A Grain Community
| Kimberley Bell of Small Food Bakery reflects on four years of YQ Wheat grown for the bakery - since Josiah dropped by with a pack of YQ Flour in 2016 - and the people-centred systems that have emerged and continue to emerge, around it. |
...year 2 at Upper Wick Farm in Worcestershire with Meg and Will Edmonds using their old dresser to clean the YQ they’d grown after harvest
Back to Little Bytham for year 1 and...
...over to Greenacres Farm in Shropshire for year -1, a trip to see Mark Lea growing YQ on a field scale away from Wakelyns for the first time.
An early visits to Wakelyns Agroforestry in Suffolk to learn more from Professor Martin Wolfe at the home of this wheat.
Martin in trial plots at the first International Conference of Wheat Landraces for Healthy Food Systems in Bologna.
YQ is a true population of wheat, born out of cross breeding 20 wheat varieties every which way possible to create 20 unique parent plants. Grown out for 20 or so years without human / intentional selection. Its a great innovation. But also, its humbling, a story about the importance of diversity for resilience a reminder to step back and stop trying to control everything. Martin Wolfe (who created the YQ population) once said to me to trust that everything will balance in the end if you just create conditions for diversity, then let it be. Including people.
Before he died, Martin co-authored an academic article (with Salvatore Ceccarelli) exploring definitions for words like ‘population’ in the context of cereals. These definitions were contentious amongst those at the Bologna conference and I’m grateful for the insight and clarity offered by the article. For me (like many), this language is new and the boundaries between the categories of grain plants are (purposefully / positively) blurred.
I asked Martin when YQ will become a landrace wheat. He replied that we can’t really say. (It does when it does).
Standing in the new grain silo on the farm this year, the power of what a small, committed group of people can do is illustrated. Not only in changing what is grown in the fields, but small scale mills, grain storage, cleaning and infrastructure have been established, retail business have been built, recipes are being written, the story is being told.
Looking at these photos from the last five years, and being witness to many other farms and bakeries who’ve been nourished by YQ wheat, its only now that I’ve understood that YQ has become a landrace; a wheat of people and place. It may be an annual crop but it is now an immovable part of our history and culture. (It would have been Martin’s birthday this week).
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Kimberley Bell
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