Peasant Bread & Heritage Grains : A Photo Tour of Torth Y Tir

In 2016, we provided a grant to Torth Y Tir for a new pizza oven as part of the A Team Challenge. Needless to say, they’ve ‘risen’ a bit since then. Recently, a collaboration with Jason Taylor at The Source Image has seen their story beautifully encapsulated in film.

What is Peasant Bread?

Peasant bread is a loaf that is baked with the skill of a craftsman, the love of an artist, and the storytelling of a writer.  

In the past, peasant bread was made with what was available to the farmers who were considered poor. These farmers managed the whole process of growing wheat, milling flour, and baking bread.

Although the modernisation of the food system since developed, in France, baking bread in a similar vein continued and formed the tradition of ‘paysan boulanger’.

Today, the old values - where nutritious food comes directly from harmony with the Earth - makes peasant bread a true symbol of food sovereignty.

Peasant bread makes use of whole flour to produce a rustic and hearty loaf. There is a stiffness to the crust and the texture of the crumb is coarser compared to bread baked from refined flours. These unique and natural inconsistencies remind us that real bread is something authentic, sensual, baked with intention, and a gastronomic delight. The true beauty is in the taste – the notable full-bodied, almost nutty, flavour originates from the health of the soil.

“Whereas bread had become something that is problematic to our health we want to restore it to something that’s actually good for us and good for our communities.”

Image courtesy of Torth Y Tir

WhAT IS Heritage Grain?

The future of farming requires us to farm in accordance to the natural ecosystems. Heritage Grains are a useful tool in the toolbox for feeding the world whilst farming regeneratively.  

Heritage grains were bred, grown, harvested, and milled at a time when artificial inputs and machinery were mere imagination.

For a sustainable future, they already have a head start. They are regionally adapted to our climate. As Rupert says in the video, they out compete natural weeds, whilst the in-field diversity allows for a natural ecosystem where predator pest species can live. Also, through adapting to local regions, they even possess their own natural defences to some native insects.

But above all else, they taste really good.

If you’d like to read more on the future of wheat, this blog post by the Sustainable Food Trust is a good place to begin. So too this Wicked Leeks article ‘Grains to Change’. There is also an annual gathering of the UK Grain Lab, which brings together not just farmers and bakers, but also millers, breeders, scientists and academics, hosted by the Small Food Bakery in Nottingham.

From Field to Loaf

What makes Peasant Bread so important is the journey from field to loaf.

In the soil, live a universe of microorganisms that support the health of the plant, ecosystem, climate, and us! The health of the soil matters greatly to the health of the biosphere, for carbon sequestration, water cycling, and nutrition.

One of the best ways to grow healthy soil is through the diversity of plant species – different root systems use and cycle different nutrients at different times. Therefore, a diversity of available nutrients supports plant health without the need of inputs. Having a mixed population of wheat in the field really is more nutritious. An example of a good ‘field-to-loaf’ flour that is available to buy is the YQ wheat produced by Wakelyns.

Peasant Bakers generally farm their grains at small scale and therefore, require either a sympathetic miller or ownership of the equipment to mill the grain into flour. For Rupert, he owns a unique piece of milling machinery that is designed to produce beautiful flour sensitively (after all, this is an art).

 The allure of the loaf really materialises during the baking process. With ‘the artist’s loving hand’ the dough is fermented, risen into a leaven, mixed, folded and risen again ready to bake.

“This is a moment of alchemy; the final stages of the transformation from the field to your loaf, when raw ingredients become larger than the sum of their parts through the magic of a multitude of microorganisms as they unlock nutrition, develop flavour and cause the dough to rise.”

 Who is Torth Y Tir?

Who knew that locally grown wheat would survive in the very wet, west Wales? Well, according to historical records it has been as natural for as long as people ate bread.

Peasant Bread and heritage grains are farmed, milled, and baked in St Davids, Pembrokeshire by Torth Y Tir (Welsh, meaning Loaf of the Land) - a Community Benefit Society, owned and run by their members, who all hail from the local community.

Their aims are:

To practice and promote community-supported baking and heritage cereal production in a spirit of solidarity and openness.

To widen access to artisan, sourdough bread and the skills needed to produce it.

To demonstrate and teach the benefits of growing, processing, stone milling and baking heritage grains through the principles of agroecology and handmade, naturally leavened, wood-fired bread.

