Spelt today. Most ripe, some still a bit green. Will keep an eye on it. Suspect next week better for harvest, but we will see. Not too many weeds showing yet

Hi all

Focusing for the moment on John’s first question ‘what to do next’ and leaving ‘what to do about next year’ for later, below is a copy of my research after contacting some mills back in April.

As I was scanning for my posts I saw potential ideas (and organisations that had been contacted about our field) from other people, but without reading back through all of this thread I don’t want to copy in random bits and pieces.

Maybe people could post again to say who they have previously contacted and what they said. This would allow us to see if there are gaps – eg, Gails, E5 bakehouse, loads of other bakeries and mills – that we could contact to see if they want to buy our grain/flour/something made from the flour.

@johncherry thanks for your updates and pics. It’s good to know you think we’re best waiting to find out our quantity and quality before selling – I can’t think how we’d be able to sell the spelt without it just ending up mixed in with someone else’s otherwise. One question I had, did you manage to find out which mills are used by your local coop? They could be a good place to contact.

Original post:

I heard back from three of the mills I contacted in March – all were very keen to hear about the project - and they told me the following:

Wicken mill http://www.nationalmillsweekend.co.uk/pages_wind/wicken.htm

This small community mill was restored a few years ago and has gradually increased production to 7-8 tonnes last year. They are not electric so are reliant on the power of the wind.

They currently buy their organic grain from http://www.hammondsendfarm.co.uk/ who seem to supplier the smaller traditional mills (and e5 bakehouse). They order grain in 2-3 tonne batches (a trailer load) for £500 a tonne. They are not certified organic so cannot sell their flour as such.

They would be happy to try some of our non-organic grain, if the crop is a good quality, either by a) buying and milling to sell the flour themselves, or b) milling the flour for us for a fee. They can send us a quote if we were interested in option b.

Brixton mill http://www.brixtonwindmill.org/

They also buy from Hammonds End Farm but on a smaller scale - £11.25 for a 25kg sack. Last year was the first year they milled anything (just 750kg of wheat and barley) as they have recently finished the restoration. They would like to try some of our grain, quality dependent, but it is unlikely to be much.

Wrights mill http://www.wrightsflour.co.uk

The MD of this 150 year old, quite large, family mill in Enfield called me himself and sent the following email a few days later:

“Following on from our conversation Wendy we would be able to turn your grain into flour, packed in 16 kg sacks and delivered in 26 pallet loads for £150 per tonne. As I mentioned it would probably be best to buy the grain from you at the market price and sell the flour back to you at this additional cost of £150 per tonne. Bear in mind too that we would need a minimum of 29 tonnes of grain which we will process in one go.”

On the phone he also offered the choice of 1.5kg or 500g bags (for an additional cost). All bags will be plain but can be labelled with a design of our choosing.

He said we would get around 20 tonnes of flour for our 30 tonnes of grain (I guessed we might have this amount). Processing takes around 48 hours to clean, condition mill and pack. We will then need to take delivery of the flour as they cannot store it for us.

We can call to book in the work with around a week’s notice of the harvest. They usually do wheat but can also process spelt (if we are able to grow it, of course).

…

If we end up growing a millable grain I think we have a couple of choices. To use a mill that can process all of the grain in one go and then try to find a buyer for the flour. Or we find several smaller mills to take a part of the grain each who then mill and sell the flour to their own customers. The later would be a nice goal of the project but may be a logistical nightmare!

Dear Wendy

Very many thanks for all the information on many interesting options. Best

Hi,
Certainly is a good read looking through the things people are posting. Thanks to all contributors.
@johncherry my apologies but I can't recall the size of the field that has our attention?

With regard to marketing the grain we will of course need to know the quality before we can make a sale but I'm interested in quantity too. I'm curious also in how the yield will measure up against what @johncherry would expect if more inputs had been used and how the cost of those inputs stacks up against the differences in yield?

And while we consider what to do with the imminent crop we will, I expect, be talking soon about what happens next. Are we taking our money, or losses, and our memories of OurField Weston and disappearing back into the ether?

Quick update and reply to questions...

Field is 20 acres of spelt (with 8 or 9 acres of unsprayed/unfertilised oats at the bottom). No idea how spelt would have performed with a high input regime, but oats will give a steer as most of the spring oats we've got have had some N and a fungicide spray, so what we get form the bottom of #ourfield will give a comparison if you see what I mean.

