As one of 12 children, Jade Koyle grew up on a family farm in southern Idaho. Jade later left the farm to attend college where he studied psychology, engineering and business. Today he puts all those experiences into helping run an innovative farming operation that serves customers from around the world. Based in an area of Idaho not far from Jade’s childhood roots,  Grand Teton Ancient Grains follows a practice known as “regenerative farming” to produce and distribute a variety of grains that date back to the earliest forms of human agriculture.

Stir the Pots had the opportunity for two interviews with Jade, one on video (above) and one transcribed below. Together these interviews should give our audience a sense of this dynamic agricultural enterprise that grows, cleans, packages and mills these grains, then distributes them globally. And as Jade speaks, he inspires with a clear, elegantly grounded expertise running an enterprise rooted in everything from intensive collaboration with other farmers, digital business and research processes, not to mention a deep passion for the connection between the food we eat and the spiritual and physical forces that deliver humans the basics of what give us life.  Enjoy.

STIR THE POTS

Welcome, Jade. Given the hot weather for most of the country, what’s it like today where you are in Idaho?

JADE KOYLE

We’re fortunate to live in a place about 5000 feet in elevation. We have these amazing, cool summers that everybody would be envious if I told you too much about it. We pay for it in the winter, though.

STIR THE POTS

So, tell us, why did you choose ancient grains as a business?

JADE KOYLE

Well, I grew up the third of 12 kids, and we all worked together as sixth generation farmers on a family farm. We grew all kinds of different crops. But our father wanted us to get education in other areas. I did not see myself getting back into farming. Then in 2009, a friend of mine who was getting his degree in chemistry, he came across research on an ancient grain called einkorn. He knew my ag background, and we both had an interest in health, and einkorn has a different type of gluten than modern wheat that is easier to digest. It’s genetically more primitive. It’s not the most fun to bake with. It wouldn’t be the one you would choose first if you were going to try to make a beautiful sourdough loaf. But it has a lot of characteristics that are attractive to people who might be concerned about health related things; gluten intolerance or wanting high protein or extra vitamins. It’s a nutritious grain to be able to eat.

In 2009, you couldn’t buy einkorn. We were just really intrigued. And it turned out there were other grains that have been around for thousands of years. Einkorn was discovered in the remains of an iceman in the Alps. I think it was in 1980s, when they found him – Ötzi, the Iceman who just melted out of this glacier. And he had einkorn in his digestive tract. He even had einkorn on his clothing. It looked like he had just had a meal that involved einkorn.

He had an arrow right through his shoulder and a broken off arrowhead right in his shoulder there. Apparently, he was killed and ended up in a glacier. It was a pretty wild story. But anyway, it just proved that, you know, civilization has used this fine corn for thousands and thousands of years.

Anyway, that weekend I found that the internet domain “Eincorn.com” was available for sale. So, I bid on it and then me and my friend put up a website and put up some posts and, suddenly, we were being contacted by people from all over the world. Health food enthusiasts, research institutions, folks all interested in what we were doing with this einkorn.

And then I got some seed from a farmer in Germany who shipped it to me, and we got to plant it on my dad’s farm. It did well. And little by little, I found myself farming again. I can tell you the whole story sometime, but today we’re dedicated to restoring ancient grains. Not just einkorn but spelt and emmer. We do rye and a number of different ancient grains that are useful to society and diets. It was surprising that you can get flavor out of these ancient grains. And flavor is one of the main reasons that people want to incorporate these grains.

STIR THE POTS

What’s interesting to me is that lot of people have passion. But building something from that passion like you did, it’s very cool.

JADE KOYLE

I once heard this saying that you don’t choose your passions, your passions choose you. I think that’s what happened to me. At first, I really was just fascinated by the idea of this old wheat and some of the history of it. And I really wanted to just see what it was like to grow it. And it grew from just that curiosity. When we started talking about it online, people were asking, “how do I get this?” Back then there was much social media. We would post on our website and use email to communicate. But it became this snowball that slowly rolled and just grew and grew.

