Our family raises organic, non-GMO grains on a small farm in Illinois, from start to finish.
Unhappy with the introduction of GMO’s and agriculture’s increasing use of chemicals, I began experimenting with organic methods, starting small with our first certified organic sweet corn in 2007.
Today, we’ve expanded to include organic oats, wheat, popcorn, peas, soybeans, and buckwheat, and our products are being sold in restaurants and stores everywhere from Chicago to St. Louis.
When choosing natural varieties for food crops, taste is our most important factor. This leads us back in time to older—and often heirloom—varieties. So get ready to enjoy the delicious and nutrient-rich meals you’re craving, made with love from our crops.

Once upon a time …
I began by raising corn, soybeans, and pigs. After a few years I met a pretty girl who not only loved me but the farm also. I have quit raising pigs, and in addition to corn and soybeans have begun raising organic field peas, wheat, oats, popcorn, buckwheat, and the best crop of all; kids.


Family Farmed
Tradition
Sometimes people ask “Why do you have a horse as your emblem if you don’t even raise horses?” The answer is simple.

When I first started farming on my own, my grandfather came out to my farm with iron tracings of horses that hung on his barn.
“You’ve got to hang these up on your barn”, he told me. When I asked him why, he said, “Because my father had them hanging on his barn.” The answer was tradition. Doing things the way our grandfathers and their fathers did them. Not that that applies to everything. I like combines and tractors and everything else. But to try and grow the crops and varieties they grew, that tasted good (because that’s what they ate), without chemicals or GM’s (because that’s what they fed their families) using methods that have been used for hundreds of years. Tradition.
… we immigrated from Norway in 1866



Great-great grandpa Lars Severson immigrated from Norway in 1866 and eventually settled in Garfield Township, Illinois, where he farmed and is now buried. I immigrated west a few miles to Goodfarm Township in 1989.


-Quality-
Does it make a difference if the farmer and miller are the same person? I think so. Seeing the product from start to finish, makes me think more about how the crop is raised. The type of ground the crop is raised on, where in the multi-year crop rotation it falls and the fertility used can affect its taste. How it was harvested and stored affects each other and the crop’s quality. It also can change how and when it’s cleaned. What I mill and sell also has to fit into the farms’ overall crop rotation. It thus turns it into an art, seeing the crop from start to finish, from the seed all the way to your table. Enabling me to control and change even small things along the whole chain to make something I’m proud to put my name on.
–Heirloom–
Farming and the food it produces have changed a lot in the past 200 years. Farmers and manufacturers have become increasingly consumed with making cheap food, and, as a result, the grains and produce on your table have changed from what they were in your ancestors’ time.
The infrastructure to produce large amounts of Alfred Nobel’s smokeless gunpowder was created during WWII. This included factories utilizing the recently discovered Haber process, which could cheaply fix nitrogen from the air into ammonia. After WWII, there was no need for all these explosives, so now, for the first time in history, farmers had access to a cheap source of plant-available nitrogen they could apply to the soil. The “Green Revolution” that occurred after WWII was accomplished by maintaining higher than natural nitrogen concentrations in the soils and developing crop varieties that could better utilize the higher ammonia levels and yield more per acre. The concentration of other minerals in the soil, such as phosphorous and potassium, was also increased, and farmers bred plants to adapt to this over-fertilization. The physiology of the new crop varieties were different from the natural crops that had been grown for thousands of years.



