Why One Spirits Company Is Betting On Regenerative Ag And Farmers In Idaho

Regenerative agriculture is cropping up around the world. The Regenerative Organic Alliance announced that more than 18 million acres are farmed using their certification practices. In the US, it’s a fraction of that — around 130,000 acres.

Tim Cornie is one of those select farmers pioneering regenerative organic. Situated near Buhl, Idaho, his 800-acre farm grows a variety of wheat, heirloom grains (such as Tibetan purple barley), beans, and popping corn. Much of it goes to his 250,000 square-f00t facility about 8 miles from the farm. He bought an old Pillsbury plant and converted it into a space that houses not just his own crops, but that of fellow farmers in the area.

Some of his crop — particularly the wheat— travels about 200 miles to eastern Idaho where its turned into alcohol. Gray Ottley runs the first organic certified distillery in the United States, Distilled Resources, Inc. It just happens to be a few hours from Cornie’s farm. That’s what led the family-owned spirits company Chatham Imports to develop an all-American gin, Farmer’s Gin, which is now the first-of-its-kind using primarily Regenerative Organic Certified ingredients.

Cornie, who has been farming for over 30 years, says regenerative is the way forward. “A lot of it is common sense. If you look after the soil, it looks after you.” But it’s taken years of learning (and sometimes failing) to come to this realization.

And like many farmers, he too has leaned on the experience of others before to him to figure out how to do this successfully for the land — but also for the business. For him, that mentor and friend has been Nate Jones, an organic pioneer in Idaho. Jones had been advocating for organic farming in the region since the ’80s. Incidentally, Jones fell into organic farming for financial reasons. “I was going broke as a small-scale farmer. The model wasn’t working. It was too expensive to sustain. So I needed a niche, and another farmer who was growing garlic organically helped me covert over.”

Today, he farms more than 700 acres, like Cornie. The duo meet up and talk pest control, cover crops, weed abatement, soil, and experimental patches in their fields that may or may not have panned out. “It’s a lot of trial and error, even if you know what you’re doing,” says Cornie.

But Jones didn’t just advocate for organic farming. He also included some regenerative practices: such as using cover crops and rotation cycles. Today, he says the organic industry is becoming “commodotized” and that’s pushing prices downward. It’s also a lot a “substitute farming,” he says, where farmers are simply using market-bought fertilizers and pesticides that are organic-approved to swap out the conventional ones. They’re not really experimenting with crops, weed management, and rotation cycles to improve the soil’s potential. That is true organic farming, in his opinion — and one that’s now being identified more with regenerative organic.

Though both Cornie and Jones do admit that their ways can be more expensive, and sometimes require more labor, with smaller yields, it can pay off. For one, they see it in their soils. “I don’t like to brag,” jokes Jones, “but I’ve got a neighbor that can see my farm from his, and he’s said to me, ‘That soil is just unbelievable.’”

Cornie chimes in, “Ya, I always joke that the ducks like to come to my field of corn, rather than going to the neighbors. They know which one is healthier.”

But there’s one key advice that Jones imparted to Cornie (and advises other farmers who want to get into regenerative organic farming): “Have a buyer. Have a market ready for your crop always. Otherwise, it’s much harder.”

That’s where Chatham Imports comes in. The company agreed to buy Cornie’s wheat in advance. With that in mind, Cornie can grow the crop without worry. Unlike some of the other beans and grains he’s got in the field destined for his own brand, the wheat has a home.

It’s trucked down to Ottley’s distillery, which in many ways is an extension of Cornie’s eco-minded philosophy: the facility has run on wind energy for nearly two decades, been certified organic since 2000, and is helping support the local ecology.

Ottley and Cornie actually met a decade ago. “In 2015, we met Tim Cornie and he was beginning to build out his new business, 1000 Springs Mill, in Buhl. It was the perfect match for us. Because not only did he grow the wheat, he also milled it, which is something we’d have to do offsite.”

Ottley was excited about the prospect that every step of the process could be traced. “The chain of custody,” he says, “can now trace from the dirt it was grown in by the farmers, to where it was milled and then to the facility it was boiled in, fermented, and distilled. That’s what organic is all about. It’s about the traceability of the agricultural product through to a finished product for humans.”

And Ottley was especially excited to see that Cornie was interested in sustainable and regenerative farming — given that each bottle of gin uses about 2.5 pounds of wheat. “It’s good to know that we’re able to support a more sustainable future as well with our hero ingredient.”

That hero ingredient then goes through a detailed process that Ottley says could include a 100 variables before one lands on an alcohol that has a “sweet flavor in the front of the tongue, is smooth in the throat, and doesn’t, what we say ‘burn the gill,’ going down. Farmer’s Gin has that smooth, sippable quality.”

Priced at around $30, it’s not the cheapest of the gins. But there’s a reason for that. “How are we going to support these farms, these communities with bottom-of-the-barrel commodity pricing? We need a better model,” says Cornie, driving through the back roads of Buhl.

For him, gin is just the beginning, and one of the many tentacles to his operation. But he hopes that more companies back America’s regenerative organic farmers who are looking for a healthier model for farmers and the soil. “We’ve got to start eating better, and looking after ourselves better. At the root of all that is farming.”

Cornie hopes that, in addition to being the farmer of Farmer’s Gin, his own brand 1000 Springs Mill can help Americans discover a pantry of US-grown regenerative organic everyday staples, which he sells to grocers across the US and online directly.