Buckwheat growers hope new markets can help it reach more tables
PENN YAN, N.Y. (AP) — Buckwheat crops sway in the breeze as bees bop between the plants' tiny white flowers. Underneath, small seeds begin to darken, a sign that harvest nears.
Paige Hansen leans down, holding between her fingers the plant whose seeds could soon turn into one of her food products.
“That diversity of crop in the field, I think we should be eating the same way with our diets,” Hansen said. “And ultimately that’s how I think we can shift things.”
After dealing with a dairy allergy in her adult life, Hansen traveled back and forth for about two years between her home in California and the Cornell Food Venture Center in Geneva, New York, to develop a buckwheat-based alternative milk. Now, she has partnered with New Barn Organics, launching her buckwheat milk in Whole Foods Markets across the country this month and creating a buckwheat milk powder that could be used as an ingredient in confections, snacks, crackers and other food products.
It's part of an effort Hansen and her partners are undertaking to expand the market for buckwheat and hopefully incentivize more farmers to plant it. In the United States, some farmers already plant buckwheat as a cover crop, but many farmers avoid planting cover crops because of the costs despite the environmental benefits. Hansen and other organic farmers see buckwheat as one way to change the food system and help farmers become more resilient in the face of human-caused climate change.
“If we can grow a valuable crop it’s a lot more likely to become part of the system than if we’re growing it because there’s a subsidy payment,” said Klaas Martens, an organic farmer who has grown buckwheat for about 40 years and has worked with Hansen.
A popular food crop in the United States until the mid-20th century, buckwheat fell out of favor as farmers turned to higher-yield crops such as corn, soybeans and wheat. Today, buckwheat is often used as a cover crop, and farmers often use the fast-growing plant to suppress weeds or rebuild depleted soils between the harvesting of other crops like corn and soybeans. As a cover crop, buckwheat can also store carbon in its roots and reduce fertilizer runoff at times when fields would otherwise be bare.
Globally, about 2 million tons of buckwheat were produced in 2024, according to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, a decrease of about half over the last two decades. Comparatively, about 1.2 billion tons of corn were produced globally in 2024, an increase of about 53% in that same time period.
China, Russia and Ukraine produce the most buckwheat, whose seeds are more akin to a fruit rather than a grain despite its name. It’s the main ingredient in soba, a Japanese noodle, and the Ashkenazi Jewish dish kasha varnishkes uses roasted buckwheat alongside pasta and sautéed onions.
Buckwheat takes between 10 to 12 weeks to produce seed. Its short growing cycle means many farmers who sell the harvested crop can plant it between a winter-planted crop and a spring-planted crop.
The plants’ roots also release an acid that can draw phosphorus out of soil and attract a diversity of microbes, creating a soil environment that is “much more favorable for some of our main food crops,” Martens said.
But little is known about how buckwheat can work best in a farmer's crop rotation. At Cornell University, researchers are working to better understand how the plant suppresses weeds, how it grows and yields under varying conditions and how farmers could potentially add it into their rotations as a cash crop.
Dan Gladstone, who manages 800 acres (324 hectares) of organic crops in Newfield, New York, uses buckwheat as a cover to suppress weeds and rebuild soil but also sells harvested buckwheat. Its roots make the soil loose and easy to plant the following season without tilling, a technique Gladstone implements as much as possible to reduce fuel use and wear on equipment. The crop also supports a diversity of pollinators and Gladstone said he finds buckwheat fields “alive in a way that a lot of other crops don’t feel.”
But harvesting buckwheat can be challenging. It doesn’t all ripen at the same time so farmers need extra equipment to cut the crop so it can dry in fields before getting threshed and hulled.
Despite that, Martens thinks if more farmers added buckwheat into their cropping systems, it would help diversify away from corn and soybeans and could make farms more resilient against losses from extreme weather. Crop insurance, he added, is geared toward high-yield crops like corn and soybeans and adding buckwheat into a crop rotation may help farms stay profitable. Growing buckwheat, which is usually done without fertilizer or pesticides, could also help reduce a farm's costs while providing income, he said.
“There’s a big difference between being highly productive and extremely resilient,” Martens said. “And there’s a risk in our system because it is highly dependent on a few outside inputs and if you take away some of those outside forces or they become damaged in some way, the entire system is at risk.”
In Penn Yan, a village of about 5,000 on the shores of Keuka Lake, The Birkett Mills have been processing buckwheat into flour and other products since the late 18th century. There, millers work with 200-year-old milling stones that grind buckwheat and a system of pulleys, wheels and belts that move and sift the buckwheat as it is further refined next to modern robots that bag and stack some finished products. To be gluten-free, the mill uses a sorter to separate buckwheat from other debris and grain.
The mill also works directly with local farmers, selling them buckwheat seed and buying back the crop at a fixed price. That financial guarantee is one way more farmers might start planting the crop.
“There’s also a home for it when they’re done with it,” said Kyle Gifford, president of The Birkett Mills. “Some of these cover crops, they just plow them back under the field because there’s nowhere to sell it.”
Gifford said the company is milling more buckwheat than it has before, working around the clock, seven days a week to meet increased demand. His father, Jeff, said he sees more farmers in the area growing the crop than he did a decade ago. They process the grain for use in their own products and for other companies, including Hansen’s.
Gladstone thinks having strong partnerships with processors and product companies will get more farmers on board with planting buckwheat as a cash crop.
“We need somebody who’s going to do the wholesale processing and turn it into an ingredient. And then we also need people who turn those ingredients into food,” Gladstone said.
And getting buckwheat into more food products as an ingredient is Hansen's mission. Partnering with a large brand like New Barn Organics allowed her to triple the amount of buckwheat she was buying from farmers. She hopes that demand could offer farmers an incentive to plant the crop on more acres or undergo an organic certification process, she said.
And starting with the ingredients in our food is how the food system can change.
“I’ve always thought that you can’t really have innovation in food unless you have different types of crops to work with,” Hansen said. “Otherwise, you’re kind of all innovating with the same set of ingredients from the same big ingredient suppliers.”
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