We produce it here. It’s a staple of our diets. But New Zealand flour rarely makes it to the North Island – and for farmers, the financial incentives to grow it just aren’t there, explains Shanti Mathias.

It started with a little desktop mill, the size of a coffee grinder. Marty Skurr’s house was surrounded by fields of wheat. What did it taste like? “I just wanted to have a play,” he says. In went the harvested wheat kernels, and, after a whirr of the motor, out came flour.

This was different to the usual fate of Skurr’s wheat. His farm, about an hour’s drive from Christchurch, has grown wheat for four generations. After harvest, it would be picked up in a truck, driven away, and ground into flour. “No one really cared about it – there was no personal satisfaction from growing the crop,” he says. But grind his own, and he instantly had flour he could use. Grind some more, and he had flour he could sell. 

There was a demand for more traditional stone-milled flour, Skurr realised – a realisation cemented through meeting a sourdough baker. That little mill turned into two bigger mills, which could produce about 60kg of flour an hour. Skurr had just started selling this flour commercially, under the brand Minchins Milling (it’s named for the road the farm is on), when the first Covid lockdowns happened. Suddenly, there was a huge potential customer base wanting flour that made decent sourdough, and he couldn’t keep up with demand. 

Today, Minchins Milling uses most of the grain Skurr grows on his farm, and he hopes at some point he’ll be able to buy other farmers’ grain, too. He has a new mill, designed here from imported parts. After lots of fine tuning – “a slow grind”, he says, revealing one of the many puns it’s possible to make in the field of wheat production – it’s now running smoothly, producing about 600kg of wholemeal flour an hour. It takes up a full room, and rattles and hums as chaff and stones are sifted out, the endosperm of wheat is cracked open, and the grain is sandwiched between stones to emerge as a fine, light-brown powder. 

He sells about half of it to commercial bakers, who reckon there’s lots more enzyme activity than you get with more processed white flour, and half to people who are baking at home. He’s now launching into little experiments with other grains: rye, spelt, purple wheat.

“When we grew things the traditional way, there were lots of compliance costs and box ticking, and no value coming back to the grower,” he says. “Now we get feedback from the end user, and in the medium term, we might make a bit of money out of it.”

The Canterbury Plains are a great place to grow wheat, says Ivan Lawrie, the general manager at the Foundation for Arable Research, which tests out grain varieties for performance in different climates. “It’s flat, it has access to irrigation, which helps a lot, and it’s traditionally had a good climate of dry summers.” Long, sunny days at the end of summer are important: rain could cause huge amounts of damage or disease to a nearly-ready crop. Most of New Zealand’s grains are grown here.

But while the vision of wheat being grown on the Canterbury Plains is a lovely one, it’s not what most people are consuming in bread and biscuits and wraps and the dozens of other wheat-containing products available at the supermarket. “From breakfast cereal to bread in the toaster, pasta, milk alternatives – we eat grain multiple times a day,” says Angela Clifford, CEO of food advocacy collective Eat New Zealand. But most of that grain is imported, usually from Australia. New Zealand imported 697,000 tonnes of wheat and flour in 2023. 

Where your flour actually comes from (probably)

The rule of thumb is pretty simple: if you live in the South Island, chances are your flour is grown locally; milled here, then sent to commercial bakeries and supermarkets to make bread and other flour-containing products. If you live in the North Island, your flour has likely been imported. 

“We live in a long skinny country – it’s hard to move stuff around,” says Skurr. It costs about $250 to get a tonne of wheat to Auckland. If coastal shipping is available, it might be cheaper – perhaps $60 or $70 a tonne – but ports often don’t have the infrastructure for grains.

“You need all this big, bulky stuff to move grains around,” Clifford says. “Silos, trucks, grain elevators. Lots of that infrastructure has simply been mothballed.” Instead, Cook Strait acts “like a toll road”: the ferry companies have commercial incentives to make money, not enable New Zealand products to get to the other side. Growers often can’t compete with cheaper grain from elsewhere, shipped on larger ships. 

It’s not just about the competition for grain prices, which are quite low margin; no one expects (or wants) flour to be an expensive product. It’s also about what else is competing for the land that milling wheat, as it’s known, could be grown on. 

For many farmers, growing feed wheat is more attractive. When food is destined to be eaten by chickens, pigs or cattle, there are much fewer checks on the process. The focus can simply be on yield: getting the most grain out of a field. “Growers often opt for feed grains – they’re higher-yielding with a lot less hassle for quality requirements,” Lawrie says. About 75% of wheat produced in New Zealand – around 300,000 tonnes – is feed wheat. Lots of that wheat could be eaten by people, but the process of checking it meets MPI standards and keeping it in food-safe conditions is much more expensive.

If farmers don’t use their land for feed wheat, they might use it for something even more profitable, like dairy. “You can’t earn as much growing milling wheat as growing dairy cows,” Clifford says. The nature of wheat also means farmers don’t have consistent cashflows. Seed grain has to be bought and put into the ground before you even know if you can make a profit from next year’s harvest. 

