I buy mine from Bob's Red Mill, 25 pounds at a time. My neighbor buys from Wheat Montana. I think a lot of us who grind don't do it because of saving money so much as wanting freshly milled flour, wanting to use different types of wheat berries, and wanting 'to it ourselves'.

--Pamela

I buy mine from a local reseller that has them drop shipped from Wheat Montana. They do this about four times a year. I understand Azure Standard does this on the west side of the US. You might check into Bread Beckers Co-ops.

Last time I checked my local feed and grain store sold 50 pounds of wheat for $12.50.  I'm need to get some more wheat soon so I'll see if the price is still the same.

Do you know any Mormons?  They have canneries that sell white and red hard wheat for fairly inexpensive.

They have them at www.organicwheatproducts.com

I agree. It makes no sense to me why whole grain is *at least* twice as expensive as an equivalent flour. I'm glad to meet someone else who is equally puzzled.

What a paradox! One would think that the costs of storing grain, cleaning grain, transporting grain, preparing grain for milling, milling grain, storing flour, packaging flour and transporting flour would *surely* outweigh the cost of storing grain, cleaning grain, packaging and transporting it.

Personally, I suspect it has to do with the scale of commercial flour milling, which is a huge, international business. A high percentage of a country's projected yeild of grain (wheat, corn, whatever...) can actually be "purchased" before it is ever harvested (think futures markets). The lowly home miller is an infinitesimal afterthought in this context.

If you live in the USA, you can realize competitive costs if you live in or close to the major wheat growing regions (or in CA, where everyone seems to be able to purchase everything).

Trying to live low down on the food chain frequently turns out to be more expensive than living on mass marketed, processed foodstuffs.

Add me to the list of people who are upset at the cost of wheat berries.  I live in Houston, and $0.99 / lb is the cheapest price I've seen.  I understand the economics of milling, and I'm not sure that volume of berriy sales would increase much if they were cheaper.  I belong to a vegetable coop, but don't know anyone else that mills their own flour.

Do you live anywhere near where wheat is grown?  Depending on the regulations governing sale of grain where you live, it is probably easiest to befriend a local farmer.  As a wheat farmer's daughter, I can assure you that farmers are paid a minute fraction of what you buy wheat berries for.  It's quite shocking, actually.  I think most grain farmers would be absolutely delighted at your appreciation of their wheat and would be happy to sell you it to you for very cheap.  But...again....this would depend very much on local laws governing grain farmers.

Karen

If you were a 50-lb bag of flour, where would you be?  Here are a few suggestions:

1. Look in the Yellow Pages for a baking goods distributor.
2. Ask a bakery or pizza place where they buy their flour.
3. Call the milling company for the flour you want and ask for the name of their local distributor.

Over here in Andalucia, Spain, organic berries are cheaper to buy then organic flour. Wholewheat is the cheapest flour and high extraction almost white flour the most expensive, which makes perfect sense to me, as it involves more labour.

Richelle

We grow our own certified organic wheat  and other small grains. In order to have the wheat berries cleaned and bagged we have to have semi loads of wheat taken almost two hours from here to a certified organic plant. They charge for cleaning and bagging the wheat berries into 60 lb bags. We have to pay the trucking to and from the place that does this. Organic farming is very labor intensive as you have to use a tractor to control weeds as we can't use chemicals. The price of diesel fuel has not come down around here.  We have to pay for organic certification, certificates and inspections etc. If you end up with a crop of low protein wheat you basically are stuck with it as other organic farmers near here have come to find out.

We charge .50 per pound for our organic wheat berries. Our hard wheat berries are 14% protein, the soft berries are 12% protein.  I also have a small commercial stone mill and sell freshly ground flour for .60 per pound. Last time I checked these prices were lower than the store brand of non-organic flours, which by the way are a year old as there is still a large amount of flour being stored in the conventional mills from last year. There are not many organic farmers who sell wheat berries to the general public because of the extra costs and hassels of doing so. My guess is that you are paying the middle man if you being charged high prices for wheat berries.

www.organicwheatproducts.com

I live just north of Minneapolis and finding bulk quantities of wheat is difficult.  I am a mormon and did resort to buying from a "cannery".  But I would like to branch outside of wheat and get bulk of other grains. 

When we lived in Vermont, getting bulk flour (KA) and grains was not a problem - the local food service supply would sell us anything we wanted that they had.  But that was Vermont.

It would seem that with the state the economy is in right now, that it would be easier to purchase bulk grains (more demand).

I have a very strange bent in the thinking process so it seemed that the only way that I was going to get the kinds of grain that I wanted was to grow it for myself. OK so I have some rather unusual friends and one of them let me farm a small corner of one of his fields. There is a lot that goes into the farming of wheat. and what comes out of the combine is not ready to be put into the grinder. It needs to be cleaned and that is more time and expense. If you are going to do it for yourself then there is getting the use of a cleaner. All this said this is truly the only way that you are going to know what you are eating. I would like to get to the point that I could offer some for sale but for now I don't have the cleaning to the point that I would want it to represent me to you. There may be a time when that might be able to happen but not for now. The first time that I went looking for wheat berries of a known variety I went to a certified seed dealer and talked them into selling some of the seed untreated. I got it for $40.00 dollars for a hundred pounds not bad but still had to hand pick the berries to make sure that there wasn't any ergot in the grain. Trust me ergot is not something that you want in your food. Salem is a good example of what can happen. There is a group of farmers that have banded together to sell grain in a known variety, they can be found on the net as shepherds grain. They use sustainable yield farming practices and for me that is at least as important as is organic. They sell to top-end bakeries that produce top-end artisan breads. I don't know if they sell the grain or just the flour.