I'm not familiar with Insecto. I'd check to see if it's safe for human consumption. Contact your County's Cooperative Extension Office and talk to an Ag. Agent. They may have specific information, or can get it for you.

1. Are you purchasing new crop wheat (yet to be harvested this year)? If so, wheat that is 2-3 years old is best for milling, although new-crop wheat CAN be used. If you get new crop wheat, you might want to store it for a year or two, if possible, before using it.

2. Is this field run grain? Are you getting it straight out of the combine hopper and will need to remove the "solids", including chaff, beetles, cricket and grasshopper legs (and other bits of them), stones and other assorted solid matter? Or will it be cleaned at the elevator - harvested with a combine and then cleaned by passing through screens, sieves, or fans to remove chaff and foreign material at the elevator and bagged?

3. Are you getting food-grade wheat (for humans) or feed-grade wheat (normally destined for animal use)?

4. If possible, get the protein and moisture count so you'll know whether it's best used for yeast breads or low-protein and best used for quick breads and other baked goods where you don't want a lot of gluten development. If it's running 10% protein, or less, you will want to add some vital wheat gluten when using it for yeast breads. If the wheat has 14% protein, or over, that's flour you can expect will take a LOT of kneading to develop that much gluten in it.

If it's high in moisture, you'll have to dry it before storing or milling it.

5. If you "wash" wheat, you MUST make sure it's well-dried in an oven or dehydrator before you use it. Wheat high in moisture will glaze over mill stones (if your mill grinds with stones), or clog an electric mill and ruin it. Glazed stones have to be removed and cleaned, dried, and reinstalled. It's always good to have an extra set of mill stones for your mill, should they glaze over.

Personally, I've never washed wheat, even wheat I got straight out of the combine and had to winnow the chaff and sift the solids out of it myself. After it was winnowed and sifted, we blew the dust off with air from an air compressor.

6. Wheat is normally "cleaned" (or triple-cleaned) by passing it through screens, sieves and air from fans, not washed. Some operations even use de-stoners to make sure any small rocks/stones are removed, as well as a magnet to pull out any foreign bits of metal, and get the dust blown off it with air from a series of large fans.

Triple-cleaned food-grade wheat means it's relatively dust-free and you get primarily whole seeds. Feed gain will be lower-quality grain, have more broken seeds and who knows WHAT else in it, and require further cleaning for human use. If your grain has a lot of broken seeds in it, then you chance having it go rancid during storage. Once the bran (coat) is cut or cracked, the germ oil is exposed to oxygen which quickly goes rancid.

After purchasing hundreds and hundreds of pounds of wheat over the years, I'd rather spend the money on quality wheat with a known protein and moisture level, that has been triple-cleaned, and is food-quality, than clean my own; although I've never passed up free wheat from friends and relatives, even if I had to clean it.

It's a LOT of work to clean a bushel of wheat. Nothing like sitting out on the patio on a July day in 100F heat with a bowl of wheat in your lap. First you pick out, or screen out, all the "solids". Then, with a huge fan blowing, you pour small amounts of wheat between two containers (over and over again) and the "stuff" (chaff, beards, bug-bits, weed seeds, etc.) blows all over the place. Then you sift it through screens to remove any large bits you missed, through another screen so the broken grain is separated from the whole. Last, blow the dust off with the air compressor.

-Grainlady