Towards an ecological bread system

Cereals and bread are central to the majority of diets across the western world. Until relatively recently however, both cereals and bread have been curiously absent from conversations and strategies about local and ecologically grown food.

This is largely because of how much work is needed to enable this to happen.

The current bread system and its associated problems

Around 80% of the bread sold in the UK today is made using the “Chorleywood process”. In this ultra-efficient process wheat flour is transformed into a soft, fluffy loaf with the help of a cocktail of additives and E-numbers. Between mixing the raw ingredients to the finished loaf coming out of the oven, the whole process takes just over an hour. This has enabled the production process to to be very well suited to large mechanised factory settings, enabling very cheap products to be offered. The wheat that is required to produce suitable flour for the process needs to be very ‘strong’ and is very difficult to grow in UK conditions. Because of this the majority of the bread wheat used comes from Canada and, until very recently, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.

Bread is often used as a “loss leader” by supermarkets, who market it at prices below the production costs to encourage customers into their stores and to purchase other items. This strategy of making the cheapest possible form of bread has had many knock-on effects. These include an exponential increase in gluten intolerance and instances of people developing autoimmune disorders such as coeliac diseases. This is primarily due to what is essentially a complete absence of a fermentation process resulting in eaters trying to digest raw gluten. Another side effect is the almost complete collapse of the local grain system within the UK.

In every Scottish postcode there would once have been access to a grain mill to transform locally produced grains into foodstuffs, malt, and animal feed. In the move to “get big or get out” these once common local food systems have been replaced almost entirely with global commodity markets. Today the only market that’s readily available to arable farmers are commodity markets where their grain is bought and sold in 29 tonne widgets that can be transported by artic lorries. In Scotland, it’s worth noting that these markets are generally geared around supplying the lucrative whisky industry with its raw materials.

At the moment most arable farmers sell to these markets, not necessarily because they want to but because this is the only available route to market. An industry like whisky will prioritise yield above all else and farmers have little option but to respond to this. They are rewarded for yield per acre. A farmer may choose to grow a crop using ecological principles in order to increase nutritional or flavour content of their crop, but unless they can find an alternative route to market, the commodity system will not reward them for their troubles.

The implications of this for the twin climate and biodiversity crises are significant. The seeds that have been bred in order to achieve their astonishing yields have been bred to thrive alongside chemical fertilizers. As the plants are extremely short and have almost non-existent root systems, they are generally unable to compete with other plants (weeds) and so tend also to be susceptible to fungal diseases or attacks from pests. This can mean that herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, nematicides and growth regulators are required in addition to fertilizers.

The result of this is that most of the arable fields you see today are made up of a single variety of a single species and contain little to no biodiversity. A 2017 study by the University of Sheffield found that the use of ammonium nitrate fertilizer makes up 43% of the entire green-house gas emissions embedded within a loaf of bread including transportation. A much-shared headline from a few years back read that because of these systems our soils only have 60 years of harvest left in them. While this may be hyperbole, it is the case that soil fertility is being eradicated very quickly and that our current methods of production are not sustainable. Add to this the changing and extreme weather patterns, it’s clear that, in the long run at least, drastic changes need to be made to make our bread systems more resilient and adaptable.

The barriers

Appropriate seeds

There are currently about 33 accessions or lines of wheat seed that are commercially available to Scottish farmers. My understanding is that not a single one of these has been bred specifically to function well in organic situations or to thrive without heavy inputs. The seed stock for low-input, low impact systems doesn’t exist commercially at the moment.

A growing number of people are realising that for a healthy, resilient system we need more genetic diversity in these fields. Rather than having single varieties of a crop, having dozens, or even hundreds, of different varieties in one field makes for a much more resilient and robust system. If a pathogen or pest attacks one variety, you still have all the others. One way to access this diversity is by using “heritage” varieties that are often tucked away in gene banks. These seeds did function well in no-input systems and did grow well in specific regions. We should not necessarily look to return to these grains entirely, but they are likely to play a crucial role in allowing diversity to return to our arable systems. My old mentor John Letts, who was one of the pioneers in the heritage grain movement, often uses the phrase “In diversity there is strength”. The late, great, plant breeder Martin Wolfe paved the way for a new approach to cereal breeding based on the principle of diversity by creating his famous YQ population where a dozen or so wheat varieties were crossed together in every way possible to create hundreds of new varieties which are all grown together, constantly evolving and adapting to the conditions they find themselves in. By tapping into the genetic possibilities of these older forgotten grains it may be possible to create appropriate seed for a low-impact and thriving future.

This isn’t helped by current seed legislation, where for any seed to be legally marketed it must demonstrate varietal purity that can be identified as distinct, uniform and stable. This means that diversity, adaptability, and therefore resilience, are not legally possibly within current seed legislation. This is a huge barrier to legally scale ecological grain production.

Rebuilding lost infrastructure

In order to reinvent local grain systems appropriate infrastructure is required to handle and process these seeds. To turn grain into bread, it first needs to be transformed into flour. In Scotland there are only a handful of small scale, regional mills left across the whole country, whereas in the past nearly every community would have a mill.

This bottleneck needs to be addressed for local grain economies to function and to create new routes to market for farmers. Interestingly, there are new artisan and sourdough bakeries popping up all over the place and increasingly these bakeries are interested in using local, and ideally ecologically grown, grains. More farmers are looking into how to transition to more sustainable methods and to find new market options. Without the infrastructure to mill, or malt or oil press at a local or regional level these things just can’t happen.

Creating networks of markets

Increasingly networks are being developed to overcome these challenges and build local grain economies in ways that are based on relationships rather than faceless commodities. We’re starting to see initiatives where all sorts of bakeries and farms within a region are working out how to collaborate and work cooperatively. It’s still embryonic but we’re beginning to see mills re-emerging across most regions in the British Isles.

If the reinvention of ecological bread systems is approached in a ‘small is beautiful’ way, it will only ever be a relatively exclusive product. Given the centrality of bread and other grains in our diet we need to be ambitious in the scale of impact we are aiming for. It’s not OK for healthy bread grown in healthy arable systems to only be available to a privileged few. To turn the “artisan” into the mainstream and to enable it to become readily available will require collaboration and cooperation throughout the supply chain. This will enable more farmers to transition to more ecological practices, which in turn will have positive ecological impacts on more acres.

What I’m doing

I’ve been working on this issue for over a decade trying to understand what a route map for making our arable systems more sustainable might look like. For the past 8 years or so I’ve been trawling through gene banks and have grown and tested around 6000 different types of old wheat from around the world. Over the past few years on my family’s farm, Inchindown, in semi-upland Easter Ross, I’ve been growing fields with mixtures of around 200 different types of wheats and ryes all grown together without any inputs.

With the generous support of The Pebble Trust I was able to purchase a Austrian stone mill to enable the transformation of this grain into flour. This will then be mixed with water and salt and fermented with wild yeasts, shaped, and loaded into my purpose built commercial woodfired oven to become sourdough bread. It’s been a long time in the making but this June will see the 1st Inchindown grown flour falling from the mill and loaves being pulled out of the oven.

As much as anything I see this as a proof of concept or a prototype which may act as a stepping stone to enable more folk from across the Highlands to collaborate and re-imagine what the grain system and our bread system could be.