Cairnspring Mills is the culmination of Kevin Morse’s lifetime of work in economic development, farming, and conservation. Raised by Italian immigrants on his mother's side, Kevin fell in love with food as the intersection of culture and community at a young age. As an eight-year-old, he was already cutting cube steaks in the family’s butcher shop, the start of a lifelong commitment to local food systems.
An avid outdoorsman and environmentalist, Morse pursued postbaccalaureate studies in River Ecology and Environmental Policy at the University of Washington before working around the country as an ecologist, economic development director, and farmer. When he turned 50, Morse reflected on his career and asked himself, “What’s really driving all the damage to these systems and issues that I’m trying to fix? Here in farm country,” he realized, “it’s the centralized commodity food processing system.”
Morse then decided to dedicate his “next 50 years” to creating a scaled business that could produce healthy food, increase community resilience, and restore the land through regenerative agriculture. Cairnspring Mills is the result of that commitment. He describes the birth of the Skagit Valley mill as “an old-fashioned barn raising,” drawing support from local bakeries, grain growers, the port, the WSU Bread Lab, and the Puget Sound Food Hub.
Since they started selling pallets of locally raised and processed flour in the summer of 2017, demand for their high-quality products, and the positive impact they create in the Skagit Valley community, has constantly increased, leading to the recent need to expand and increase efficiencies. In addition to being an economic engine for positive change, Morse sees the Cairnspring Mills team and network as a family and credits community support as the ultimate foundation of their success.
Regenerative & Sustainable Practices
“Buying a loaf of Tartine Bakery’s bread is nothing less than a pilgrimage,” writes The San Francisco Chronicle. For Tartine, and many other bakeries throughout the PNW, that pilgrimage actually begins with the farms and flour mill at Cairnspring:
- Cairnspring’s process yields a higher-quality and more nutritious food source by preserving the natural germ and bran of the flour grains which are stripped away in the industrial flour milling process
- Sourcing from local, regenerative grain producers invests in the local economy and the health of the land
- Source farms are committed to sustainable soil practices like cover cropping, crop rotations, on-farm composting animal integration, and no-till farming
- Cairnspring pays their producers top-dollar for higher quality identity-preserved grains and farming practices, yielding more margin and livable wages
You can learn more about the impact that Cairnspring is having on regenerating the Pacific Northwest Food System by visiting their website at www.cairnspring.com/pages/our-story
