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.
“It’s very worrying for farmers,” he says, as many prepare for a reduced harvest. “The stress of when it's going to rain has been very real.”
Yet much of Richard’s land is still green. “We grow 30 different species of plants here,” he explains. “They grow together in the fields as a community, with the shallow-rooting species sharing resources with the deeper-rooting ones.”
That diversity is part of what helps Richard’s fields endure a dry summer. It has also changed the way we think about bread.
Richard is one of the farmers who taught us that good bread begins with the life of the soil. Instead of asking farmers to grow the grains we had already decided to use, we began learning 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.
Among the plants Richard grows deliberately are some most of us would call weeds. He calls them his “ecological treasures”. We haven’t made a loaf from those just yet.
Read our full conversation with Richard in the Journal. | 