IGP Short Course Provides Emerging Wheat Leaders and Staff with a Crash Course in Flour Milling:
From the rolling hills of the Palouse to the trading desk in Kansas City, the day-to-day work of the U.S. wheat industry is a whirlwind of activity. For farmers, staffers and traders, the focus is often on the immediate task at hand, but understanding how the needs of end-users like millers and bakers connect directly back to those daily decisions is critical to understanding why wheat quality is important from kernel to loaf and every step in between.
Learning more about flour milling and end-use functionality is the goal of the IGP-KSU Flour Milling for State Wheat Leaders and Staff Course, which took place December 8 to 10, 2025, at the IGP Institute on the north campus of Kansas State University. Led by Shawn Thiele, associate director of the IGP Institute, the course aims to provide training on the basic principles of flour milling and to help attendees gain a greater understanding of the relationship between wheat quality and flour performance.
This year’s attendees included new state wheat commissions from Oklahoma, Washington, Oregon and Idaho, staff members from the Idaho Wheat Commission, Kansas Wheat and U.S. Wheat Associates and three industry representatives.
The course combined classroom lectures with hands-on milling and baking labs at K-State’s teaching facilities, including the Hal Ross Flour Mill and Shellenberger milling and baking laboratories.
Minding the Mill
Throughout the three-day course, attendees saw firsthand the complexity of flour production. Jill Cloward, who leads office operations for the Idaho Wheat Commission, noted that the precision required in a commercial mill far exceeds what she expected.
“The one thing that really stood out to me was just that first day with the milling process of how precise it is,” Cloward said. “I was surprised at how many times you have to run the wheat through the mill. It was interesting and something I did not realize.”
Justin Place is a second-generation farmer from eastern Idaho, just a little north of Idaho Falls. While he is a new member of the Idaho Wheat Commission, he previously served on the Idaho Grain Producers Association. He had participated in Idaho’s tour of the export system in the Pacific Northwest, but had not had experience with the milling process or with the other differences between the six classes of U.S. wheat.
“As a new commissioner, I needed to learn more about wheat than what I had knowledge of at the moment,” Place explained. “I saw how difficult it is to get flour out of certain classes. We’re more familiar with soft white (SW) wheat where I’m at, but when you start watching the harder wheats get milled, it’s amazingly different.”
From Lab to Loaf
In the baking labs, the lessons shifted from mechanical processes to chemistry. Participants experimented with different wheat classes—sometimes using them for their intended purpose and sometimes purposely using an alternate class to see the results.
Art Schultheis farms near Colton, Washington, in the Palouse region of the state’s southeast corner. He found the visual evidence of flour performance to be one of the most impactful parts of the course, such as when his team used U.S. hard red winter (HRW) wheat to make a delicate cake rather than a loaf of pan bread.
“It was interesting to see the differences between the performance of different flours used for different applications,” said Schultheis. “It was a good training course to understand what happens with our wheat after it leaves our farms and the number of steps wheat goes through to get flour.”
Closing the Loop on Quality
For U.S. wheat farmers, quality isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a competitive advantage in a crowded global market. Collin Crocker is a first-year commissioner on the Oregon Wheat Commission from Monroe, Oregon, just south of Corvallis. He farms with his wife, son-in-law and daughter. His retired parents are also on the farm. He raises around 10 different crops, including SW wheat. For him, the course reinforced the importance of quality across all six wheat classes.
“Each wheat class has its own niche. The different wheats – the reds to the whites – make a lot of difference in the end product,” he said. “At the end, quality is number one because that’s what we, the American farmers, always hang our hats on. We have the best quality in the world, and we have to get the world’s bakers the best product we can. This class gives us more appreciation of what we do—it closes the loop.”
Bringing together a cohort representative of the U.S. wheat supply chain is a bonus advantage of attending the course. Tom Cannon is a new commissioner on the Oklahoma Wheat Commission who farms near Blackwell, Oklahoma. He has a diversified rotation of cattle and crops, including wheat, corn and cotton, and is a passionate soil health steward. For him, networking with other wheat farmers from across the country as well as with industry representatives who work in other parts of the supply chain was especially beneficial.
“I was painfully ignorant of what happens to our commodity crops when they leave the farm,” Cannon admitted. “This course brought out our similarities more than anything. We need to have a profit, and that’s all through the supply chain. Quality is very important to us, so it’s good to see where that quality can bear fruit for the next line in the chain.”
By the end of the three-day intensive course, all of these emerging leaders left Manhattan, Kansas, with more than just technical knowledge; they left with a renewed commitment to the quality standards that define U.S. wheat for the world’s millers and bakers.
