When I first stated making my own bread from my own at-home-ground flour I was puzzled by variations in the dough. Sometimes the bread rose well and was spongy after baking like I wanted it to be. Sometimes it kneaded stickily and ended up flat and crumbly like a cake. Since I had done everything the same way except that I may have bought my wheat berries from different healthfood stores, I began to investigate the subject of wheat quality. The element in the cereal that forms the rubbery sponge in risen bread so it doesn't crumble and rises high without collapsing, is gluten. The word glue derives from gluten. The gluten content of various wheats varies. Bread bakers use "hard wheat" because of its high gluten content. Gluten is a protein and gluten comprises most of the protein in bread wheat; the protein content and the gluten content are almost identical. Try this. Ask your healthfood store buyer or owner what the protein content is of the hard red wheat seeds they're selling. You'll almost certainly get a puzzled look and your answer will almost certainly be, "we have Organic and conventional." Demand that the store buyer ask this question of their distributor/wholesaler and then report back to you. If the distributor deigns to answer, the answer will be the same--I sell Organic or conventional hard red wheat. Period. When I got these non-answers I looked further and discovered that hard bread wheats run from about 12 percent protein to about 19 percent and this difference has everything to do with the soil fertility (and to an extent the amount of rainfall during the season), and almost nothing to do with Organic or conventional. This difference also has everything to do with how your dough behaves and how your bread comes out. And how well your bread nourishes you. Thirteen percent wheat will not make a decent loaf--fourteen percent is generally considered #2 quality and comprises the bulk of cheap bread grain. When you hear in the financial news that a bushel of wheat is selling for a certain price, they mean #2. Bakers compete for higher protein lots and pay far higher prices for more protein. We prefer our bread about 25% rye, but rye contains no gluten at all. Mix any rye flour into fourteen percent wheat flour and the dough becomes very heavy, won't rise, and after baking, crumbles. So I kept looking for better grain and finally discovered a knowledgeable lady that sold flour mills and who also was a serious baker herself. She had located a source of quality wheat with an assayed protein content and sold it by the 50 pound sack. When I asked her if her wheat was Organic she said it was either sixteen or seventeen percent protein depending on whether you wanted hard red spring wheat or hard white spring wheat. Organic or conventional? I persisted. No, she said. High protein!