MOUNT VERNON, Wash. — Every time Laura Valli left her native Estonia for college, she made sure to pack several home-baked loaves of rye sourdough bread.

It’s a staple in her home country, considered the quintessential Estonian food. Valli would slice and freeze the loaves, rationing them for weeks while studying anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

“Rye bread honestly was the food I missed the most,” she said of her studies in Britain. “There was a lot of comfort that I derived from eating that rye bread.”

After her graduation from Cambridge, Valli did research at Washington State University’s Breadlab in January 2019 as a graduate student, working with farmers, millers and bakers on “anything and everything rye-related.”

“It was the assumption that I had more experience maybe with rye, or I had more knowledge about it before coming here,” she said.

The Mount Vernon, Wash., lab’s primary focus is breeding wheat, barley and other specialty grains.

Valli’s work continued the lab’s ongoing rye research over the past 15 years, former director Stephen Jones said.

“Bakers and distillers are all over it,” Jones said.

Longtime WSU specialty crop breeder Kevin Murphy took over as director July 1. Valli’s evaluation of rye varieties in the field was “critical,” he said.

As an anthropologist, Valli brings a unique perspective, Murphy said.

“She’s really human-focused on the crops she works on, asking questions about the importance of rye in the fields and diets, where it should fit in rotation and in our culture,” he said. “Great questions that, as plant breeders, don’t come naturally to us to think about.”

Valli’s dissertation, “The Meaning of Rye,” considers the crop’s role for plant breeders, farmers, bakers and customers. She’s expanding it into a book.

“The idea behind it was to understand what motivates people to turn to rye in the first place,” Valli said.

Minor cereal

Rye is considered a minor cereal grain.

About 2 million acres of rye are planted in the U.S., and about 280,000 acres are harvested, about 13% to 15% of the total crop. The rest is grown as a cover crop, terminated before it reaches the heading stage.

It’s less clear how much rye is grown in the Pacific Northwest.

“The only answer I can give you is ‘Not much,’” Valli said. The USDA doesn’t track rye in the region because acreage is “so miniscule.”

Typical yield for rye in the U.S. is 30 to 80 bushels per acre, depending on the region, growing conditions, weather, management practices and variety, Valli said.

Some seed companies promise up to 160 bushels per acre for hybrid varieties, she said.

The average price U.S. farmers received for rye in 2023 was $6.90 per bushel, down slightly from $7.17 per bushel in 2022.

“Again, lots of regional variation, as rye is not a commodity crop,” Valli said. “For instance, in Iowa, distillers would pay $12.50 per bushel of rye in 2022.”

According to Valli, the cost of growing rye depends on:

• The kind of seed: hybrid or heirloom.

• Intended use: distilling, flour, animal feed or cover crop seed. Quality requirements are different for each use.

• Management practices: organic or conventional.

Valli wanted to know what it would take to encourage more farmers to raise rye. The answer: more demand.

Rye challenges

“There’s a lot of assumptions that Americans in general aren’t that fond of rye,” Valli said. “The baking culture is so wheat-centered, there just isn’t a lot of interest in rye, so how to create that interest or demand is the question.”

Rye tends to be pigeon-holed in the U.S. and associated with caraway seeds, giving the impression it has a strong and unique flavor only suitable for particular uses, Valli said.

“Rye doesn’t taste like caraway unless caraway is added to it,” she said.

Rye flour can be used to bake cakes, cookies, pancakes and waffles, among other uses. “You can bake 100% rye cakes,” Valli said.

But rye bread is misunderstood, she said. Currently, labeling regulations allow a bread with only 5% rye flour to be called rye bread.

“In grocery stores, we could have many more different kinds of rye bread available,” Valli said.

The most common rye bread in the U.S. is VNS, which means “variety not stated,” she said.

For growers, the greatest challenge is a lack of resources, including access to rye seed.

“Farmers just often don’t have much to choose from,” she said.

Potential markets

There are different uses for the varying quality of rye, Valli said.

One seed company she’s worked with sees the biggest growth potential in using more domestic rye in rye whiskey production. Currently, the U.S. imports most of the rye that goes into whiskey.

“We could grow it here, but the issue is that the whiskey industry has very high quality standards,” Valli said.

One possible option for lower-quality rye is the animal feed market, which is currently dominated by corn. Farmers and ranchers would have to be convinced of rye’s value, she said.

Rye is also a good cover crop. Federal grants are available for farmers to grow more cover crops. But the question is whether rye would count as a cover crop if it’s allowed to reach maturity and sold into the food market, Valli said.

Farmer perspective

Keith Kisler remembers pulling rye out of dryland wheat as his after-school job while growing up on a grain farm in between Othello and Warden, Wash.

Kisler is now a farmer and operations manager for Chimacum Valley Grainery in Chimacum, Wash., an organic family farm on the Olympic Peninsula.

Rye fits the cooler maritime climate, Kisler said.

“It’s one of my favorite grains to grow,” he said. “I’ve made the joke that if I could just grow one crop, it would be rye. I love the flavor of it, I think it enhances so many different products by adding a little bit of rye, even if it’s 5%.”

Rye has been the top-selling flour at the small mill this year due to an influx of new, larger bakery customer accounts. It makes up about 40% to 50% of the company’s overall milling, he said.

“Rye is becoming a more popular flour to bake with,” Kisler said, citing the grain’s flavor and nutritional value.