We are hoping to combine the spelt this weekend, depending on how we get on with our beans...the spelt is very nearly ready and the weather is good so here's hoping.
John

Greetings from Stockholm. I hope the sunshine is as bright in Hertfordshire as it is here.
Good luck.

Harvest!

Wonderful. We look forward to any report you have time to send. Sadly water conference I am attending in Stockholm is farmer free. I keep pointing it out. Also pointing out that Late August is not a good time to get northern hemisphere farmers to take a break from harvesting.

Amazing!!! Thanks so much @johncherry for sending photos and harvesting our spelt -- it's soooo exciting! Interesting there is so much green under the crop as well - is that the clover coming through or is it other weeds? Look forward to hearing total tonnage harvested and quality of the spelt! Also we need to get discussions going with the collective about what we are going to do with it. Thanks @christinelewis for posting about the mills - i think we are waiting for some proposals from other potential buyers as well. We are also trying to get together an overview of the finances so we can understand what we need to sell the crop for to break even etc.

Not so amazing...We have up after a couple of trailer loads...too much greenery and spelt not 100% for. Will try again
John

Interesting cryptic update from John. I'm translating as 'gave up after a couple of trailer loads' and 'spelt not 100% dry'?
I'm happy to put some effort into hunting down some more mills who may be able to do some processing for us.
I'm also interested in what people feel about continuing. I'm keen to continue with this field and/or somewhere else. I'm particularly interested in the possibility of growing a crop that I'd be able to process myself.

On the topic of continuing I am very much in favour. The relationship with John and the field has been very important and very interesting. It would be good to know what issues we should address and what should be prioritised. Who will lead the discussion?

What news of the harvest - on OurFiled and on the farm?

Hello all co-investors. We apologise for the silence our end! The team are super stretched right now in many other areas of life and so we have had a bit of a slow down with OurField. We are aiming to be back on track with the decision about what to do with our spelt in two weeks time. We are also postponing the harvest festival for now (so it will no longer be the weekend of 7th Oct), but will let people know asap once we have confirmed a new date. Thanks so much for all your contributions so far and we are excited for the next decision!

Thanks for the update Abby :-)

Thanks for the update @abbyrose and @johncherry , will keep an eye out for new dates. I'm also feeling that it's been a struggle to make the field a priority. Immediate pressures of life/ wealth of information/ distance from field. All of the things that probably leave us much less engaged with our food than we should be! I really look forward to the next physical convening. Your efforts with the field and to keep us updated are really appreciated @johncherry. I don't feel we've been much help.

I am of a very similar opinion Tessa, I have struggled a little to be as engaged with the project as I would have liked but am really looking forward to the next update / gathering.

Apologies too from me...we did finish harvesting the field in between showers a couple of weeks ago. I haven't measured up yet to estimate the yield, but it looks like 1 tonne/acre is optimistic, but it looks like a nice sample. I had to run it over the cleaner 3 times to get the rubbish out and that has dehulled a lot of the grain, so we will be able to exract some for instant milling. I suspect that the later cut half of the crop will have lost some of its gluten in the rain and so will not be so suitable for breadmaking and thus less valuable. Time will tell
In other news, we finally finished cutting our spring wheat last night, just before the 10 mm of rain that fell as it got dark. It's been a very boring and drawn out harvest and there's a lot of gloomy farmers round here, most of us had a poor harvest yieldwise, though the Farmers Weekly is talking about a bumper UK harvest, so either they are lying as usual or most of the country had different weather to us. Probably a bit of both

John

Dear John
Very many thanks for the information. The yield is respectable considering the problems of acquiring the seed, the cold start of the season and the less than optimum rainfall. We look forward to more details - in may case especially on the weeds. We value very highly the experience of hearing about and seeing a spelt crop germinate, compete with the weeds and get harvested.

Can you advise what you have in mind regarding the 2017-2018 seasons - on cover-cropping or on a winter sown crop or on a spring sown crop? And beyond. This comment is obviously premature in that we should discuss continuation. I write on the assumption that the project will continue if you can stand the strain. It is hoped that this message might stimulate discussion. If someone wants to draft an agenda to structure the discussion it would be helpful.

