of the discipline are a bit intimidating.

“I don’t think I’m organized enough to be able to do it,” she said.

But in the precise environment of the laboratory, the soft-spoken teen’s precision and a keen attention to detail shined through as she carefully recorded each observation on a spread sheet and replaced the standard to the rack.

From this observer’s prospective, it seems likely her organizational skills were more than adequate to allow her to pursue metrology or almost any scientific career path if she chooses.

She’ll probably pass her algebra class, too.

WSDA partners with Oregon and national agriculture group to support women in agriculture

Laura Raymond
WSDA Regional Markets 

A prize of as much as $20,000 is waiting for a woman in the agriculture industry, the top prize in the new Women Farm to Food Business Competition. The competition, which closes Jan. 31, is sponsored by the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA), and is one way it is promoting a new program to help women in agriculture launch or boost their farm businesses.

Both WSDA and the Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA) are partnering with NASDA in the effort. In addition to the competition, NASDA is launching a new business accelerator program for women and conducting a survey to learn more about the business needs of women in agriculture.

The competition - The 2019 Women Farm to Food Business Competition is open to women-owned food and beverage businesses in Washington and Oregon. Advantage will be given to farm-based businesses that grow their own ingredients and businesses that source their ingredients from Washington or Oregon agricultural producers. Applicants must complete an on-line application and submit a video of 3-minutes or less pitching their business. A $20,000 grand prize will be awarded, as well as a $10,000 prize and two $5,000 prizes.

The business accelerator – Currently under development is the NASDA Women Farm to Food Accelerator Program, scheduled to begin later in the year. It is a 90-day program of training, skill building and networking tailored to the needs of women in agribusiness.

The survey – The Women in Agriculture survey is meant to help NASDA develop the accelerator program so that it best meets the needs of women in agriculture.

More information - Visit www.nasda.org/foundation/women-in-agriculture for links to the contest application, the survey, or more information on any of the three initiatives.

Fourth generation dairy farmer new assistant state vet

Hector Castro
Communications 

Dr. Amber Itle has been around large animals her whole life, first as a child growing up on her family’s dairy farm in Pennsylvania, and later as a private practice veterinarian and in recent years a field veterinarian with the Department of Agriculture.

“I started working at a young age, feeding calves and milking cows with my siblings and cousins,” Dr. Itle said. “I have worked as a herd manager, AI technician, and processing plant worker. I even had the chance to deliver milk on local routes.”

Now, Dr. Itle can add assistant state veterinarian to the list, after being appointed to the position earlier this month.

As the assistant state vet, Dr. Itle will manage the agency’s team of field vets and the agency’s Animal Disease Traceability Program. Her top goal is to collaborate with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to boost communications with stakeholders who work in all sectors of the livestock industry to protect animal health and promote traceability.

“The idea is to close the gap between Olympia and the producers that our decisions and regulations impact,” she said. “As much as possible, we should incorporate the ideas and proposed solutions of our stakeholders when it comes to implementing ADT.”

Dr. Itle also plans to remain involved in partnerships with other organizations working on animal health issues, such as the large animal program committee for the Washington State Veterinary Medical Association and American Association of Bovine Practitioners.

She has a degree in veterinary medicine from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s from the University of British Columbia. Dr. Itle worked in private practice for several years, including a decade in Whatcom County as a large animal and sale yard veterinarian working among beef cattle, before joining WSDA in 2013 as a field veterinarian and foreign animal disease diagnostician.

“My dad has been practicing as a food animal veterinarian for 46 years and continues to be passionate about the work. My sister is also a mixed animal veterinarian,” Dr. Itle said.

She lives in Whatcom County with her husband and their three children, where she helps manage her neighbor's beef herd and her oldest daughter's two beef cows, Flower and Moocy.

“Agriculture has always been important to the livelihoods and identity of both my family and myself," Dr. Itle said. "I hope to use my understanding of animal agriculture and animal health to promote practical solutions for our stakeholders.”