He estimates he mills about 1,000 pounds of rye each week. He receives about $1 per pound for rye flour sold wholesale to bakeries and restaurants.

Malted rye experiments will begin this winter, and Kisler expects a lot of interest from brewers.

He raises about 30 acres of rye for grain and as a tall cover crop for biomass to return to the soil. He also bales some straw and sells it.

It’s cold-hardy, harvests early, outcompetes weeds and doesn’t require many inputs, he said.

Cost of production is equal to raising wheat, Jones said. Kisler said rye costs him less than other grains because he doesn’t fertilize nearly as much, and sometimes not at all, depending on the rotation.

His yield is about 50 bushels per acre.

Kisler’s rye tends to lodge in the spring due to wind and rain, which he mostly considers a nuisance. Other varieties are shorter, with more straw strength, he said.

“Any scale would be a great move for a farmer that was able to rotate around different grains,” he said. “In my mind, any negatives are outweighed by the positives.”

Weed classification

In Washington state, cereal rye, or “feral rye,” is classified as a Class C noxious weed.

It has a tendency to volunteer, Valli said.

“Even if a farmer doesn’t want to grow it any more, there’s probably still some rye that occurs in the fields,” she said.

She cited one farm where rye was still growing a decade after the farmer stopped planting it.

“It’s a pretty resilient species — it is a great feature for a crop to have,” Valli said. “But in our current farming system, we’re very much wanting to have the control. Usually farmers want to grow one crop at a time.”

A wheat farmer is paid less if rye is found in his grain, Valli said. That makes them reluctant to raise rye.

Valli also thinks there could be confusion with the weed species ryegrass.

“Some people tend to conflate the two, or assume that cereal rye and ryegrass are the same thing, which they are not,” she said.

“If you grow wheat, you don’t want to grow rye,” said Drew Lyon, WSU weed science professor. “Rye does make a good cover crop in parts of the country where wheat is not grown, but best to leave it out of our crop rotations in eastern Washington.”

“That’s something we’ll have to figure out,” said Murphy, the bread lab director. In western Washington, “it’s a common cover crop for a lot of farmers — it’s not unheard of, it’s not unusual. Farmers are used to growing rye, they know how and when to terminate it.”

Rye makes the most sense for farmers with more crop rotation options, such as potatoes or other vegetables, “so when it does pop up in the field, it’s easy to kill, one way or the other,” he said.

Kisler, the farmer, makes sure he doesn’t follow rye with something requiring seed purity.

“If I’m trying to grow seed wheat to replant, then I’ll have to spend some time pulling the rye out of the field,” he said. “In my experience growing it, I wouldn’t see it as a weed, I see it as just a great rotation crop.”

Yale class

Valli also wants to explore rye as a potential teaching and learning tool in academia.

This summer, she and fellow instructors Maria Trumpler and Jeremy Oldfield are teaching an online undergraduate course about rye through Yale University for the third year.

The five-week course runs through Aug. 1.

The class covers rye’s role throughout history and a hands-on look at rye growing in fields and baking with it.

“Humans never deliberately chose to cultivate it, but it first occurred in fields of wheat and barley in what’s contemporary Turkey,” Valli said.

As humans migrated and brought their grain seed with them, rye performed better in northern latitudes.

“One could argue that it allowed humans to migrate northwards,” Valli said.

During the July 11 session, the instructors spoke with 11 students who were baking 100% rye bread for the first time. They discussed the grain’s role in society, trade and formation of early states as a unit of taxation.

That class included a 5,000-year-old drinking song and a 14,000-year-old bread crumb article.

“We know that at some point rye became a success story in history,” Valli told students. “What you could be pondering now is whether rye again could become a success story.”

Looking ahead

Valli was in high demand across the country to give guest lectures, workshops and baking classes, Murphy said.

She graduated in May.

“I would hope she finds a job working with rye, but even if not, whatever she does, she’ll be good and hopefully we can continue working with her,” Murphy said.

Through her research, Valli says her relationship with rye has deepened.

“Previously, I viewed it more as a food that I was eating,” she said. “Now it’s also a plant, and a connector for humans. A lot of the relationships I’ve established here are very rye-centered. That’s what’s so beautiful about it.”

Washington Grain Commission on rye

In theory, rye could ultimately fall within the purview of the Washington Grain Commission.

That would require rye producers to form a growers association, then vote to collect a checkoff and support legislation to modify the grain commission’s code to include rye, commission executive director Casey Chumrau told the Capital Press.

Under state law, the commission only collects an assessment on grains grown in Central and Eastern Washington.

There would need to be enough rye harvested and sold to reach “critical mass,” collecting sufficient assessment money to fund grower priorities, such as research and market development, Chumrau said.

In Washington, wheat and barley assessments are collected at the first point of sale. The assessment on wheat is 0.75% and the assessment on barley is 1% of the net receipt amount received by the seller-producer at the first point of sale.

The USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service stopped reporting rye acres in Washington in 1978, when planted acreage fell to 23,000 acres, only 3,000 of which were harvested.

“Using the 1978 data, if we applied the barley assessment rate of 1% to 63,000 bushels produced and a $7 price that is close to a modern-day price, we would collect $4,400,” Chumrau said.

Estonia’s national bread

Estonia’s national bread

https://www.visitestonia.com/en/estonias-national-bread