Thanks @johnanthonyallan for asking some important questions about continuing! This is great to start discussing now! In terms of a more formal agenda for disucssing it, we are first going to put together a formal outline for the decision of what to do with the grain - we hope to really get that discussion going by the end of the week. Then once that has been decided we will kickstart the discussion more formally on what to do next in the field and the potential for continuation.

Dear Abby

Your message is very much appreciated. I look forward to participating. Many thanks, TonyA

Results

I have been asked to prepare some post harvest accounts, and have looked at the earlier spreadsheets, the initial forecasts, some predictions made in these pages; and will so far as possible merge that information with the actual figures which I have obtained in discussions with John and the farm book-keeper.

The accounts will therefore be

• a record of actual expenses
• combined with some national averages for input costs, and
• local typical values for specific fixed costs such cost of using the land; and
• for the income from an unsold crop, much guesswork.

Just to add a further harvest update...we've had a measure up and estimate the total harvest yield at approx. 15 tonnes of spelt off our 20 acres. We sent some of the first cut stuff off to be sampled for gluten etc and it ticked the boxes ok (Hagberg falling number of 215 for those who like an actual figure). We had to mix that with the late cut stuff (so that we had enough to fill the grain drier), so I suspect we'll end up with a lower figure, but it'll perhaps have enough gluten to raise a loaf. We haven't got a value for the crop yet, but Grahame is working on the accounts now so at least we'll know how much we need to sell it for if we're not all to end up in the poor-house...

Dear Grahame and John. Thank you warmly for the news. Much appreciated. Tony

The accounts are now out with the organisers for review..grahame

Selling the Spelt

I see that Wendy Alcock had many useful leads and ideas about this - see her post of 17th August - including this from Wrights Mill

“we would be able to turn your grain into flour, packed in 16 kg sacks and delivered in 26 pallet loads for £150 per tonne. As I mentioned it would probably be best to buy the grain from you at the market price and sell the flour back to you at this additional cost of £150 per tonne."

If every OurField member would "buy" eg 25 kg, that would account for a whole tonne. I am not a member, but would be willing to agree to buy 25Kg at £1.50 /kg if packed in small bags, as I can give them away for Christmas.

Perhaps there could be a proposal on whether members want to have some flour for their bread ..

FIELD COSTS SUMMARY

We have the final costs of the field for the year, here is the summary:

• Land rent (net of Basic Payment Scheme) 664
• Farm admin costs 200
• Agronomist time 109
• Farmer time 600
• Machinery/contractors time 1,098
• Other handling costs (store, drying etc) 210
• Seeds and sprays 2,168
• Total Farming Costs 5,048.28

(For anyone who is interested in the wider accounting and how these costs break down further @grahamehunter will publish the full accounts in a separate thread and you can ask him any questions you like about them!)

SELLING THE SPELT

We harvested 15 tns of spelt, so to break even and recover our costs we would have to sell the spelt for £336.53/tn

In the initial agreement there were 60 shares allocated, John owns 18 of them and then there are 42 co-investors. So this means if we don't sell the spelt (so worst case scenario), each shareholder gets £65.86 back. i.e make a loss of £84.14.

Members of the collective have already talked about a number of options for selling the spelt and some have the potential to still make that money back, and even to make a profit but require more risk/work from the collective. So let's start the discussion and see what's possible with our 15 tns of spelt! Really looking forward to everyone's thoughts and ideas!

Dera Abby
Very many thanks for conveying the accounts from Grahame and John. The summary is very useful indeed. We are very grateful indeed or the detailed work and effort that has gone into the accounting.
I look forward to the discussion on marketing. And hear about the next meeting/celebration. Best

Hi everyone

I think there are a lot of outlets we could contact about selling the grain or flour so I've started a google doc to allow us to record who we have already spoken to. I've added the companies I have seen mentioned but please add any more you have already spoken to or contact from now on. If we all contact 2 or 3 mills or bakeries we will cover a wide range of outlets.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W_6E1zJuAC0PxursgEGdjYAppTjRDfg1ibAG41547DA/edit?usp=sharing

@john Are you able to confirm gluten levels for the combined spelt – I think this is important info to pass on to possible buyers. Also, did you manage to find out if your local farmers co-op has a spelt buyer or which mills are used by your local coop? They could be a good place to contact.

@abbyrose @annielandless The latest email said “The team has been contacting possible buyers, including Marriage’s and Dove’s who have indicated their interest.” Could you add this info to the document?

