Oxford Local Bread

This article appeared recently on the BBC Oxford site:

The government is attempting to making radical reductions to our carbon emissions by 2050 and if they hope to achieve this they will have to work out how they can limit the impact the agricultural sector has on the nation’s footprint.

One possible solution is being worked out by a group working to produce a local loaf of bread.  The idea is to grow good quality wheat locally, have it milled as locally as possible and then bake it, you guessed it, locally. It’s all about connecting the producer to the consumer. 

John Letts is a wheat-grower who points out that although you can currently buy locally produced bread the flour is almost always imported from places like Canada or Argentina. He says, “the hope is that by growing flour locally it will reduce the carbon footprint.”

And his flour isn’t made from any old seed. “It has been ten years in the making. It is a blend of wheat with some ancient varieties from all over the world with an eye to producing good quality thatching straw as well as top quality grain for making bread.”

The advantage of using a blend of old varieties of wheat is that it is genetically diverse with between 150 – 200 different types of wheat in one field compared to the mono cultures of a standard crop. This buffers the crop from the adverse conditions that farmers increasingly face.

BBC Oxford will be following this experiment by the Oxford Bread Group from planting to production to see if it could really be the start of the renaissance in farming it hopes to be.