““Your loaf starts in our field. Nourished by the sun, the rain and the soil, our heritage grains are then freshly stone-milled on-site before being naturally leavened and baked entirely by hand in our wood-fired oven. It’s a process of dedication and a dance of time and intention”. Rupert Dunn ”

All photos copyright of Jason Taylor, The Source Image

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Our Rare Welsh Oats

Written by Katie Hastings, Seed Sovereignty Network, who tells the story of rejuvenating regional heritage grain in Wales.

On a sharp day on the cliffs of the Pembrokeshire Coast last spring, a small group of farmers and growers met to place rare Welsh oat seeds in the ground. Where usually these seeds would be broadcast across a field or drilled in long rows, each of these rare oats was placed diligently by hand into carefully drawn channels. So momentous was this that the BBC focused their cameras on the sowing, broadcasting it on the 6-o-clock news across Wales. Gerald Miles – organic farmer of Caerhys Farm since the age of 16 – cracked his signature jokes as we picked each seed from their containers against a strong wind coming from the sea.

 Although these oats were kindly donated to us from the seed stores of the IBERS plant research centre, they were already ours. These oats – with names like Hen gardie, Ceirch llwyd, Ceirch du bach – were grown on Welsh soils for hundreds of years. The seed was saved by the communities that grew them and is a collectively owned commons. As different regional seeds were passed through generations they adapted to the soils and climates of the varied lands they grew in. These oats co evolved with Welsh farming communities, being saved for the traits the farmers selected and shaping the lives of those growing them in turn.

In the last 50 – 100 years we have lost these oats from our fields. Mixed farms of animal, crop and forest have been disappearing from under our noses. Where arable crops were once grown for animal feed and human food all over the varied conditions of Cymru, we now declare most of Wales ‘unsuitable’ for arable production. Feeding this fire is the fact that we have moved away from growing our native indigenous seeds, suited to our wet and luscious conditions, in favour of buying seeds bred to offer us better ‘performance’. Failing to see that seeds bred for high yields in industrial farming scenarios don’t work for smaller low input farms, we have forsaken the seeds that worked in our Welsh valleys in the past.

Coming together under the banner of the Llafur Ni (Our Cereals), our Seed Sovereignty Programme has been working with the farmers and growers on the ground who want to reclaim our grain seeds. Looking into the records of only one genebank we found 108 Welsh oat varieties secured against total extinction. But these seeds should not just be filed away in storage, they should be a part of our farms and our diets. These older seeds don’t just hold unknown genetic traits, unknown climatic tolerances, unknown disease resistance. They also hold the stories of the people who grew them and the history of our landscape. To let them disappear is to let a part of ourselves disappear.

Our Llafur Ni group decided to collectively sow Welsh oats on the clifftops of Caerhys Farm as a statement of reclamation. We were unprepared for the diversity these oats would show us, different shapes, sizes, sweetness and strength. Initially not a scientific experiment but a symbolic bringing into being of what should still be there, we started to take advice from experts at IBERS and the Organic Research Centre. We measured basic information about the oats growth, susceptibility to ‘lodging’ (falling over) and ripeness. While at the end of the year we were only able to harvest tiny quantities of seeds from these plants, we felt the weight of that first step on a long journey of resurrecting our indigenous grain seeds.

Our Llafur Ni network met again this autumn in the grand Guildhall in Aberteifi (Cardigan). Our numbers have swelled, our enthusiasm has focused. Smallholders, sheep farmers, market gardeners and seed library volunteers sat side by side to listen to two elder farmers tell us about the ways grains were grown, not too long ago, before industrial arable production.

Iwan Evans still grows the Ceirch du bach oats which were grown on his farm near Llandysul since “forever”. Iwan is now an island in a sea of diversity loss, still saving these Welsh oat seeds on his farm each year and keeping alive what would have once been commonplace. Joining with our group he has now been able to pass these seeds on to other growers in the hope that they will be safer preserved in several locations and slowly passed back to the farms who have lost them. He told us of his extensive vintage machinery collection and pledged machinery to our machinery ring so that others in the group can start to farm grains again.

Gerald Miles told us tales of threshing days when he was young, in which members of the community came together to process grain crops. Showing us pictures of beautiful farm machines which can be pulled by horses and run from small tractors, he made possible in our imaginations a type of low impact grain farming that was still widely practiced only 50 years ago. Giving us a call to action, he told us of the importance of continuing to reclaim and preserve our Welsh grains. “They could be the foods of the future” he said, “we might need them in order to survive”.

