Pinnaroo grain growers launch lentil flour brand
The Lawson family speaks in our latest Farm magazine about launching their lentil flour brand during the pandemic. And they share their grand plan to boost fortunes for all pulse growers of Pinnaroo.
WHEN a nutritionist asked Phillipa Lawson if she could track down red lentils and mix them into her daughter’s bolognaise, Phillipa gazed out her farmhouse kitchen window and laughed to herself.
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“I should be able to find some lentils somewhere,” was her tongue-in-cheek response.
Phillipa and her husband, Skeet, run her family’s 1500-hectare wheat, barley and lentil operation at Pinnaroo, in the South Australia Mallee near the Victoria border.
A third of their paddocks are sown to red lentils each year, so the mother of two is not short a bag or two.
“Our youngest is a fussy eater, not a very good sleeper,” says Phillipa, explaining how the conversation with the nutritionist started. “We had been trying to work out what was wrong, and how to manage what was going on in her little body. We were told to look at her diet.”
Phillipa tried adding lentils directly to dishes, but five-year-old Annabelle was wise to that strategy.
“She was just picking it out,” Phillipa says. “My husband and I thought, ‘why don’t we just make it into flour?’. She had no idea I was putting it into all her biscuits and pancakes, using it to thicken sauces and in curries.”
What started as a mission to improve Annabelle’s protein intake, quickly morphed into a value-adding idea that Phillipa pushed from concept to delivery in six months.
After taking part in an intense start-up accelerator program called Farmers2Founders earlier this year, Phillipa launched The Pinnaroo Farmer brand in July, selling red lentil flour directly to customers through an online shop, the local Pinnaroo bakery and through a wholefoods store in Adelaide.
In the first three months of trading, she has sold 250kg of flour to 85 satisfied customers.
Phillipa is the fourth generation of her family to run the cropping property. She and Skeet returned to the farm six years ago, on the invitation of her 72-year-old father, John Angel.
“Dad had made the offer as to whether we wanted to come and try farming. No strings attached, just to give it a go for a year or so,” says Phillipa, whose two brothers pursued off-farm careers and whose mother passed away after battling cancer.
At the time, Skeet was travelling widely as an aircraft mechanic for the air force, and Phillipa was using her environmental science degree as a high school teacher.
For Skeet, a city boy from Adelaide, the chance to apply his mechanical skills to running a broadacre cropping operation was appealing, as was the opportunity to spend more time with his young family.
“He’s had to learn everything from scratch,” says Phillipa, praising her husband’s can-do attitude. “We’ve had plagues and two droughts, all in the first six years.”
They have taken the challenges in their stride, with Phillipa helping on the farm, launching the new value-adding venture and teaching one day a week while raising their two girls, Georgia, 7, and Annabelle, 5.
Skeet is in charge of operations in the paddock, with guidance from John.
“Dad is still very much part of the farm,” Phillipa says. “He knows every inch of the land and the paddocks and problem areas. He has been quite good at letting us make mistakes, and supporting us when we have.”
QUALITY COUNTS
TO GET the most from the crops, Skeet uses multiple weed management strategies to maximise production and soil health while reducing chemical use.
Chaff lining, controlled trafficking, increasing their lentil crop to a third of the property, burning rows rather than whole paddocks, introducing hay production and targeting soil improvement in specific areas are a few of his tactics.
They sow wheat, then barley, always followed by a pulse crop for nitrogen fixation benefits.
The Lawsons produce high-quality lentils for export markets, with harvest running November to mid-December, producing an average of 0.8 tonnes per hectare in recent years. Phillipa says this season they hope to hit one tonne per hectare.
About three years ago, when the Indian Government slapped steep tariffs on lentils, Skeet and Phillipa were infuriated that an overseas political decision could so drastically change the value of their crop, when the protein-packed pulse in their paddock had not changed, nor had their production system.
“We felt very frustrated about that,” Phillipa says. “We felt it was really unfair that Australian farmers had to cop it on our bottom line even though it had nothing to do with us.”
With drive to find alternative markets, and Annabelle’s tastebuds to please, Phillipa started to form her flour value-adding idea.
IDEA ON THE RISE
FRIENDS pushed her to apply for the Farmers2Founders Ideas accelerator program.
“At that stage, we literally had an idea,” she says.
“No infrastructure, didn’t have a business plan, didn’t know if there was demand.
“All we knew was that we had lentils.”
Due to COVID-19, she completed the whole program of mentorship and workshops online, from March to May.
“I had never even used Zoom before,” she says, with a laugh.
One of the biggest challenges, she says, was adjusting their mindset from thinking about the dollars-per-tonne value of their crop, to instead consider cents per 100g.
The accelerator program stepped Phillipa through everything from customer research to website development and marketing.
“They had a huge emphasis on speaking to physical customers or potential customers to work out if your product is likely to solve a problem,” Phillipa says.
“We didn’t initially think we could be gluten free as we grew wheat and barley. But through my customer research, nearly every second person was asking if this product was going to be gluten free, so we went down that avenue.”
They thought separating their grain and lentil operations would be a costly exercise, but it turned out to be affordable and achievable. “We devised a system on the operational side to decontaminate our headers, augers, trucks and silos,” she says.
Once harvested, lentils are put in 1.5-tonne bulk bags, sent to a nearby seed cleaning company, then returned to the farm, where Phillipa uses a small domestic mill to process 80kg batches.
Flour samples are then sent to an Adelaide lab, to be tested for traces of gluten.
“That is extra peace of mind for us, and the customers,” Phillipa says.
The Pinnaroo Farmer flour sells in 1kg bags, for $12.90, online and through local and Adelaide retailers. Demand comes from people looking for plant-based proteins, and those who eat a gluten-free diet.
BIGGER BATCHES
SKEET and Phillipa know it is early days, but with initial interest so strong and plans to scale up and develop more products, they are excited about what the future holds for The Pinnaroo Farmer.
“One of our big visions is, even though we have started The Pinnaroo Farmer … we don’t want to just use our lentils, we want to use our district’s lentils,” Phillipa explains.
“When we (farmers) go to the silos, the lentils don’t all make export grade. Some are chipped, or dented; they aren’t pretty enough for the packet, basically. But that is just how the seed comes through the header.
“The downgrading of those lentils, which are extremely good quality, is ridiculous.
“We want to find another market for these type of lentils, because once they are milled they have exactly the same protein.
“There is a consumer trend looking for plant-based proteins and we are really thinking this could be an opportunity for us.
“So, your lentils will come from not just Skeet and I, as the Pinnaroo Farmer, but it will be Pinnaroo farmers in the district who supply the lentil flour that you could find in commercial bakeries.”
FARM FILE: The Pinnaroo Farmer
Phillipa and Skeet Lawson run a wheat, barley and lentil cropping operation on 1500 hectares near the South Australia-Victoria border. They have launched a direct-to-consumer red lentil flour business, selling under The Pinnaroo Farmer brand. After harvest and off-site cleaning, they mill lentils into flour on the farm, selling 1kg bags through their online shop for $12.90.
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