Organic grain grown in Montana featured in new Kellogg’s cereal
Cool news for a cool Montana company: Kamut brand wheat is featured as a main star in Kellogg’s new cereal, Origins Ancient Grains Blend Cereal.
Kamut is an organic grain grown mainly in Montana. It’s company headquarters is in Missoula.
Here’s more about the cereal:
Kellogg’s Origins Ancient Grains Blend cereal was developed in response to the growing consumer demand for simple foods prepared with recognizable ingredients, and is an ideal breakfast option for adults and children, as it combines nutritional value with delicious taste. The cereal is made with crunchy flakes of wheat, brown rice and barley, KAMUT® khorasan wheat puffs, spelt and quinoa. Lightly sweetened with a touch of honey, Kellogg’s Origins™ contains no artificial sweeteners, artificial flavors or hydrogenated oils.
We featured an article about Kamut founder Bob Quinn’s commitment to organic farming and Kamut’s growing popularity in 2009. Take a look below (click the images for a larger verision):
Take a jaunt down Billings’ Sugar Ave.
There’s a street in Billings called Sugar Avenue, and it ‘s a very appropriately named street. That’s because every winter, more than 1.5 million pounds of sugar is produced at the Western Sugar Cooperative plant.
Contributor Jennifer McKee took us into the refinery in our July/August issue, taking readers through the process of making sugar from Montana-grown sugar beets. It’s quite a process.
The sugar ends up in products across the world, helping to sweeten things you’ve almost definitely eaten (like Wilcoxson’s ice cream or Wheat Montana bread).
But how do you make sugar from a beet? Here’s a quick breakdown of the process:
From seed to sugar
Seed: From mid-April to May, planting season begins for beet farmers on 150 Montana farms from Bridger to Custer
Root: From May through September the seeds begin to grow on the 24,000 acres of Montana farmland into what will become white, two-to five- pound, foot-long sugar beets. Beets contain up to 22 percent sucrose
Sugar beet: In September, harvesting season begins and roughly 1.5 billion of pounds of sugar beets are shipped to “beet dumps” around the state. Beets are then delivered by truck to the Billings refinery
Refining: From September through mid-February, once at the Western Sugar Cooperative refinery, beets are taken through a three hour process to make sugar. The refinery runs nonstop producing sugar
Sugar water: Inside the refinery every day beets are washed in river water, sliced with precision, dropped into a diffuser where steam coaxes out sugar. The resulting sugar water is then pumped into pans that induce crystallization
Crystals: As sugar crystals form, they’re sent through a centrifuge that blasts the last of the water from the sugar
Sugar: The sugar is spun dry and packaged. Every day of operation, the Billings refinery produces 1.5 million pounds of sugar. Sugar is shipped from the refinery to facilities across the world, including to Hershey, Penn.
Centennial farms and ranches: Celebrating a century of MT stories
“These days, to have a job for 10 years is something of an achievement. To spend an entire lifetime on something is remarkable, and to spend multiple lifetimes in dogged determination is downright admirable.”
That’s what Montana photographer Thomas Lee told our readers to introduce his Portfolio of photos that documented the lives of three Montana centennial ranching families in our July/August issue.
Lee’s Portfolio, “A Century of Stories” introduced readers to three of the 28 Montana families that have been honored by the Montana Historical Society’s Montana Centennial Farm and Ranch program.
You can meet the families Lee highlights and learn more about the program with our interactive map. To see all the photos, pick up our July/August issue.