@grahamehunter Wrights mill were a good option but I will need to check if they can take only 15 tonnes, as they originally told me they would need at least 29 tonnes.

I would also buy some of the flour if it was available and I have added your suggestion to the doc - where others who are interested in this option can also add their names.

I'm sure I've missed things off the google doc so please see this as a starting document that anyone can edit and add to.

THank you for this @wendyalcock ! Great summary and we will certainly add to the Google Doc. We are going to post a summary here as well for everyone to see some of the ideas John, Grahame and the organising team have put together to kickstart the discussion with everyone.

Huge thanks for pulling this together Wendy.

Posting this on behalf of @grahamehunter and organising team:
It’s that time of the year… It’s time to decide what to do with our delicious spring spelt. In some ways this could be seen as one of the most important decisions - as it will decide who finally gets their hands on the grain, what is created (bread? biscuits? animal feed?), and how much of a profit or loss we make on our grain!

John has sent through some details about the quality of the grain and the yield - it appears that it IS high enough grade for human consumption, which is brilliant news. We are awaiting the results of a few other tests, and will let you know the results of those as soon as they come back.

So let’s start the final debate!

Some of you have already been actively researching and exploring options for who might be able to buy the spelt… Well this is your time to speak up and share your findings with the group! Thanks @wendyalcock for putting together this google doc with different options:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W_6E1zJuAC0PxursgEGdjYAppTjRDfg1ibAG41547DA/edit
If you have any thoughts or ideas please do share them on the loomio feed and then add them into the doc to make sure everyone sees them!

Additionally, our team has been contacting various bakeries and millers, and brainstormed the following ideas:

1. We could do the milling ourselves - milled and bagged (where?) for a charge of £150/tonne… this could be in 20kg bags or 1kg bags - which will cost differently. Then the question is, what could we sell it for, and to whom? Grahame says you can buy spelt flour for £2/kg in Waitrose.

2. We could get in touch with bakeries that have a mill, like E5 bakery, and see if they could take some and mill it on site and do a special day selling the bread, and provide us with loaves at our Harvest Festival. This probably won’t cover all the grain, but could be a nice way for each of us to take home some of our own spelt flour and potentially sell bags of flour direct to the public. Is this something that is important to people?

3. Doves Farm (https://www.dovesfarm.co.uk/about) have got back to us offering £190 per tonne of spelt and would take it off our hands entirely.

4. We are waiting to hear a reply from Marriage’s and Gail’s Bakery.

5. what other ideas do people have???

We look forward to hearing all your thoughts and discussions.
We will consolidate all the discussions into final voting options Mon 23rd Oct.
Then the vote on what to do with the spelt will run from Wed 25th Oct - Sun 29th Oct. So please do get into action asap and encourage other members of the collective to speak up!

p.s We are just confirming a few details but we are planning the harvest festival to be on Thursday 23rd Nov in London. It will be a really great event! Please pencil that in your diaries!

What are your thoughts? @tessatricks @harryboglione @sadhbhmoore @sebastianpowell @nikitagulhane @nikireynolds @sebastianpowell @ellemcall @edna @edibleutopia @tristramstuart @jamestickell @tamsynforsyth @shyamdesai @averilglencross @catherinearend @alfredlawrie @matthewshribman @matteodv @romymiller @alexandrasexton @johnanthonyallan @lucybradley1 @andreadibiagio @emersoncsorba @christinelewis @christinelewis1 @darren4 @veronicalopesdasil1 @danielkindred @sineadfenton @tamsynforsyth @harrygreenfield1 @karlschneider @seangifford @stevenjacobs @johncherry @alfredlawrie @annielandless @stinewilhelmsen @seangifford @wendyalcock and anyone who we didn't catch in that list!

..and there is now a spreadsheet giving a little more information on costs in the accounts discussion thread.

grahame

Marketing
The discussion on marketing is very interesting. I was wanting to circulate this message on the separate accounting and marketing page but cannot this morning fathom how to do this.
Can I enquire if the offer of £190/tonne for the spelt from Dove's is still open?
£190/tonne gladdens the heart. It appears to be much higher than the £140/tonne quoted in Farmers Weekly for wheat. Can John comment? At £140/tonne for wheat farmers will have a tough year. What is the crystal ball telling us about the price of spelt over the next months. Will it fall?

