Flour of the prairie

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HARVEY - From the day Earth Harvest Mills opened its doors four years ago and started selling flour as Dakota Prairie Organic Flour Co., it has seemingly been in an expansion mode.

Eric Hoberg, president of Dakota Prairie, founded the company with his brother Grayson, who is the CEO, and started producing flour in the fall of 2004 after breaking ground on the facility a year earlier. The offices for the mill are actually located in a converted veterinary building, and a 40-by-90-foot expansion was added to the facility. Although the business started out relatively small, it would not stay that way for long.

"And that's all we had until about a year or so ago. All we had was four grain bins, the milling facility, and the office," said Eric Hoberg. "In part of the current office building we were doing packaging, and beside the mill we were doing warehousing.

"We needed better packaging, and we needed warehousing space, and about a year-and-a-half ago we built a packaging and warehousing building, and we grew out of that to the point where we added a ... warehouse building to it."

Those expansion projects were a big help to Dakota Prairie, but it didn't take long before the mill was going through yet another teenage-like growth spurt. The latest round of expansions will add two more mills, 21 grain storage bins, a truck scale, a rail line and additional midds bins, which hold a by-product of the milling process that is sold as cattle feed.

The expansion can be seen clearly in an image on Hoberg's computer that shows the old sections - relatively speaking - of Dakota Prairie in black while the new sections blaze outward in red like a sunburst, which necessitates a fair amount of scrolling just to take everything in.

"From what we originally were four years ago, we've probably grown fourfold," Hoberg said. "Our production will go from about 50 metric tons to 200 metric tons, a metric ton being a 24-hour period."

The mill is certified organic and certified gluten-free, and the expansion will upgrade their milling facilities so that gluten-free flours can be blended and additional gluten-free products can be milled. Hoberg said rice, lentils, peas, amaranths and quinoas are examples of products that are a little tough for them to mill in their current gluten-free facilities.

"There's some gluten-free products that we can do currently, but they're difficult," Hoberg said. "And the facility that we're upgrading into will give us better quality and just make it a better product and easier for the guys to get it done. Right now it's fairly labor-intense."

The secret to success in the constantly changing milling market is simple, according to Hoberg: give the customers what they want. The fact that Dakota Prairie has been able to give their many customers what they ask for is one of the reasons the company has grown so much in such a short amount of time.

"A customer calls you up and says, 'Can you do this?' And we say, 'Yeah, we can do that.' And you go out and add the equipment you need so you can produce what they're asking for," Hoberg said. "And that opens up further doors and pretty soon you have to expand that portion of it because it grew more than what you thought it was going to grow, which is a good thing."

While ensuring their customers' satisfaction is a big reason the mill has grown this much in the past four years, it isn't the only reason. Hoberg says when the mill first started up they didn't have the capital or facilities to keep up with all the work that was coming their way, and they've been playing catch-up ever since.

"We've been expanding since the first day we got here because we started up on a shoestring. We were underfunded, undercapitalized when we started this business, and we started up without enough equipment and facility," he said. "So we've been adding equipment and adding production capabilities from the minute we started."

Although having to constantly upgrade has undoubtedly been hectic, it has also led to a far stronger and larger business than the brothers could have hoped for four short years ago.

The employees at Dakota Prairie have grown from just the two brothers to around 20 at present time, with more to come once the new facilities come online by the end of the year. Where the mill once produced only basic white and spring wheat flour, it now produces 37 different products. Hoberg hopes their expansion efforts into overseas markets will continue and that their gluten-free varieties will become a larger part of the business, although he says that pounding out regular flour for the American market is still at the heart of what Dakota Prairie does.

The paltry 20,000 bushel storage capacity the mill started out with is now more than doubled by just one of the 21 new storage bins being built that will hold 47,000 bushels each. Once all the bins are complete, Hoberg said they will have a storage capacity of 1 million bushels.

That is key to the business because they don't store much in the way of finished product. An order comes in, and the flour is milled and sent on its way in a matter of days. That plan keeps the product as fresh and high-quality as possible, and allows the mill to buy from local farmers who either can't or don't want to store their grain over a long period of time.

"Baking is a 12-month industry, and the farming community likes to get rid of their grains by a certain time, and we have to store it," Hoberg said. "They no longer want to store their grains, they want to cash them in and get the cash, so we have to store it. If we don't have the grain on hand sometimes we might not be able to service our customers."

Hoberg is excited by what he sees in the future for the company. He admits the difficulty in getting Dakota Prairie established and the enormous growth the mill has undergone took him by surprise, but Hoberg credits the many people in the community of Harvey and the state for helping the two brothers realize dreams they never thought possible four years ago.

"We've been very fortunate to find quality people in Harvey. (People) in the city, in the community, in the banking community (and) state financial organizations have been excellent," he said. "The local community, the people and the state have been excellent to work with, and they're a big part of our success."

As for what the future might bring beyond this year, Hoberg said that while they always have their ear to the ground for new ideas to grow the company, he has a firm answer for any ideas involving expansion in 2009.

"No," he said with a laugh that filled the room. "We're always getting inquiries and stuff, but right now we've got our hands full on this project and we're not looking for additional projects."