Llafur Ni are now planning to increase the varieties of seed reclaimed and spread the planting across 3 different farms to reduce the risk of losing precious crops. Aware that we are at the bottom of a mountain, it will take years to bulk these seeds into significant quantities, we are galvanised to work together and keep these seeds in farmers hands. As well as sharing seeds, we are also putting together lists of equipment that can be shared from farm to farm in order to better increase our Welsh grain production.

We are aware that the 108 Welsh oat varieties we found in one genebank are only the lucky ones that made it into that seed store. There is no record of the quantities of diversity lost across our country that never made it into the seed stores and breeding programmes. Now is the time to take back what genetic material we still have access to and not allow it to slip unnoticed into extinction. There is no better time to get involved in the front line of our indigenous seed preservation.

To join the Llafur Ni network contact the Seed Sovereignty Programme’s Wales Coordinator Katie Hastings on katie@gaianet.org .

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Author: Katie Hastings

Katie Hastings is the Wales Coordinator for the Gaia Foundation’s Seed Sovereignty Programme. She is the Director of a community food organisation in Mid Wales called Mach Maethlon, where she runs a farmstart training programme and works with businesses to increase the amount of locally produced food they are buying. Katie also grows wheat and oats as part of the Machynlleth Grain Growers and has produced vegetables for many years.

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THE ABSOLUTE IMPORTANCE OF ENLIGHTENED AGRICULTURE

Written by Colin Tudge, Real Farming Trust, who calls for an Agrarian Renaissance.

Almost a billion people go to bed hungry; more than a billion eat too much of the wrong things  (the world population of diet-related diabetics far exceeds the total population of the United States); everywhere there is unrest; we’re in the throes of a mass extinction;  and climate change threatens to make nonsense of all our aspirations. Everybody knows all this (don’t they?) although many feel there’s nothing they can do about it and many alas in high places are in denial – or at least, if they do acknowledge the facts, they assure us that they are on the case, and we should put our trust in their good offices. 

And yet: if only we, humanity, did simple things well, then even at this late hour, much of the pending disaster could be averted. Right now, as Pope Francis, several archbishops, a great many scientists, and writers and activists of all kinds line up to warn us, we are heading for Armageddon – perhaps in 30 years or less; certainly, within the lifetimes of our grandchildren. Yet we could and should be looking forward, with reasonable optimism, to at least another million years on this Earth, and our far distant descendants could be living far more contentedly than most of us do now, with real, personal fulfilment, and in harmony with the creatures that we are now destroying. The difference between what is, and what could be, is that stark.

To make the necessary changes, however, we need truly to be radical; to get right down to the roots of the world’s problems and, in effect, start again. We need transformation; metamorphosis; metanoia – nothing short of Renaissance, meaning re-birth, at least as deep-rooted and far-reaching as the “Italian” Renaissance that began in the 15th century and (more or less) brought the European Middle Ages to a close. 

The key, though, to all the world’s problems, human and inhuman, lies with agriculture; and so too therefore does the key to their solution. Agriculture is, very obviously, by far the greatest source of human food: 99 per cent of us would not be here without it. Less obviously, it is also the world’s biggest employer – by far. It occupies a third of all land – including most of the world’s most fertile land. Other terrestrial creatures have mostly been pushed to the margins. But in its modern industrial form agriculture is also the greatest of all polluters of the land, the oceans, and the atmosphere – source of a hundred toxins, and a major and critical contributor to global warming. It destroys soils (a third of all land is now degraded according to the FAO); it is the main drain (by far) on the world’s fresh water. Taken all in all, “modern” high-tech farming is very obviously the prime cause of mass extinction. Indeed, unless we develop wildlife-friendly farming then the cause of wildlife conservation is more or less dead in the water, or at least severely holed below the water-line.

In short, the grand Renaissance, the great re-think that the world now needs, should begin with an Agrarian Renaissance: a complete re-think and re-structuring of the world’s farming – together with a new, complementary food culture. One more thing: the Italian Renaissance was driven by bankers and led by artists and intellectuals but the Renaissance we need now, beginning with the Agrarian Renaissance, must be driven by us: people at large. It must be a giant exercise in democracy. 

