Cultivate from what is around you

LAUNE BREAD 
2024 ANNUAL REPORT

The only stakeholders we have are our community - you, me, us, farmers, local producers, soil, climate. Writing an annual report is not a requirement. It’s a reflection of the past, a way to consider what grounds us, and potentially, give us an eye toward the future.

 The Annual Report doesn’t necessarily have to show any form of quantitative data, because each year is a mirror: our values create a high bar towards our practices, and without making any fundamental changes, the bar will fluctuate just slightly.

The only large quantitative shift is the diversification from wheat. In the summer of 2023, we began the transition away from relying heavily on wheat, and 2024 demonstrates a full year of changed recipes, incorporating more rye, barley, emmer, buckwheat, and seeds.

Additionally, using dollars spent to quantify our sourcing may not be the best way to represent our practices, but it’s where we started, and is the easiest measurement for us to track. For example, we spent $16,000 on 3,328 lbs of butter (WI), whereas we spent $30,000 on 29,500 lbs of flour and grains (mostly MN).

So we track and share quantitative data to make sure our rhetoric matches our work, while we use qualitative data to consider the year past and the year forward. It’s similar to making bread - we have all the protein content percentages, falling numbers, and hardness of our grains, but it's the feeling of the dough that we interact with most. We work with relation, intuition, history, knowledge and trust.

Our expectations are met, we are doing what we set out to do, and with more possibilities now than before.

Supporting small farms and businesses can feel insurmountable. It can make us feel especially small in the scope of agriculture. As a small bakery, last year we purchased sixteen acres of grain in a state that grew 1,180,000 acres of spring wheat. It’s wild and unique to think in these terms - to know how much and from where we source, and to have formed a relationship outside of the commodity market to be able to do so, on a scale that will never grow into hundreds of acres of grain. Thankfully, our relationships with farmers are as meaningful to us as they are to our farmers. As Mark Askegaard kindly points out when I widen my perspective too much, “every acre counts.”

Without ever visiting Minnesota, I moved from California to the Mill City in 2014 with the intention of starting a bakery that would purchase our main ingredient, flour, from the local grain economy. Unfortunately I did not do my research before moving, because most of the grains grown in Minnesota are exported, and there are very few farms who have personal or economic interest in selling grain on such a small scale. 

After weeks of searching, I found Mark on the internet and emailed him about the possibility of purchasing 500lbs of whole wheat flour. That was almost ten years ago. If he didn’t say yes, I would have kept looking for local grain, although my prospects were pretty low and my ambitions pretty high. I would not have started this bakery working with anonymity. It took me a long time to realize this, but the ingredient I was actually looking for was interconnectedness. 

What does an ingredient like interconnectedness offer? 

Possibilities. Grounding. Abundance.

A few years ago, Mark started growing a wheat variety called Linkert again on our behalf. Winter 2023 he inquired about wheat varieties we were interested in baking with and planted a few acres that unfortunately washed away. This last fall, he reached out to ask if we could purchase any of his Noreen wheat before he sold it through the organics commodity market. We did some test bakes with his wheat, estimated how much we could incorporate into our recipes this year, and thanks to our relationship with Baker’s Field Flour to store and mill the wheat, purchased a supersack (1 tonne or 2,200lbs). 

This relationship, one of many, is an ingredient in our success. Each year these ingredients offer new possibilities. Through our bakery, which used 0.02% of their 2024 wheat acreage, Mark and his daughter Beth are connected to a community that they feed, the bakery bridging the two. The same can be said for our other farm partners - Kelsey, Andrew, Rachel, Les, Els, Luke, Taya, Seamus, and more.

New recipes often come from abundance and support. This year we made Beetbrot and later Sri Lankan Beet Curry Puff Pastry from an overabundance of beets we took in from Racing Heart Farm. Another term for overabundance is our ability to accept what is available, and to pivot from what is not. Tiff and I often say yes to our farm friends when they ask if we might buy their excess, half of the time without a strong plan for what’s to come of it. Abundance and support builds possibilities. It grounds us as we are surrounded in our bakery by these connections. 

A common sight in the bakery is a smile. In the back, with the bakers, and at the front, at our case that seems endless in the mornings. Part of our return on investment is gute Laune (good vibes), knowing each other and learning how our breads and pastries bring people to reminisce on life in Europe, their grandparents, the farms they grew up on. The joy when you eat and share the work of many hands, from the bakers to the farmers. Tiff and I spend less and less time in production mode or at the front counter, as we are in the basement office planning the future week or month and general office work, but to be upstairs anywhere, feels especially grounding. 

A few years ago, an employee of Forever Green and the daughter of an influential Minnesota organic grain grower said “you are doing enough” to me in a period where a multitude of organizations working with Kernza wanted us to incorporate the grain into our production. It was a relief, for someone to acknowledge the rare qualities of our bakery as they are. So I will hold on to her sentiment, we are doing enough, while acknowledging that we do, in fact, want to do more, to push the needle further from reality toward idealism.

 But for now, we are doing enough, and it feels grounding.