Meet the member:
Scotland The Bread

Scotland The Bread began in 2012 as a project within Bread Matters. Founded by Andrew Whitley and the late Veronica Burke, it began as a participatory research project to link plant breeders, farmers, millers, bakers, nutritionists and citizens.  Rescuing Scottish wheat varieties from seed banks around the world, working with leading Scottish research institutions and with similar agroecological projects in England and Scandinavia, they set out to find the most nutrient dense grains that thrive on low-input, Scottish farms.

In 2016 we created the Bread For Good Community Benefit Society to scale up Scotland The Bread (our trading name) with its dual purposes of research and the skilling up of community-scale, artisan bakers to stimulate a market for nourishing, locally-grown grains.

We were aiming to address the dietary inequality that places Real Bread out of reach for most people. We wanted to prove that we can grow wheat in Scotland that is suitable for breadmaking and not just alcohol distilling and animal feed, and simultaneously unshackle ourselves from the powerful corporations who currently dominate food production.

We wanted to address the problem of (a lack of) biodiversity in our crops, and grow grains that contain high levels of genetic diversity within the field, making them more resilient to stresses from the growing climate crisis. We wanted to address the skills deficit in this country holding people back from making their own nutritious bread, and sharing it with others.

Scotland The Bread launched its first three flours in the autumn of 2017, milled from varieties of wheat that were common in Scotland in the 19th century – Rouge d’Ecosse, Golden Drop and Hunter’s. Not surprisingly, finding these varieties and getting to the point where there is enough flour to go round has been quite a story. How do you find the seed to revive and research long-forgotten wheats?

We have to thank Andy Forbes of Brockwell Bake Association in London for scouring gene banks round the world for tiny samples (typically 10 grams or less) of ‘accessions’ bearing the name of Rouge d’Ecosse. He also identified Golden Drop and Hunter’s as plausible ‘Scottish’ heritage grains.

A total of 13 small packets of winter wheat seed across the three varieties were germinated under controlled conditions (‘vernalised’) by Mike Ambrose at the John Innes Centre in Norwich and the resultant seedlings brought up to Scotland in March 2013 for growing out on four farms in the Borders, East Lothian, Perthshire and Aberdeenshire. Each year the grain was harvested and re-sown, with the majority being grown at Mungoswells in East Lothian. Production moved to Balcaskie in Fife in 2017-18. To the three original historic varieties we added ‘evolutionary’ varieties and populations from Scandinavia (growing at similar latitudes to Fife). Our ‘Evo’ rye flour, for example, is a spring rye mixture grown on at Balcaskie from Hans Larsson’s Fulltofta rye in Southern Sweden. ‘Evolutionary’ means that there is a high degree of genetic diversity in the crop (unlike in modern ‘monoclonal’ varieties where every plant in a field is identical to the others – and thus equally vulnerable to pests, diseases and seasonal or climatic shocks).

We now call our wheat ‘Balcaskie Landrace’ as an indication of our ambitions to create an increasingly diverse population of plants that adapt to the local soils and climate. Their superior nutritional profile and their suitability for agro-ecological farming make them a good starting point in our quest to develop bread grains that can nourish healthy citizens while providing local farmers with a fair and reliable return.

From the start we’ve tried to make people aware of the dysfunction of current Scottish grain growing. When a country uses its best soils to grow wheat for intensive animal feeding or, worse, the production of low-end alcohol, it’s clear that the interests of commodity markets (and their financial controllers) are trumping public health. Scottish governments wring their hands at the effects of poor diet on community wellbeing (and the spiralling cost of diet-related ill-health) but they seem reluctant to stand up to big distilling and food processing companies. Scotland chooses to be ‘booze-secure’ at the expense of a chronic food insecurity: almost all the bread eaten in Scotland is made with imported flour (and quite a bit of it is baked over the border, too). The country seems carelessly vulnerable to disruptions in the supply of this key dietary staple, bread. Scotland The Bread is not just calling out this dereliction of duty on the part of policy makers; we are showing how a different, healthy, resilient and people-centred bread economy can germinate and thrive in local soils.