I have been thinking that I would really like to have some of the spelt flour for my own use, I'm not a big baker - but as Grahame suggested at some point - I do quite like the idea of giving bags of spelt flour as Christmas presents, a great way to tell the story and spread the word, plus I could probably manage 1-2 kgs myself. Are other people interested in this idea? This would be one way of recovering some of our losses as well potentially.
For this to work we would need to decide how much each person in the collective would want to take themselves...and in order to make it work for everyone do we, as individuals, need to buy that spelt flour from the collective or what to people think about that?
Of course another question is who would mill the spelt for us? @wendyalcock I wonder if Brixton Windmill would mill a certain amount of the grain for us (just 5 tonnes say), and if yes what would that cost? Also have you heard more from Wrights Mill - would they be able to deal with 15 tonnes?

Of course if we did this with all the spelt that would be 10-12,000 kg of flour (assuming about 20-30% loss of weight in milling process - is that assumption right?), which I think is probably too much for us to sell personally. So it would make sense to sell some of the grain to someone like Doves. As you said @johnanthonyallan £190/tonne is thankfully higher than the wheat price, but @johncherry how does that compare to what you would normally expect for a more specialty (lower-yielding) grain such as spelt? I would have thought we could expect more per tonne than that, especially as it's pretty good quality spelt! Really interested to hear what others want to do with the grain.

That does sound like a very sensible approach Abby - thanks for thinking it through

Dear Abby
Very many thanks for your message. It will be good to try to add value to the spelt and be able to market higher value products. We need, however, more knowledge such as Wendy is generating and some skilled volunteer inputs. In this element of the project my only contribution would be financial either as a donation or in the purchase of spelt bread. We do not bake my our bread.

I have some questions.
1 Is there any urgency with respect to the sale of the spelt produced. Does anyone know trends in spelt prices? Is the demand for spelt grain high? If there is no pressure to take advantage of the current price we have time for a long discussion on what to do next.

2 We need to understand the nature of the "loss". In order to have a better understanding of loss we need to know something about grain prices. The diagram below provides some idea of the downward trend in INTERNATIONAL grain prices since 2012. It would be better to have a diagram for UK PRICES but I do not have such a diagram to hand. I am not sure whether the diagram will transmit in a readable format.

Producing spring wheat, like producing spelt, is only viable if farmers receive CAP payments. It would be good to have enough information to understand the challenges of market volatility and the extent to which the CAP payments mitigate the impacts of volatility.

Meanwhile we should not lose sight of the soil, water, biodiversity ecosystem issues which for most of us are key priorities. We need, for example, a discussion on weeds and glyphosate.

Thank you very much for coping with all the issues that have emerged since harvesting.
Best Tony (Allan)

The glyphosate issue and weed control

An issue on which the OurField members need to be informed is the use, regulation and the moves to discontinue the use of glyphosate during a complex international corporate take-over of Monsanto (US) by Bayer (Germany).

Professor Amir Kassam a very highly regarded scientist who has devoted decades to understanding and publishing on conservation agriculture shared some comments on glyphosate and weeds and agreed that they could be posted on the OurField website. Dr David Dent who in June very kindly collected and analysed soil samples from our 2017 field has also made some comments.

18 October 2017 at 21:20, Amir Kassam amirkassam786@googlemail.com wrote:

Dear David and TonyA,
EU will discuss the renewal of license for glyphosate on 25 October. The period under discussion now is 10 years, not 15 years, given the muddy debate about agrochemicals, GMO and industrial farming!

If farming moves to CA more rapidly, then it should be possible to adopt/innovate weed management strategies based on integrated weed management approaches. There are already organic CA farms and they use the power of all the three CA principles - no-till (letting weed seeds die in the ground), dead and live ground cover (smothering weeds in different ways and also killing weed seeds with organic acids as humification proceeds), diversified cropping (rotations and associations, including cover crops and allelopathic effects) to manage weeds. The last chapter in Edward Faulkner's book, Ploughman's Folly, is about managing weeds without chemicals.

Planting green is becoming an interesting option on large farms, something which small to medium farms have been doing in South America for quite sometime. This involves using a crimper or a knife roller to roll or crush the vegetation cover/cover crops followed by no-till seeding. With smallholders, most farms get away with not using any herbicides but use weed smothering companion cover crops or mixtures of cover crops (legumes and non-legumes), such as mucuna, Dolichos lab lab or Desmodium or pumkin and so on.