STIR THE POTS

At what point did you decide to turn it into a business?

JADE KOYLE

Within a year, I had formed a business entity, but I was still working full time in a career in marketing and sales. I didn’t see myself going back to farming. I didn’t plan for it, nor did I head in that direction. I just got this this idea that I wanted to plant einkorn on my dad’s farm. That was of great interest to me. But the curiosity and my basic interest that I have in farming, uh, it just wouldn’t let it go. I just wanted to see what einkorn looked like as it grew, how it matured, and then how it was different.

STIR THE POTS

Say more.

JADE KOYLE

I’ve always liked the seed thing. Where you have this seed in your hand that might look a little different than the other seeds, but you plant it and then to see what it turns into, it’s, you know, everything just changes a lot, right?

STIR THE POTS

What were some of the challenges?

JADE KOYLE

One of the big issues is that einkorn has a husk or a hole on it. And that had to be removed. And there had to be a mechanical means for removing that hole. That’s not easy. It’s an issue to overcome at scale. I saw that as “wow, that’s a big obstacle. It’s not just a machine. It’s a group of machines connected to dust handling and all kinds of issues.” But I thought was, well, we’ll plant it and then we’ll see what happens.

At the same time, I came across a man named John Husbands. John was a farmer in Canada. And John was near the end of his career in farming, and he had taken an interest to ancient grains, especially einkorn. John grew some einkorn, and he shipped it down to me. So, I took some of those grains and I put them in Ziploc bags. And I told the folks online if they wanted to buy some of this einkorn, because, again, you couldn’t get it back then easily, I told them I would send it to them in Ziploc bags. So, we sold a little bit right there out of my house. Then we started generating sales. That happened over the course of a couple of years.

Then another mentor of mine, his name was Renee Featherstone, he reached out to me. Renee was like an ancient grains vagabond. He just traveled the world all over for these grains. Renee had a different strain of einkorn that he had worked with some guys in some research on a kind of hobby farm and developed it in the 1980s. And I was able to get that seed from Renee and move things forward, testing of it, playing around with it. I ended up with the seed from the guy in Germany, John Husband’s seed, and Renee Featherstone’s seed.

Basically, I had these different types of einkorn seeds. And the question was, well, you know, how well do they grow? What are their differences there? What are the differences when it comes to baking to flavor? All three of them were very different in baking characteristics. You could adapt the baking style to work with any of the three. But the one I got from Renee, it worked best on the farm and was also really good to bake with. And so that’s the one that we offer to our customers today.

But this took years, you know, of growing it. We had some big trials in the process. For example, I sent some to a farmer in Wyoming and the entire crop was lost. But in the end, I think, with a lot of prominent help from God, we were able to get through these challenges and end up actual crop from each of those that we could test and bake with.

STIR THE POTS

When did you start the farm where you live today?

JADE KOYLE

I didn’t buy this farm ground until 2015.

STIR THE POTS

You moved there to farm?

JADE KOYLE

We chose this area because my wife grew up two miles from here. But when we moved up here, we didn’t plan on buying farm ground. I was still doing this hobby on the side, but I didn’t plan on doing it as a full time farm.  It continued to be more of a hobby. I didn’t go full time until 2021. So, when you ask me, “how did I decide to go into business,” well, it was just kind of this curiosity. It just kept moving forward and got to the point where in 2018 I said to my wife Julie, “this thing is becoming not just a hobby, but kind of a hassle. What do we want to do with this?”

By that time, I had a financial investment related to it. And it was taking up a lot of time on top of my full time job. Anyway, my younger brother Jackson, he grew up on the farm with me, and he has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, and has a passion for farming, so I invited him to become a partner in the business. I suggested he use his engineering background to build us a processing facility and work full time on the business while I remained part time to avoid putting a financial burden on the company.  Then in 2021, I went full time. So, it happened slowly but suddenly as well, but I didn’t expect to be full time that quickly.

STIR THE POTS

What’s the expression, “success is slow, and then it happens overnight?”

