Wheat fields across the country are brown and brittle this year. Blackberries ripened a month early. After one of the hottest, driest summers on record, we called our farming partner and friend Richard Gantlett at Yatesbury House Farm in Wiltshire to ask what he was seeing in his fields.
Richard is one of the farmers who taught us that good bread begins with the life of the soil. For more than 25 years, he’s been focused on farming methods that work with nature, rather than against it, to regenerate the soil and produce natural, quality food.
As we’ve learned more about the relationship between soil health, flavour and nutrition from farmers like Richard, our process has reversed. Instead of asking them to grow the grains we want, we’ve learned to bake with what good farming gives us.
Our Brown Sourdough grew from that change. It brings together eight plants, including emmer, spelt, buckwheat and heritage grains grown by Richard. Each has its own place in the field, helping to nourish the soil, and its own place in the loaf, building its dense crumb and deep, malted flavour.
Here Richard shares how bread may be impacted by the droughts, why there’s more to yield than volume, and the wonders of thoughtfully planted weeds.
In the wake of the droughts, what’s the mood among the farming community right now?
There’s a great deal of concern. Over the last five years we’ve had three years of hot and very dry summers, and we’re used to one every 10–11 years. There will be a reduction in volume of food that’s harvested and it’s bound to have knock-on effects on prices. This is not just today’s news – it’ll affect the next 12 months.
It’s very worrying for farmers. Aside from volume of yield, if there’s nothing for your cattle to graze on, you have to feed them your winter food prepared earlier in the season. This year, people started doing that in July. The stress of when’s it going to rain has been very real.
Why do droughts impact the volume of a harvest?
When plants undergo photosynthesis and take carbon dioxide out of the air, they also need water to make the sugars. If they’re under water stress, they will produce less sugars and less volume. Basically, if your lawn isn’t growing, the fields are not going to be growing so well either.
But I’ll add that modern farming tends to think of yield as only one thing. And actually, ‘yield’ means to give up, and volume is just one of the things that nature gives up to us. Biodiversity and wildlife is also yielded from our fields. And you can’t have healthy crops without wildlife, so if you’re only thinking about volume then you’re missing the bigger picture.
The other aspect to yield is quality. Often with a wet summer, it’s difficult to get bread-making quality wheat. But intense heat and slightly drier hops can increase quality. So, hopefully, this year, although the volume might be less the quality might be better.
So far, how has the weather impacted your farm?
Despite many burnt-out fields surrounding us, we've got lots of green pasture still. That's because we grow 30 different species of plants. They grow together in the fields as a community, where the shallow-rooting species are able to interact and share resources with the deeper-rooting species, helping them stay green. It's lovely to see. I find the connection between those plants, through the microbes in the fungi in the soil, really exciting.
The number of species of plant you have growing in the soil is proportionate to the number of species of organisms within the soil. So, to have diverse, healthy soil, it’s important not to grow a monoculture. We almost never have one variety of wheat growing in a field.
We also avoid monocultures by growing weeds. I have a reverence for weeds now. I think of them as our ecological treasures, as they provide really important functions and services. Weeds feed the insects and bugs that live in the soil surface, which then provides food for the farmland birds, creating an ecosystem of biodiversity. Sometimes we plant them ourselves as ‘companion plants’ to grow alongside the wheat, like clover and herbs. They also protect the soil and help to keep moisture in.
So, farming in the right way can protect us from summers of droughts?
It’s not to say that the extreme weather won’t have an effect, but we can protect ourselves from the worst. We're trying to build up the health of our soil so that if there are these extremes we can weather them better. Of course, if margins become tighter that becomes more difficult. But for us, having farmed in this way for over 25 years, the ability for our soil to bounce back after dry spells has improved. We're very glad to be in the position we are.