But where herbicides must be used then banning glyphosate will be a real loss. I am prepared to be proven wrong, but I personally do not feel that glyphosate will be banned this time round, given that glophosate is the least toxic herbicide that has ever been produced, and given that it is rated as being possibly carsonigenic, not as being probably carsonigenic or as being carsonigenic. In fact ECHA's Committee for Risk Assessment does not classify glyphosate as a carcinogen. Also, it has become almost impossible to sort things out given all the claims and counter claims, and regional dimensions of the debate where for example US or Canada have no difficulty with glyphosate but Europe has, not only with glyphosate but also with other agrochemicals.

However, the scary part with glyphosate is that the food safety and water safety rules are not being strictly adhered to by farmers and government authorities also do not seem to be imposing them seriously, and thus we have seen glyphosate increasingly entering into food and water chains, due to using glyphosate as a desiccant too close to harvest or as a herbicide to keep water bodies clear from weeds. It should not be impossible to remove these risks altogether by imposing good practice standards.

I would think that industry probably has alternative plans if glyphosate is banned, and they will make sure they make extra profit from the situation. Liberty is one herbicide, manufactured by Bayer, which is similar in action to glyphosate and is already available but not at $4 per litre of active ingredient!

There are likely to be positive outcomes for CA farmers from glyphosate ban because there would be a move to find non-tillage methods of controlling weeds for economic and environmental reasons. No-till CA Farmers already use less glyphosate per hectare and per tonne of produce than farmers who use tillage and glyphosate to control weeds.

On the other hand, some no-till farmers may be forced to adopt intensive tillage to control weeds. In any case, it is high time that more innovative and cheaper ways to manage weeds without chemicals become available, and with CA this should be relatively less difficult to achieve than with poor quality tillage-based farming where both tillage and chemicals are used to control weeds but not very effectively.

David Dents comments
There are other ways to hold weeds in check. A six-field crop rotation including crops with different life styles (rather than cereal-cereal-oil seed rape-cereal-cereal... ) is quite effective. So is a well-timed shallow cultivation (a la Chatterton) but this goes against the no-till mantra.

Whatever the problem, there is usually several ways around it. The problem is to find ways that are also profitable. I do sometimes wonder whether the weed issue is cosmetic rather than critical - but I have no data.

---

It would be very useful to have a comment from John and anyone who has expertise to share. Weeds affect yield and were I think a problem this year on OurField. How is the clover?

Hello. Sorry I meant to post more but I'm struggling for time at the mo. I'll hopefully get chance to digest all the previous great comments over the weekend. In the meantime, a quick update, I've asked Wrights mill if they can still take our 15 tonnes and I'll let you know when they reply.

My only other suggestion is that we find lots of smaller mills to take a bit of the crop. We seem to be stuck in that middle ground where 15 tonnes is too small for some mills and too large for others! I think Brixton mill would probably still be happy to take a small amount to sell the flour themselves (unconfirmed at the mo) but I don't think they have the capacity to take 5 tonnes from us to return the flour.

Also, there are a few questions being asked that are unanswered and would be useful to know to help with decision making and emails to potential mills.

Hi,
The issue of pricing is interesting. Its a lot to do with what the market wants. This then comes back to the question of finding what markets are available prior to harvest, even prior to sowing.

Grain prices are liable to extreme volatility. Factors include quality, global trade, weather, time of year and levels of storage.
Organic prices are higher than non-organic, though a note of caution to say that these are also subject to volatility.

For reference here are some recent organic cereal prices:

Feed wheat £265, Milling £295 Feed barley £255, Malting £300 Feed oats £235, Milling £275 Beans £365

OurField doesn’t have an organic crop. But I wanted to point out that there are different markets. The organic one is strong and the crops are grown without glyphosate and without artificial nitrogen fertiliser.

A crucial aspect we must not forget, of course, is that growing crops at all is not easy. And growing organically is certainly not easier than non-organically. And achieving the specifications any of the available markets say they need is especially tough.

15% protein is popular with the largest bakeries. This is extremely difficult in the UK with organic production methods. Or with methods where less fertiliser is used. Nitrogen lifts protein values.

But 15% is not entirely necessary. Indeed it is debatable as to whether the current spec. which includes hagberg numbers and bushel weight is appropriate for the British Isles.