JADE KOYLE

Yes. There were a lot of pieces to the story, to what it really was.  One of the things that caught my attention was between 2011 and 2013, I got a call from a fellow who lived in California, and he said that he represented a very large food manufacturing family.  He said, “this family has significant presence in the organic foods market. And they have been working for some time now to come out with an einkorn product, and they are interested in buying you out.”

Well, at the time, there was nothing to buy. I just had a domain name. So, I didn’t even really consider it. I said, “well, this is just a hobby for me. You aren’t going to pay me enough to stop the hobby.” It was kind of a funny conversation.

He told me the family business name was Jovial Foods. He said when they launched that they would go nationwide. That they’d be in all the Whole Foods stores. And I thought, “that’ll be interesting.” Well, Jovial Foods, when they launched, most people hadn’t heard of einkorn, and suddenly it was everywhere. Their campaign made a big splash.

So, we grew on the coattails of this Jovial Foods. They did a really nice job. I confess that made possible a lot of what I think we see today with einkorn.

STIR THE POTS

Did you partner with them?

JADE KOYLE

I never did. They weren’t interested in buying einkorn from us. They wanted it to come from Italy. That’s been a core part of their brand. We work with a different type of einkorn. If you taste them and test us side by side, there are some differences in appearances and bake quality and flavor. We like to think that ours is, uh, a better product. But, you know, they make a nice product and the challenges they have are supply and logistics related because it’s grown in Italy.

Our customers, when they receive our grains, the bag tells them the day that it was packaged. And it’s usually the same day – or within a day – of when it gets shipped to them. And then it arrives to them two days later. So, freshness is a very big part of our brand. It’s a true farm to table experience,

STIR THE POTS

Listening to you makes me think of the elevated importance of marketing in the food business.

JADE KOYLE

It started when I was a kid. There was a farmer in Gooding, Idaho, where I grew up. His name was Macaw, and he raised beans. My family raised beans, too. But Macaw made money on his beans. Some years we made money but some years we didn’t. The way Macaw made money is he sold them in little bags at roadside stands. He also got them placed at stores all over. And he had a brand that called Macaws Fartless Beans. I don’t know if there was anything to that claim but the way he packaged things stuck in my head as a teenager. I thought he was doing something right so far as a farmer you don’t have to take your beans to an elevator, and they tell you what they’re going to pay for it. He did things different. His branding, his getting it to people, that impressed me.

Today we have tectonic shifts in business the way customer gets their product. It started in the 1960s with catalogs where it took six to eight weeks to get your order. Then the internet came, and suddenly everybody’s ordering stuff online. The whole maturity of that distribution direct to people’s door is what led to the rise of our business today. That and COVID, where people started ordering food online. That historic period changed people forever in how they shop. Our business was never the same after that.

STIR THE POTS

Paint a picture of your farm today.

JADE KOYLE

Okay, my house is on the Teton River. The Teton River flows from the Grand Teton Mountains. And it’s a free flowing river year round. In the 1970s, the state built a dam on the Teton River. And as soon as they finished that damn, it washed out and it flooded this whole area.  This whole area was under 30 feet of water, and it washed out homes and businesses. It left terrible destruction to the area.

Our home today would have been under water from that flood. But today we’re on a nice plain at the foothills of the Grand Teton Mountains. We are surrounded by this Teton River. And that’s where we farm. We have some fields that are up in the upper foothills there. But the majority of our acres are down here on the flat plain, and we’re high in elevation, and it’s cool here, but it’s also desert. So, you have to irrigate. We irrigate out of that Teton River.

STIR THE POTS

Is there anything about the climate or the soil or the area that positively impacts positively the growth of ancient grains?

JADE KOYLE

Yeah. The high elevation combined with the arid climate here is ideal for growing these grains. These ancient grains are cool season grasses. They don’t like it to be really hot. In the last few years, we’ve seen weeks in the 90s but most of the summer it’s in the 80s. Low 90s, high 80s at the warmest and often in the 70s, so it’s a cooler, more temperate area. That’s ideal for growing these grains. It contributes to better baking quality.

