Scaling your acreage needs

So you want to start sourcing grain from a local farm, but you’re not sure how much acreage you need.

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Chris Swersey at the Brewers Association provided some “back-of-napkin” estimates to figure out how many acres of barley a brewer will need. With an estimated 70 to 72 pounds of malt in a barrel of beer, he said the average craft brewery (at 700 barrels) requires about 50,400 pounds of malt.

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With an 85 percent conversion rate during the malting process, that’s a requirement of a little over 59,000 pounds of raw barley.

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Barley yields about 60 to 80 bushels (at 50 pounds per bushel), so a 700-barrel-a-year brewery will need about 15 acres.

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For other grains, corn can yield 160 to 170 bushels per acre (9000 pounds) or more, while wheat is closer to 65 bushels per acre (3,000 lbs) and rye is about 40 to 50 bushels per acre (2,000 pounds).

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A distiller who wants to lay down 100 barrels of bourbon a year at 80 percent corn, 15 percent rye and five percent malt, at 1,000 pounds of grain per barrel of whiskey, will need 80,000 pounds of corn, or about 10 acres. They’ll also need 20,000 pounds of rye — another six or seven acres — and 5,000 pounds of malt, almost 6,000 pounds of raw barley, or about 2 acres' worth.

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Keep in might that these are rough estimates to put you in the ballpark. Your mileage will vary depending on variety and location, but you can use this information to start thinking about the size of the farm or farms you want to work with. If you need 20 acres of grain, then a farmer who oversees thousands of acres, or ten acres, might not be the right one for you.

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Be sure contact a local agricultural extension office to research average yields in your location, and set specific expectations with any farmer you may want to partner with. (Stay tuned for a future post on how to structure contracts with your farmer.)