Lisa Woodke is the sustainability director at Star of the West. On The Scoop podcast, she shares how their business has helped connect food companies with farmers to advance conservation agriculture from the field to the grocery shelves. Woodke walks through a handful of real-world case studies, including their work as a recipient of the USDA’s Climate Smart Commodities Grants.
Star of the West started as a flour mill in Frankenmuth, Michigan, and has expanded to five mills across four states, a dry bean food grade division with conventional and organic, and agronomy centers across Michigan. With their business breadth, Woodke works with farmers to explore opportunities to connect field-level activities with upstream market opportunities.
“We have both farmer-grower customers and food customers, and I connect those two,” Woodke says. “It started with a smaller focus on wheat and our flour products and our flour customers, but that has expanded to all of the products we sell to customers. We get more and more requests each year for sustainability information.”
She describes most of the situations as chicken versus egg.
“I often approach our growers at winter meetings or grower days in the fall, and say we’ve got an opportunity with a customer, we don’t know what it looks like financially yet, but if we could provide a certain amount of data or data in these sectors, we think it’s possible that this will move into a project that is a paid opportunity for you in the future,” she says.
Here are examples of how Star of The West has built such connections and expanded opportunities for farmers.
“Bright Future Foods is a division of Post, and they launched a “climate friendly” snacking option with the Airly brand,” Woodke says. “We were very excited to be approached to supply the wheat flour that goes into those crackers, and we work with four different growers across the Saginaw Bay area.”
She explains those wheat fields and the Star of The West mill had an LCA (life-cycle assessment) done.
“We helped the farmers gather five years of data, and we were designated as negative 20 co2 or greater per field,” she says which helps support the claims on the product package.
Another project partnered Star of the West with The Nature Conservancy.
“The Nature Conservancy approached us about a wheat pilot project around nutrient management, cover crops and possible reduced tillage,” she says. “Sometimes growers don’t feel The Nature Conservancy is pro farmer, but they are pro science and interested in ways to have both farming and nature work together in harmony.”
One of the newest projects for Star of The West is being the recipient of a USDA climate smart commodities grant.
“After some of the smaller pilots, we thought what better opportunity than to apply for the USDA climate smart commodities grant to be able to help decipher what climate smart commodities looks like for the future,” Woodke says.
The company received a $4.9 million grant with a focus on four food crops: wheat, food grade soybeans, dry beans and food grade oats.
“We were able to partner with a nonprofit in Michigan called Michigan Ag Advancement. Dr. Julie Dahl leads that, and we were so excited to work with them because part of the grant is focusing on underserved farming populations and the two populations that we chose were beginning farmers - which are less than 10 years in the industry - and women farmers,” Woodke says.