I had a mentor at Lehigh Roller Mills. Sherm Robinson taught me all about milling and wheat, he was a third generation mill owner, and he was instrumental helping me understand the value of this area as it relates to the quality of the baking the wheat’s grown here in terms of flavor and baking quality.

STIR THE POTS

In our conversation you’ve talked about communicating with a lot of other farmers here and even around the world. It sounds like the community of farmers have been important to your business.

JADE KOYLE

Yeah, I’m a networker by nature. I find that going and encountering new people that new ideas come up. I have a sense of self-confidence, but I also know that there’s a lot that I don’t know. I don’t know what I don’t know. But I know that when I talk to other people a lot, I learn, and I start discovering what I don’t know. So, I make it a habit to speak to a lot of people.

One of the things that I did when I moved here as part of my hobby, I called all the organic farmers in Idaho that grow grains. I introduced myself. I told them the project that I was working on, and it was probably one of the weirder phone calls they got. But I just wanted to know how, what they were doing, how they were running their organic program.

And when I met Sharm Robinson at Lehigh Roller Mills, I even got some other farmer to grow for him. So, I was just networking and getting familiar with people and built some trust and relationships in the community by making those phone calls and getting acquainted with people. But it gave me insights.

STIR THE POTS

I grew up in the city. But as a teenager, I spent two summers on a small ranch in Montana. What I remember was how hard ranchers and farmers work. They don’t get a day off. The other thing I remember was that it seemed like there was a lot of sharing between ranchers. Where they’d come over and talk about crops and cattle and sharing news and tips. It seems that sharing of information – even among competitors – is relevant to the food business.  Your competitors are sometimes your collaborators to some degree. Is that too idealistic or is that a principle that you think is somewhat accurate?

JADE KOYLE

I think it is accurate.  I look to the farmers around me for practices. To learn from them. If you understand the boots on the ground side of what you’re doing and the implications from the ground, literally the ground up, then I think you can be a lot more successful.

STIR THE POTS

How big is your farm?

JADE KOYLE

We bought just these 40 acres around our house. It’s a very small number of acres. But we were fortunate because we were able to experiment more in depth with growing and testing and what-not. And since then, we’ve gone to local landowners in the area and arranged long term leases so that we can transition their farms to organic and use all our regenerative farming practices on these fields. So, all these fields are within a couple of miles of our place here. We can travel and manage them from the same area. So, all these fields, they’re just kind of on one side or the other of this Teton River as it flows through the valley.

In terms of acres farmed, we’re very small. But we’re trying a lot of new things. We’re very experimental in the eyes of other farmers. We’re doing this regenerative farming. Which means always testing. Cover crops. Intercropping. We couldn’t be more different than everyone around us.

They talk about the tail wagging the dog, right? In this scenario, the dog is the soil. And often the tail is the commodity that comes off that soil. And often the tail is wagging the dog in farming. But what we’re trying to build is a situation where we can support the needs of the soil first. Because we’re a regenerative farm. Which goes down to our consumer promise that when this grain shows up to you, it’s going to be clean.

STIR THE POTS

Clean? You mentioned that before. What do you mean?

JADE KOYLE

Well, if you saw some of these grains, when they come off the combine, you’d think, “how will you ever get that clean?” But we do. That’s because my brother Jackson has built an amazing cleaning facility that’s much more elaborate and intricate than most grain cleaning facilities you will ever see. It’s just more specialized because what we’re starting with is we are a regenerative farm, so we’re going to have peas and we’re going to have radish seeds in the grains we harvest. We’re going to deal with other species coming in at the harvest. And we need to be able to separate them. Because at the end of the day, it needs to be an incredibly clean crop. Because when the customer puts that bowl of grains on their table, it has to be beautiful and clean. And we can’t make amazing grains for the customer if we don’t support the regenerative movement. If we if we can’t handle that diversity in our cleaning, then it doesn’t work for our customers.

