“It’s not dramatic to look at,” Ben Mackinnon tells me. I’m standing on the edge of a muddy field with the farmer and owner of the organically certified Fellows Farm in Suffolk and E5 Bakehouse, an organic bakery, mill, and shop in London.
Yet there’s more to this unimpressive view than meets the eye, not least because we’re here in winter. The field was sown with heritage grain only a few weeks ago. Come the summer, those grass-like blades will grow into impressively tall strands of wheat with spiking filaments. All going well, they’ll be harvested in July and delivered to E5 from September onwards.
But in recent months, all hasn’t gone well. England faced its wettest season on record in autumn/winter 2023/2024. As a result, the 2023 UK wheat harvest was down 10%, with data from AHDB and DEFRA predicting it will have fallen another 21% in 2024.
Scientists say climate change exacerbated the extreme weather, and unpredictable patterns like floods and droughts are set to become more prevalent, giving farmers little time to adapt.
But a growing number of farmers like Ben as well as producers and bakers are championing heritage wheat as a more climate-resilient crop. But does it fit in a modern context and can it meet demand at scale?
What is heritage grain?
Heritage grain refers to old varieties of wheat, oat, rye, and barley that were grown before intensive, scientific plant breeding was introduced in the mid-1900s. Above ground, heritage wheat can grow thigh-high or taller. Underground, their deep root system allows them to draw up loads of nutrients and moisture.
These varieties were known as ‘landrace’ crops. Every growing season, farmers would keep back seeds from successful harvests and resow them. Over the years, the seeds would naturally tailor themselves to the environment and site-specific conditions. This cycle of adaptation and selection created heritage varieties that were more genetically diverse and resilient year after year, leading to more reliable yields.
That all changed around 1950 when bomb-making factories used during World War II were repurposed to make fossil-fuel derived chemical fertilisers and pesticides. They were cheap, readily available, and produced higher yields.
But the intensive methods caused old varieties to grow too tall, leading them to keel over. Eventually, dwarf varieties were created, leading to the shorter modern wheats that we know today.
Around the same time, seed companies began creating genetically identical wheats with qualities that would bring farmers more money.
Fast forward to 2025 and these modern varieties are the ones struggling to adapt to their shifting environment.
The problem with modern wheat
Farmers looking to grow wheat in the UK don’t have much choice. There are only a handful of varieties available on the commodity market for planting and limited genetic diversity. While this approach tries to mtaintain a standard and reduces uncertainty for farmers as they know what price they’ll receive for their grain, it increases risk in a time of unpredictable weather.
“Most of the wheat that is grown for breadmaking is off the peg,” explains Chris Young, coordinator for Sustain’s Real Bread Campaign. “The national register has a limited number of grains, and they’ve all been developed in a particular place. They say, right, now that works, let’s transplant them and plant them everywhere. Of course, the soil, climate, and other conditions are totally different, even within the UK, let alone if those varieties have been bred elsewhere.
“ To work well in a particular location, it’s often necessary, or beneficial in terms of yield, to throw the chemical arsenal at it to mollycoddle this thing that’s completely out of its comfort zone.”
For organic farmers, buying wheat off the national register isn’t feasible. Ben felt that experimenting with heritage varieties was an obvious choice, leading him to seek out specialist breeders around the world. He’s not alone, either. More national non-commodity grain networks like the Britain and Ireland Community Grain Associations are researching and promoting alternative grains.
Heloise Trott, a farmer and member of West Midlands and Southwest Grain Networks, brought back seeds from a heritage breeder in Denmark who develops ‘population’ wheat. Selected from different ‘parents’, they’re often a mix of modern and heritage varieties.
“You take 15 parents that have the traits you need like pathogen resistance, bakeability, flavor, agronomic performance, and yield,” Heloise explains. “You cross them all with each other, then you have 600,000 possible ways that they can display those genes in order to be resilient and adaptable in the field. As an organic farmer, I feel like that’s the future for organic arable.”
“It was a really difficult harvest year. We had a lower-than-average yield, but it will still hit milling spec – 160 tons went into the mill and it performed really well, despite the challenges of the weather and because of that wide gene pool and ability to adapt.”
Community, not commodity
Despite the ability to adapt, even heritage varieties struggle amidst severe floods. Ben’s yields were also down 25-30%, the long roots struggling to get hold in the water-logged fields.
What they are good at, though, is introducing more field diversity so crops are less susceptible to disease and can produce a more dependable supply as the climate shifts. The flour also produces deeper-flavoured, more nutritious bread compared to modern wheat that is stripped of vitamins and minerals and contains added gluten.
“It’s important that farmers have lots of different options in the bag to adapt and respond to different weather conditions,” Heloise says. “Anything that has a deeper flavor is going to contain a lot more nutrients, so from an eater’s point of view, it’s important that they have a place in the bakery. And as a genetic resource, having heritage wheat growing out in fields that are then going to be adapting, I think it’s [wise]. They’re not a silver bullet, but they’re part of the bigger picture.”
So, what is the bigger picture? According to many who champion heritage grains, re-introducing older varieties goes hand-in-hand with re-localising food systems.
Currently, over 80-85% of wheat milled in the UK is grown in the UK. Pressure to make up the shortfall from 2023/2024 is already leading to higher imports, which comes with greater risks, as Heloise explains: “COVID was a taster of what it could be like. If there was a pandemic and suddenly a whole distribution network is taken down, if you had a local supply where you had a mill that got its grain from its local farm that went into local bakeries and if there were all these local pockets around the UK, they would be resilient and resistant in their area to maintain food supply.”
This ethos is at the heart of Ben’s business model with Fellows Farm and E5 Bakehouse. It’s also at the core of the Real Bread Campaign’s aim to promote bread that’s better for us, our communities, and the planet.
In the late 19th century, there were over 8,800 flour mills in the UK. Each village would have its own mill or two where local farmers could mill wheat and store flour for the local community. Bread was considered a fresh, local food bought from a local bakery. Today, just 32 companies operate 51 mills across the country, with the majority of flour going into bread produced in large plants and supermarket bakeries.
“You can go into a supermarket and see a sign that says something along the lines ‘Freshly baked in store today’,” Chris explains. “Actually, that was pre-fabricated in France, chilled or frozen, shipped to the UK and merely rebaked at a later date in the store’s loaf-tanning salon. We’re challenging companies that are doing that because that’s misleading to the shopper but also because there are people who are doing that for real and it’s taking business away from them.
“With the bakeries that are using [heritage] flours,” he continues, “some people are buying into the story; they like the idea of something that was bred before the agricultural revolution. Other people are interested in the fact that they can see the fields that it’s grown in and know where the farm is, where the mill is, and where the bakery is. They like those human connections along the chain.
“For other people, it’s about taste. Typically, these varieties, as well as being suitable for where they’re grown, were grown because they make great bread. That’s not necessarily a criterion when you’re developing something that needs to last forever in a supermarket.”
While the framework to build a more robust grain economy in the UK may not be there yet, the growing interest in alternative grains shows things could be heading in the right direction.
“Obviously people need to be fed and we need to feed people affordably,” Ben says. “ But we also have to look at our planetary health and what’s going to work for the longer term. It does seem that these old varieties have a bit of an answer in that.”
0 Comments