Wheat Buyers March to Different Durum

The 38-seat auditorium at the Northern Crops Institute looks like a United Nations assembly hall in miniature, complete with world clocks, flags and equipment to provide translations in any three languages.

But the universal language in the brick-and-glass center is food--cheese puffs, couscous, anything that can be made from barley, beans, sugar beets, sunflowers, spring wheat and other crops from the Northern farm belt.

“We’re not here to teach people how to grow crops,” said acting director John A. Crabtree. “This is here for them to learn to purchase and process.”

That’s become a bigger task in the 10 years since the institute began as part of a four-state effort to sell off an increasing glut of commodities.

Countries from Mexico to Morocco to the nations of the former Soviet Union are switching away from government monopolies and cooperatives for their raw food purchases.

Without instruction at places like the crops institute or the International Grains Program at Kansas State University, millers can find themselves at a loss.

“We’ve got people coming in where their import needs were taken care of by their government,” Crabtree said. “Now they’re on their own.”

Nothing can be as messy or intimidating as the U.S. market system, with its futures markets, commodity exchanges, and six classes of just one commodity--wheat.

Besides hearing lectures on management of flour mills or grain procurement, visitors tour farms and grain elevators just minutes away in the Red River Valley. They travel a little farther to visit the grain exchange in Minneapolis and the port in Duluth.

But how is the Moroccan visitor to know whether the durum from Prosper, N.D., will turn out couscous to please the folks back in Marrakech? If the country adopts a grain inspection system, how do you explain that the American system and not the French one is the one to emulate?

That’s where the rest of the institute comes in.

Thanks to the patronage of the late Sen. Quentin Burdick (D-N.D.), former chairman of the Agriculture appropriations subcommittee, the institute has a two-and-a-half story durum mill under its roof.

It also runs a mill near the Fargo airport so visitors can learn the right mix of barley, soybeans and other crops for livestock feed.

The institute’s main building houses a baking laboratory, so visitors can see how the hard red spring wheat that is grown here works in different flour mixtures. There’s a commodity grading laboratory where visitors learn about U.S. grain standards. And there’s an extruder that turns out ready-to-microwave pasta and all kinds of breakfast foods and snacks.

This is the place to see a wheat-based cheese puff au naturel, before the finger-staining orange coating is put on.

If those foods earn a respectable place at the table here, that’s because breakfast cereal and finger foods follow close on the heels of prosperity.

“The world’s coming around to more extruded wheat products,” said John Howard, director of programs at U.S. Wheat Associates, the export-promotion group for wheat producers.

Groups like U.S. Wheat Associates and the U.S. Feed Grains Council help pay the travel and lodging for visiting trade delegations and others.

Those groups use money raised by member growers and some of the $32 million the U.S. Agriculture Department will spend this year to develop foreign markets.