STIR THE POTS

Can you explain what you mean by “regenerative farming?”

JADE KOYLE

The basic idea is that the sun is the ultimate source of energy for Earth. And once you tap into the power of the sun, it produces everything that represents life on this earth. If you can harness the power of the sun in your soil, well, think of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of species of organisms living in that soil. Those organisms are mining the soil. They’re tilling the soil. They are fighting off harmful biology. What they’re fighting for is that plant. If the plant is healthy and thriving, then it will drop roots. And the very smallest microbes will live off of that root exudate. And then the larger ones will eat those microbes. And it becomes this ecosystem that makes our soil. And what they’re doing is they’re mining nutrients out of the soil to provide to the plant. To make that plant healthy. They’re fixing nutrients out of the air and giving that to the plant.

What happens in conventional farming, they use pesticides and fertilizers and all the things to do the work that microbes can do in regenerative farming. In regenerative farming, we try to arm the helpful and beneficial biology to do the work for us. In regenerative farming, we’re tapping into millions of species and their intelligence, their God given innate abilities to go do that work for us and protect the plant. So, the end result is a nutrient dense food. A healthier food. A more flavorful food.

To do regenerative farming, we have to have healthy biology. Well, we don’t want to put any toxins or chemicals on it that will nuke the biology. No pesticides, herbicides, or glyphosate. But we also want to support those organisms with biological diversity. So, we don’t just plant one seed in the soil. We always plant multiple species together. We do cover crops. And we do crop rotations. So, year after year it’s also changing.

We will brew this microbial tea using compost to build a source for this biology. And then we’ll put it into the field through our irrigation system. And it goes out to all that biology in the field, and it helps promote active biology on the field.

When a combine goes through one of our fields, what comes out is not going to look like what shows up in the grain tank that went through a conventional field. That conventional field will look uniform and beautiful. Ours is going to have a lot of diversity in the grain tank. It’s going to have weed seeds, maybe peas, all depending on what we planted as a companion crop to einkorn or the other ancient grain. So, we’ve got to transform that to a clean product that the customer sees and says, “wow, this is so clean and beautiful.”

We have the machines that do the work to help us to get there. And, you know, in this world where you live and die based on your online reviews and your reputation online, well, we can’t afford to have a customer who doesn’t understand everything it took for the grain to get there. For them to say, “oh, I found this black seed in there and I’m really upset.” It’s like you and your business crashes over that black seed that they found, right? So, you want to have this ability to manage the customer experience, even for those who aren’t as aware of what’s going on.

There’s no perfect way to do it.  We’re trying new things every year. We’re always testing new things. But to do that, we have to have a supportive grain. We must have a supportive way to bring that to the market, to our consumers. And so that’s why we found it necessary for us to have our own grain cleaning facility. Now we can support regenerative farmers and farming.

Where it’s no longer the tail wagging the dog. The soil is the dog. The priority is the soil. The priority is how do we tap into the power of the sun and everything else comes from that. And so we are building this from the ground up, truly farm to table. You know, these crops don’t leave our hands until they end up in the hands of the customer, so that we can make sure that whole process is supportive of tapping into the power of the sun.

STIR THE POTS

What’s the percentage of grain to flour that you sell?

JADE KOYLE

Well, it’s probably 95% grains, something like that right now.

STIR THE POTS

Primarily home bakers buying that?

JADE KOYLE

Yes.

STIR THE POTS

Milling it at home?

JADE KOYLE

That’s right. It’s part of a movement now called fresh milled flour. When I was a kid, my mom used a flour mill to mill our flour. That was just that was boring back then. That was how you survived in a poor farming family. That’s how you got your bread. The same for my wife. So, when we got married, we got a mill, and we milled our own flour, and my wife made bread. It was common. But I’ve come to learn that it’s not common. But since 2020, the sourdough baking community really took off. And the second order effect of that was fresh milled flour.