Prolific and traditional food cultures, like the diets of the Mediterranean (example pictured above), use meat but sparingly and celebrate local diversity.

The task may seem daunting – not least because the world’s food network seems sewn up: every stage from plant breeding and seed production through the agrochemical industry to processing and retail is controlled by a handful of corporates, all supported by big governments like those of Britain and the US for whom the corporates are their natural partners.

Yet there is serendipity. Most (by far) of the world’s farmers are still small-scale and craft-based (artisanal); many millions of people worldwide and many thousands (literally) of non-government organizations (NGOs) are working on projects that are leading the world in the right directions; and various communities in Britain and the world at large are acquiring farmland or at least the use of it and are beginning to do things differently. Indeed, despite appearances, the giant, globalized, integrated food and farming industry may be the most amenable or vulnerable of all to a people’s takeover.

So what’s gone wrong and what do we need to do?

What we have and what we need

The kind of agriculture that is now promoted by the nexus of big governments, big finance, and corporates, with their chosen expert and intellectual advisers, is anomalously called “conventional”. This, though, is yet another example of language hi-jacked – for it should, rather, be called “Neoliberal-Industrial” or NI agriculture. It is driven, after all, by the (neoliberal) conceit that we, human beings, need above all to maximize wealth. Agriculture is now conceived as “a business like any other” (a chill phrase I first heard in the 1970s) and “business” these past few decades has been re-conceived not as the natural underpinning of democratic society as it was at its best until the 1970s but simply as another way of making money – for personal enrichment and to contribute to GDP.

The way to maximize wealth, so the neoliberal doctrine has it, is to compete in the maximally-competitive global market with other enterprises of all kinds to maximize profit and grab the biggest market share. Profit in turn is maximized in three ways. First: by producing as much as possible. The more there is to sell, the greater the potential returns. Productionism still rules. Second: by cutting costs to the bone and then cutting a bit more. This generally means replacing labour with machines and industrial chemistry, although if all real costs are taken into account then labour emerges as a minor contributor, and machines and chemistry are cheaper only so long as oil is still available and is made affordable. The third route to profit is by “adding value” – which of course is good when it means turning grain into bread and pastries, or dead animals into highly nutritious delicacies, but it also means extravagant packaging and out-of-season strawberries and all the rest.

A bird’s eye view of the neo-liberal monoculture that prioritises the maximisation of yield.

Indeed the whole industrial food chain is immensely profligate. Modern arable farming, which is the chief agricultural enterprise, is in effect an offshoot of the agrochemical industry -- the agrochemical industry al fresco. Modern livestock farming especially in vast modern CAFOs (“concentrated animal feeding operations”) is an offshoot of arable farming -- designed, primarily, not to meet (spurious) public need or “demand” in the spirit of democracy, but to mop up arable surpluses. Supermarkets in general sell only the prime cuts, and what cannot reasonably be made into sausages and pies (and a lot that can), the rest supports the petfood industry. The profligacy is not an accident. The food chain is designed to be profligate. It is more profitable that way.

At the same time, FAO tells us that at least a third of all food is simply wasted. In the poor world, a third is lost to pests and predators in the field or in storage. In the rich world, a third is thrown away after it has reached the kitchen. In addition – and worse! -- about half the world’s cereal and most of the soya is grown for and fed to livestock. Yet all the world’s greatest cuisines, like those of Italy and China, use meat sparingly. We could produce enough to support the world’s best cooking just by feeding animals on pasture and/or swill, as is of course traditional. 

Enlightened Agriculture

What we really need, in absolute contrast to all of the above, is what I for the past 15 years or so have been calling Enlightened Agriculture, also known as Real Farming as in the Oxford Real Farming Conference – and our new College for Real Farming and Food Culture, of which more on that later.

Behind Enlightened Agriculture lies the big idea that if we really want to solve the world’s problems, and establish the Renaissance on firm foundations, then in everything we do must be guided by the principles of –

Morality, which tells us what it is right to do; and of

Ecology, which aspires to tell us what it is necessary and possible to do.

These two – Morality and Ecology – must provide the guidelines. They alone deserve to be called principles. “Political principles” are just ideologies, which is not the same thing at all.