“We have wheat in the ground now, wheat in the silos from last year that hasn’t paid for itself yet, harvest to do in February – you almost lost money to grow a crop,” Skurr says. He’s invested lots of money into the milling business, including importing mill stones. For arable farmers in New Zealand, the incentives are in all the wrong places. Dairy is more profitable than grains, feed grains are more profitable than milling grains, milling grains are expensive to transport, and mills take some of the profits. That’s despite the fact that grains are an essential part of the food system, require less irrigation and produce fewer emissions than dairy or other livestock. 

What we grow is what we eat

Everyone in the industry assures me that New Zealand’s grain is great, produced reasonably sustainably. “We’ve done our homework, exhaustively compared the quality of domestic vs imported wheat,” Lawrie says. The Foundation for Arable Research looks at yield, protein content, disease resistance. “New Zealand wheat is just as good or better in every category.” They evaluate different sites with sample varieties, testing out microclimates and comparing winter-sown wheat, which has a longer growth cycle, to spring-sown wheat. 

It’s a problem experienced on the other side of the food system, too. Sam Ellis runs Grizzly, a bakery in Christchurch that supplies hundreds of open-crumbed loaves of sourdough bread, bagels and pastries to cafes through the city, as well as operating a cafe. “We try to push the boundaries of baking and find those extra layers of flavour,” he says. 

Bread doesn’t have many ingredients: water, flour and salt. So it’s important to get the type of flour right, which is how Ellis discovered how hard it is to find New Zealand-grown grains. “I started with this simplistic understanding – I think you assume, especially if you live in Canterbury, that all flour is from New Zealand.” 

Grizzly uses wholemeal flour. That’s not quite the same as wholemeal you buy in the supermarket, which is basically white flour with some shreds of “deliberately large wheat particulates” added back in. “A whole wheat kernel that has been crushed and milled will taste completely different,” Ellis says. The flour is smooth and pale brown, but it has more of the original wheat seed in it. Most of the bakery’s flour is from Weston Milling, in Christchurch, with some from other small mills like Minchins.

There’s been a trade-off between getting locally sourced wheat and organic wheat. “It’s quite hard to get both of those things,” Ellis says. They’ve tended to choose local where they can, but would use organic flour if it was easier to grow nearby. Caring about taste means caring about the details: the kind of grain, and how it’s milled, the process of making the bread – all that feeds into a final loaf with a burnished crust and bubbles held in a web of gluten. It’s impossible to ask for changes or give any feedback as a small baker to a big mill. “You know how Pluto got demoted from being a planet? That’s what we are as a bakery,” Ellis says. He’s not there to compete with the tonnes of flour being cooked and delivered to the supermarket bread aisle. 

To Clifford, who advocates for broader change of the food system through Eat New Zealand, the concept of “food citizenship” could help. Grains are “treated like an ingredient”, she says – rather than the foundation of many meals. “Long supply chains create a disconnection between us as eaters and the people producing our food,” she says. When food is a commodity, something encountered only when packaged, labelled and priced on a supermarket shelf, it’s hard to remember that it comes comes from land and water and soil. Supply chains can be fragile, as the many delays during Covid showed; similarly, the war in wheat-growing Ukraine put more pressure on Australia’s wheat production. 

“We need good transparency about what is from New Zealand and what isn’t,” Clifford says. One idea floated by the sector is a New Zealand grain mark that could be displayed on products grown in New Zealand. “People in the North Island need to understand that most grain they consume isn’t originating from New Zealand,” Lawrie says. 

While Skurr has found it incredibly satisfying to deliver his grain directly to customers, he acknowledges that it’s not a scalable solution. On a practical and financial level, not every grain farm in New Zealand can start running small mills. “Do people have time to look into it?” he asks. One demoralising experience at a food show ended with very few people coming to talk to Skurr about where grain is grown – except for one person who wanted to yell at him about glyphosate use. 

“I thought people cared about farmers – but maybe they just want what’s safe, tasty and affordable,” Skurr says. The cost of living is hard, he gets it; government subsidies, to grow more wheat here using money from taxes, wouldn’t go down well when there are so many other problems to be focusing on. “People are angry at the mills, but they’re operating on a small margin too,” Skurr says. That said, making it easier for food to cross Cook Strait, as the Australian government does with Tasmania, might be a starting place. 

“You could look at the system and say there’s nothing wrong,” Ellis says. Thanks to imports, there is plenty of flour, and it’s cheap. “But if we don’t consciously try to use and speak about local grain, I think there’s a risk of it going away, because arable farming is such a risky business.”

And yet, despite the slim margins and the uncertain chance that the farm will make a profit this year, the vibration of the mill still echoes as it fills bags with flour for next week and next month; there’s still grain in the ground to harvest next year. Since humans first domesticated grain, it’s been a staple part of diets. “When you’re making bread, time is a key ingredient,” Ellis says. Bakeries like Grizzly, or Minchins Milling customers pulling steaming loaves from the oven, are all a sign that locally grown grain could be part of the future, too.