This leads onto questions on varietal choice. There are some who prefer heritage varieties. They have strong points with regard to growing well in low input situations, they often have good flavour but they will not yield as well and they will struggle to get protein levels above 12-13% even in a good year.

There is evidence that modern cereals are declining in mineral density. And that varieties that date back from the nineteen seventies are better able to pull nutrient from the ground than more modern varieties. But modern varieties are the ones being promoted.
Perhaps less yield but higher quality is what even slightly older varieties can deliver.

However, even an artisan baker will need to have a level of consistency. To have flours that are reliable. They want flavour and character but they also need to know how a flour will behave day to day and month to month.

There is a lot do and much is being done. And I believe improving relationships and improving understanding between growers, millers and bakers, and with the eaters is key. Which is why we are all here.
Cheers,
Steven

I've had the following positive reply from wrights mill:

Yes I am still happy to work with you on this project. I think we could manage 15 tonnes although it will cost you more to deliver it to our mill because of the smaller quantity. To progress this further I think we would like to see a sample of the grain first so we can establish the quality.

If all is well we would take in the 15 tonnes (delivery to be arranged by you). We would buy the grain at a price agreed and we would mill it into flour packed into 16kg bags. Given the smaller quantity we would deliver the 10 tonnes of flour (approx.) in one hit to your depot. You would need to ensure there is a fork truck to take the flour off into your store. We would charge you a price for the flour equal to the cost of the wheat plus £170 per tonne. This would need to be paid on a pro forma basis – before we took delivery of the wheat.

Please call to discuss when you have considered the proposal further.

ENDS

Is this something that is easily addable to the options as a costed proposal? I'm afriad I havn't got my head around the numbers yet.

Spelt flour costs

to clarify the math on the above, my understanding is that we would pay Wrights Mill a net £2,550 (15 tonnes x £170) to turn 15 tonnes of Spelt grain into 10 tonnes of Spelt flour, delivered in 16kg bags.

Based on the accounts so far (costs to date around £4,448, see the accounts thread), and assuming additional grain handling costs, the OurField cooperative members' net cost per 16Kg bag of milled non organic spelt flour would then be around £11.50 /bag.

Presently I buy Spelt flour for baking at about £2 /kg, often organic. That of course is the retail price for 1.5Kg bags..Although it is not organic, our flour was grown from organic seed, and without sprays ..so in terms of quality should be comparable.

Hello,
Thanks to all who have put out feelers for markets and pulled the figures together. Personally, I would love to have a some spelt to try and gift < 10K, ideally. It's also very exiting to think that the spelt could reach the market... It was a great surprise to hear the news on the quality this week.

Re, @johnanthonyallan 's questions around timings and speed of decision, it would be nice to think we could gift things on by Christmas, but I get the sense that everyone is quite stretched atm and it may be optimistic to feel that the collective would have the spelt milled and in hand in a couple of months time. Whether it's Christmas, Easter, summer, whatever, I would still love to bake an Our Field loaf, but I would be keen to try and sell the majority on to Doves, once everyone felt that they had a little for personal consumption etc.
I've always been under the impression that Doves were purely organic. @abbyrose, I would love to hear more on how this discussion went. E5 and Gails also sound like they are worth holding out for.
Look forward to hearing other thoughts... : )

Thank you @wendyalcock @johnanthonyallan @stevenjacobs @tessatricks @jamestickell for your comments and thoughts, all v interesting and helpful. I haven't heard back yet from the bakeries I contacted, but will contact them again today. @johnanthonyallan great to hear from Amir Kassam and David Dent as well, thanks for sharing those!
@wendyalcock great you heard back from Wrights. I guess the issue is if we only want to mill a smaller portion of the grain into flour ourselves, say 2 tonnes, then Wrights maybe aren't keen to do that? or would they still do that? Do you think Brixton would do just 2 tonnes milled into flour for us to use if we paid them for it?
It is through other members of the organising team that we heard about Doves, so I'm not sure @tessatricks what the situation is there. I will try and find out more. I think there also may be another option of a larger mill to sell to, will know more hopefully later today!

All exciting stuff. Happy that we've got some food grade produce to distribute.

Spoke to a watermill next to the farm where my friends are growing hemp unfortunately will only mill wheat, but has lead me to look into smaller mills - water and wind and I am getting some results.

A watermill where we may potentially be able to go and help do some of the milling + I'm chasing more possibilities

I'll post more later tonight when I've got more time & info.

