Cover crop, plow, disc, seed, roll, harrow, rogue, reap, bind, thresh, clean, store, mill, sift, mix, shape, bake, eat.
Heritage Grains
We’ve been growing and using grains grown here on Lopez Island for the past 8 years. These diverse heritage and landrace identity preserved grain varieties are at the heart of what makes our baked goods flavorful and nutritious.
Organic ingredients
From our butter to our sesame seeds, everything we use in our bakery is a certified organic ingredient or comes from a farmer we know and trust. The toll chemical farming takes on our land, waterways, and communities is just not worth the money saved on a sack of flour. When we buy ingredients we help create landscapes and communities that are robust, healthy, and prosperous.
Sourdough
All of our breads and pastries are leavened with our wild sourdough culture. The starter is the mother, and its character is passed down into each piece of bread through the leaven. We use no commercial yeast or chemical leaveners in our bakery.
Soil first
We measure the carbon in our fields and consider it our bottom line. We are looking for ways of building soils through regenerative agriculture in small grain production. We grow our grains with no inputs, minimal tillage, rain watered, cover crop cycles, appropriately scaled equipment, community collaboration, cooperative farming, a sense of humor, excellent picnics, and a whole lot of luck.
Wood fired
Our island forests are second, third, and fourth growth trees and need thinning to reduce fuel load, create diversity, and increase timber quality. Using biofuel produced on island to bake ours bread and pastries, our Bassaninna Tubix 420 is the heart of the bakery. A steampunk oven from Italy with a roaring hot firebox and 300ft of steam tubes wrapping 7.9 square meters of composite hearth stones. We baked for 8 years in a tiny Alan Scott style black oven we built in 2012 at Midnight’s Farm, and while it had its charm, we love our new oven and the bread it makes.
Right livelihood
Can we make money? Can we pay our employees a living wage? Healthcare? Can a business turn a profit and also be actively regenerating our earth? Can we create a life where work and home are intertwined and mutually supportive? The journey continues.
Island Grist
We couldn’t do any of this without Steve Lillestol at Island Grist. A historic equipment stone miller and mechanical genius here on island who has the machinery to harvest, clean, mill, and store grains and flour for our bakery. He also grows beautiful grain when he’s not working on his boats.
Lopez Farmers
Over the years we’ve used grain grown by many different island farmers. Wayne Shu, Ron Norman, Steve Lillestol, the Buffum Bros, and Ken Akopiantz. Each one has a different farming practice and we’ve learned a lot about growing grain from their successes and failures. Farming is hard and we couldn’t do what we do without these Lopez farmers.
Community
In too many ways to list the folks here in the islands have been co-creators in Barn Owl. They’ve given us their time, labor, money, reasonable interest rates, land, know-how, equipment, barns, kind words, and buy our bread. It’s our honor to be baking for you all, thank you for your kindness.