Our ‘uniqueness’ lies in the fact that we are probably the only flour miller in the UK that

~ tests every batch of grain for nutrient density (generally stable or improving since we started)

~ mills only wholemeal flour (refining is a theft of nutrients) and

~ studies, supports and celebrates (e.g. through the Scottish Bread Championship and the Scottish Festival of Real Bread – coming to Bowhouse on Feb 15^th) the vital process of fermentation that is essential to healthy additive-free breadmaking.

Our impact is for others to assess. We make no great claims to quantitative success, and we’d be happy to be measured by lives improved rather than tonnes (albeit organic ones) produced. Yes, we work for whole system change, and yes, we are finding that hard going. But we hope to inspire other similar local grain networks all over the country. We’d be happy if the local Fife community could take pride in what we are trying to do and benefit (in terms of personal wellbeing and community health) from well-fermented bread made from grain grown in neighbouring fields.

Scotland The Bread is breaking new ground by making bread flour available with an analysis of important minerals. We are concerned to reverse the long-term decline in vital nutrients in our daily bread. We believe the best way of doing this is by selecting and growing better varieties of wheat. There is almost certainly no one variety that will combine high levels of all the important minerals, vitamins and phenolic compounds with ideal baking quality and a good yield, every season. So, our research is going to take time. The good news is – we can eat the ‘data’, while we examine the subtle interactions of soil and season on minerals, yield and stability.

The key to good health increasingly seems to be in the balance that comes with diversity. This is certainly an important feature of healthy soils, sourdoughs and stomachs. So our search for the most nutrient-dense grains that also make good bread and provide a stable yield is likely to lead not to one ‘miracle’ Scottish variety but to highly diverse mixtures, populations and landraces, adapted to their local surroundings, in which a high degree of genetic diversity allows natural resilience, rather than short-term chemistry, to maintain the productivity of food crops that are as good to eat as they can be.

We are a community benefit society with over 400 member-shareholders and many other supporters. Our mission grew out of community breadmaking and grain research initiated in the Borders by our founders Andrew Whitley and the late Veronica Burke. It is supported by a board of trustees, a growing number of volunteers and a very small team of part-time staff. What inspires everyone involved in, or touched by, what we do is probably a conviction that gathering round a table to break bread is a simple yet powerful way to nourish healthy bodies and minds and that this only works if the bread is honest-to-goodness fare, made with care and love in the community, not ultra-processed with additives and sold with deceptive marketing.

We’ve had considerable support from the Balcaskie Estate in helping us to set up and develop our little mill at Bowhouse (and the estate grows our grains organically, too). We’ve also benefited from the supportive community of makers and from the readiness of people in the Bowhouse ‘ecosystem’ to help out (for instance during the pandemic when flour demand went through the roof). The monthly Bowhouse markets are a good source of direct sales which make up for the relatively small local market in the East Neuk.

Our Flour to the People project (which won the BBC Food & Farming Innovation award in 2021) was a quick response to food inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic. We took our flour and the skills to make it into nutritious bread to community food hubs in various parts of Scotland including Fife. We’re more interested in ‘feed-forward’ than feedback, but we know that Flour to the People changed attitudes and laid out a template for a better bread economy that could be scaled out to communities far and wide. Since then, our Soil to Slice programme with community gardens and our People’s Bread project (with a key event in Culross) have continued to put verifiably more nutritious flour and bread into people’s hands. Funding is tight for this kind of work at the moment, but we hope to do more and increase our impact in future.