Well, you can make sourdough flour, but if you use whole grains in it, then you’re going to add more nutrition and new flavors to your breads. So, we’re now in that second wave of people starting to mill at home. And that’s really taking off. I don’t know how long or far that wave will go. Maybe we’re at the top of it. But we’re shipping a lot of grains out to people who are just milling it at home.

We tell our customers the best way to store grains is in the whole form, the way that God made it. The shelf life on flour is just a few months. Even if you’re getting flour from us and it’s fresh, it still doesn’t have the shelf life that the grains would. Buying it in the whole grain form is the least expensive and the most economical and the most beneficial to your health way of buying grains and providing food for your family.

STIR THE POTS

Do you ever think of engineering and selling your own flour mills for home?

JADE KOYLE

We are playing around with some of those ideas. There are some big challenges in the supply chain right now with milling units.

STIR THE POTS

What are the ways that homemakers are impacting your business compared to commercial bakers?

JADE KOYLE

Even though we do serve some bakeries and retailers, our primary customer is the home baker. Our entire business processes are based on this idea that every order of grain leaves our place and has a date printed on it. So, the customer gets that true farm-to-table experience and connection to the farmer. And our customer service is designed to support them.

I still read almost every customer-service email that comes through. I want to understand what people are saying. To me, good business is being in touch with the customer. Helping them understand how we bring the power of the sun into our fields and how that affects all the processes, all the way through to shipping. It must matter to the customer. So, we’re very much about being in tune with them and making sure that we’re adapting to meet needs of that customer.

I mentioned we were shipping seeds in Ziploc bag. Well, we had customers start to complain about microplastics. Well, near the farm we bought is the old Teton Mill farm. Their mill ran off the river. It was built here in the 1800s. And that mill still stands today, but it’s used today as a haunted house instead of a mill. Well, my farm is just a quarter mile from that mill. The man that owns it, Dennis Briggs, he took me on a tour there, and he pulled out some bags from, like, the 1940s or 1950s. It said “Bemis” on them.

It was a cotton bag that they put flour in. I took that bag home, and I searched Bemis and Bemis was still making bags. So, I contacted them. They didn’t make the cotton bags anymore, but they did make paper bags. So, I had them make our paper bags. Later they were bought out by a larger conglomerate, but they made my first paper bags. And my customers loved those paper bags because it went from, you know, these Ziploc bags to paper bags. And that was something that came directly from listening to the customer. Learning from the customer. Just because you go to a university doesn’t mean you have all the knowledge, right? These people are coming up with these discoveries in various ways, and I get to pick these up by talking to them.

STIR THE POTS

Share with us your favorite baked goods from your grains.

JADE KOYLE

My wife’s an amazing baker and cook. I love to cook and bake as well, too. But my wife makes the sourdough bread that has einkorn and khorasan and emmer and spelt in it. A combination of them. It is amazing; the flavor and the quality of a loaf that she can make. One hundred percent whole grain. And my wife also makes an Indian flatbread that we eat with curry that’s amazing.

But grains can be eaten in a variety of ways. Not just his bread. There’s been a big movement of using grains as a rice replacement. People eat what they call ferro. There are three types of ferro: einkorn, emmer and spelt ferro. When people refer to ferro, generally they’re talking about emmer. But you can eat all these grains as a whole grain. You cook it, you boil it, and that softens it up, and you can use it in savory dishes.

You can also just cook it and put salt with it, and then have it in your fridge and use it in different things. I like to use it with Greek yogurt and some berries in the morning. We had an amazing salad my wife made this week with some grains. You can also pop these grains. We do that with einkorn, where you heat up the oil in the pan and drop it in and it pops like popcorn, and it makes it kind of light and crunchy.  You can make it sweet or savory.

Then just basic einkorn pancakes that my wife makes. And sourdough waffles. There’s really no end to it. One of the things that we’re working on right is pasta. This einkorn pasta is delicious. Linguine. Angel hair. They’re all just amazing. The flavor that it brings to the meal.

STIR THE POTS

And it all starts from the soil.

JADE KOYLE

And the sun. The sun and soil.