Just a quick comment to say that there is no immediate hurry to sell or process the spelt. It is dry and under cover and is easy to store. It's worth remembering that Spelt comes complete with husk and needs 'dehulling' before it can be milled. Some, like Doves can deal with dehulling themselves, most mills will want it dehulled. I could sieve our spelt and get a tonne or two of dehulled seed out for a small sample, but most of the crop will need to be sent somewhere that can deal with it.
I'm sorry not to have been communicating more, we have been a bit busy. Still have some buckwheat and linseed to harvest and plenty of sowing to do before it gets too wet.
In answer to @johnanthonyallan 's question about our Spring Wheat...I'm not sure exactly how it yielded, but definitely under 2 tonne to the acre. It was a horrible year for spring crops round here, too dry when we wanted rain and vice versa. The spelt will probably perform better than our Mulika as it cost so little to grow and will be worth more per tonne. 50kg of N as Urea fertiliser is only £35 or so at current prices. It probably barely paid for itself on the Mulika even so. The sprays we used will have made the crop easier to harvest than our mucky spelt, but otherwise just cost money...
Golly, I do find Loomio hard to use.
John

Dear John
Very many thanks for finding time to reply. All the information is very useful indeed When next you have time to reply could you address these additional questions:
1 Would there be merit in using some of the spelt harvested as seed for next season? Are there technical or certification issues that would make this option impossible?
2 What have your farm team learned from growing spring spelt? Promising? Never again?
I hope the family is well.

I had a free day so I did some research on mills. I found a nice map online of working wind and water mills and tried calling most of the mills in the South East, East and South Eastern Midlands.

Quite a few are organic and can't mill non-organic unless they totally clean all the mill out afterwards which is a lot of work, so most of these were not interested.

I did however find three mills that could do some milling. I suggested to all of them that some us us may be interested in going to see the spelt being milled and potentially helping out, they all appeared to be open to this.

Amazingly one of the millers turned out to be an old friend, who I didnt realize was a miller. He runs the mill at http://www.fordendwatermill.co.uk/ near Tring which is a small mill. The mill there runs from a big millpond fed from a small stream. He can mill about 100 - 150kg a day. A dustbin full. He could do a small amount for us, but milling 1-2 tonnes is above what he'd like to do. The mill is run voluntarily. My friend earns his money doing other work.

I stupidly wasnt checking the document Wendy put together, so I also rang Wiken Windmill and left a message.

I spoke to the head miller at Pakenham Watermill who suggested they could mill some for us. They are volunteers and normally run the mill once a week. They could mill half a tonne in a day (they normally do short runs of about 150kg) and have storage for half a tonne of un-milled grain. It would have to be delivered to them in 20 or 25 kg sacks. I can borrow the equipment to sack up the grain if John can separate some without husks for us. I've got a truck that can easily carry a tonne, so potentially I could take it to the mill, some of us could go help out for a day, take a half tonne of flour away and leave them a half tonne to mill for us. He said he'll speak to his co-millers and let me know exactly what they could do - it sounded promising.

Nigel Moon the miller at Whissendine Mill, Rutland was very helpful, he wouldnt mill because hes organic but he said he might be able to help us find somewhere to dehull and told me to call Dave Pearce. Who turned out to be the head miller at Wicker Windmill.

Dave said that they mill 1/3 tonne a day, normally operate 7 days a month and expected they could do something for us - he's going to chat to his co-millers. We could probably go join in too. If I remember right they have storage for about 2 tonnes.

I'll the list of mills I contacted to the google doc Wendy started https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W_6E1zJuAC0PxursgEGdjYAppTjRDfg1ibAG41547DA/edit

I was round my parents today and my mum said she had some spelt. I looked, but couldnt see it with the other flour. Turned out it's grain. Organic. Bought from Lidl, when they were doing an organic week a couple of months back.

Packet says - add double the volume of boiling water and simmer for 20 mins.

Had a small bowl with butter, salt and pepper. Quite tasty. I would be up for having a fair few kg of grain for myself & friends. I wonder if we could find someone to buy the grain/some of the grain if it was dehulled so that they could sell on in small bags? Probably worth talking to the 3 wholefood co-operatives, they even do their own bagging.

Pakenham mill said they dont loose much flower when milling, they expect to loose 0-10%