By explicitly taking all our fellow citizens into account. We’re more than a passive link in a commodified grain chain. We’re based on an organic farm. We’re demonstrating the potential of low-energy milling to conserve the ‘nourishment potential’ of the diverse grains coming from the fields around us. We work with bakers to exercise their craft skills in making delicious bread from a naturally variable ingredient. And we want everyone in the process to be paid – and charged – fairly. Our members and supporters pay forward for ‘solidarity bags’ of flour to make it more accessible to people on low incomes who also have a right to healthy food. It’s not easy acting as though we are already a Good Food Nation while coping with the distortions and injustices of the status quo. But bringing people from all points of the food system together to devise something better that will endure – that’s what Bread for Good (Community Benefit Society) is all about.

Community engagement is the reason for our existence, and we have a varied and extensive range out outreach projects.

This February 15^th (2025) will see the third Scottish Festival of Real Bread, which we host with support from Fife-based Scottish Food Guide. This one-day event brings together families, community groups, local farmers, bakers and visitors from near and far and all walks of life to co-create a benign revolution in Scotland’s food culture.

The Scottish Festival of Real Bread creates a welcoming environment for families, chefs, locals, and visitors, offering a remarkable platform for sharing and celebrating the Real Bread movement. It adds value to the region’s thriving food and drink scene, bringing visitors to the region during the tourism low season.

Soil to Slice is a programme that encourages communities throughout Scotland to get involved in growing, harvesting, threshing, milling and baking with more nutritious grains in their local area.

This project was started in 2015 with the purpose of helping local communities to grow and bake their own healthy bread, from the soil to the slice. Sitting alongside our wider crop research, this participatory project engages local communities in gaining a better understanding of how heritage grains can be grown and enjoyed close to home.

There are now around forty-five Soil to Slice groups around Scotland running different projects, from schools to youth groups, community gardens and projects.

Our Flour to the People project brings talks and workshops to schools and community groups across Scotland – these could be anything from hands-on breadmaking to talks on the current grain system and how people can get involved in the movement to a better alternative.

People’s Plant Breeding
Since our first identification (in 2012-13) of historic Scottish wheat varieties, Scotland The Bread has been researching cereal varieties whose genetic diversity, nutrient density and local adaptability make them good candidates for a healthy and equitable bread supply.

Scotland The Bread is taking part in grain trials curated by the James Hutton Institute as part of a European RADIANT research project into ‘underutilised crops’. Climate disruption makes it prudent for humanity to reduce its dependence on a very small number of commodity food crops (wheat, rice, maize, soya) and to find agroecological resilience in a broad range of edibles. Our interest is turning towards grains such as tritordeum (a hybrid of wheat and barley) and purple barley, both of which show nutritional potential.

People’s Plant Breeding is very much a community-based project with volunteers heavily involved at all stages, including preparing the ground for sowing, sowing the varieties, and monitoring their subsequent performance, not to mention getting on top of the weeds which will require a working party pretty soon. If you would like to help with this work please contact lyndsay.cochrane@scotlandthebread.org.

That having a distinct identity or ‘proposition’, based on values that can be seen to benefit people fairly, is in the end more important than chasing a niche market. We rarely refer to ‘heritage grains’ now because those words have all too often been pressed into service by corporate greenwashers. Researching and revealing the deeper meaning of grains, of the whole thread of diversity in soils, cereals, stomachs and society, and thus of collaboration in service of life rather than competition in service of private greed – these are some of the things that ‘heritage grains’ have taught us. It would be nice to think that other food and drink makers in Fife might relate to their stock-in-trade as critically as we have been privileged to do in our attention to humble wheat and rye.

We hope to open a community bakery and ‘bread lab’, to feed local people with measurably better bread – better for us and for our precious landscape. The ‘lab’ bit refers to our ambition to work with Scotland’s leading researchers into nutrition and health to define that ‘better bread’, building on organic grain production (so no harmful agrichemical residues), ‘integrity’ milling (leaving all the goodies in) and appropriate fermentation to bring out the best in the flour. And definitely no additives.

We welcome support from the Food from Fife network not just in using our flour where possible, or putting it out for sale, but also in helping to pass on the hopeful messages that it – more than any purely commercial product – brings to people who  want  a healthier, fairer foodscape. And that’s all of us, naturally.