Many, though, suggest that a universal morality is not possible. Different individuals and different societies set their own standards.  True – but contrary to the fashionable, post-modern belief, some moral codes are better than others. Thus, moral codes in practice have been set since the beginning of history mainly by religions; and although the different religions differ in their trappings, liturgies, and customs, the moral codes that lie at their heart are all remarkably similar – in essence almost identical. All in particular emphasise the core virtues of –

Compassion

Humility

Reverence for Nature

These, then, are the guidelines of Enlightened Agriculture – which is informally but adequately defined as:

“Agriculture that is expressly designed to provide everyone, everywhere, with food of the highest quality, both nutritionally and gastronomically, without cruelty or injustice and without wrecking the rest of the world”.

Local and regeneratively grown, socially just, and economically sound are key principles to agroecology.

Despite present appearances, and despite a sequence of somewhat panicky reports from governments and commerce, this should be eminently possible. But we can do what needs doing only if we farm as if we really intended to provide good food for everyone – as opposed to becoming rich and powerful – and if we treat nature with true respect, and not, as now, as raw material, to be turned into commodities, to be sold on the global market.

In practice, although the term “Enlightened Agriculture” is novel, it is based on four ideas – moral and ecological -- that are now becoming well established. They are:

Agroecology

Food Sovereignty

Green Economic Democracy

Respect for Traditional Knowledge

All are the precise opposite of the Neoliberal-Industrial approaches that now receive such zealous support from the government-corporate oligarchy. Thus: 

Agroecology requires us to treat all farms as ecosystems – diverse, low-input, synergistic, and cyclic. Accordingly, agroecological farms in general aspire to be mixed and organic; they are therefore complex; therefore they must be skills-intensive – plenty of farmers; and therefore in general they tend to be small to medium-sized. 

But NI agriculture depends on machines and industrial chemistry with minimum to zero labour – and machines prefer simplicity, so complexity gives way to monoculture; and machinery is most economical when it is big. Big machines need big fields to operate in so NI farms are as big as possible. Farmers these days are encouraged to swallow up the farms next door.  

Food Sovereignty is the idea that all societies should be in charge of their own food supply. This again pushes us towards the small-to-medium sized mixed farm that is designed primarily to serve local communities and, is ideally, community owned: or to towards cooperatives of such farms.

Again in starkest contrast, NI agriculture is designed not only to maximize wealth but also to concentrate wealth – into the hands of an irreducibly small coterie of corporates and financiers which governments like ours, faute de mieux, depend upon. This is the precise antithesis of food sovereignty.

Green Economic Democracy among other things requires a “tripartite mixed economy”: a synergy of public, private, and – the one that has been too little emphasized – community ownership, especially of land. The whole is designed to operate for the wellbeing of society and the biosphere as a whole. Again, that is not the prime motivation of the neoliberal economy.

Respect for Traditional Knowledge means just that. It is absurd to suppose that the latest wheeze dreamed up in some think tank or commercial laboratory is always innately superior to and must replace the crafts and wisdom evolved by billions of farmers in millions of locations over thousands of years.  It is absurd – yet seems to be the assumption nonetheless.

Agroecological, small-holder farmers are the torch bearers of traditional knowledge built on millions of years of experience. (Photo by We Feed The World)

But could agroecological, small to medium-sized, mixed, low-input (organic) farms really support the present population and the 10 billion who will be with us by the end of the century? Of course. Study after study has shown that small units, preferably mixed and of course well run, are more productive per unit area than all but the most intensive high-tech kinds – and of course are far less damaging and profligate and indeed are sustainable, which the high-tech industrial kind emphatically are not. 

The powers-that-be, however, though they speak in endless reports and rhetoric of the need for change, seek in essence to perpetuate the status quo: high-tech designed to maximize and concentrate wealth, controlled by an elite. It won’t do. We have to take matters into our own hands. In Six Steps Back to the Land I try to show how people at large can get stuck in to farming; in Why Genes Are Not Selfish and People Are Nice, I sketch in some of the main ideas behind the Renaissance; and in our new College for Real Farming and Food Culture (http://collegeforrealfarming.org/ – though the website is now being re-constructed (May 2019) we are seeking to develop and promulgate the necessary ideas and to translate them into action. Our efforts are only part of what is rapidly becoming a global movement. Here and there in a thousand different ways the Agrarian Renaissance is already happening. All it needs now is a little more collaboration. Please do join in!

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Author: Colin Tudge

Colin Tudge is a biologist by education, a writer by trade, and co-founder of the Oxford Real Farming Conference and the College for Real Farming and Food Culture.

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