The recent release of an RSPB analysis titled ‘A lost decade for nature’ showed that the UK has failed to reach 17 out of 20 UN biodiversity targets agreed on 10 years ago. The other side of the scale holds the news that sales of organic food and drink hit a record high during lockdown, […]
Photo: A crop breeder visits a field in which a new variety of tef, a staple cereal crop, is being grown by a local farmer in Debre Zeit, Ethiopia [Tara Wight 2018] By Tara Wight Cereal production in Scotland is dominated by a small number of conventionally bred varieties of barley, wheat and oats. These […]
We have launched the Solidarity Bag: a 16 or 8 kg bag of flour paid for by you and delivered to the brilliant community bakeries working across Scotland to keep their communities fed. With her experience working with foodbanks, our new Flour to the People Project Coordinator Lyndsay Cochrane is well placed to introduce this new […]
Scotland The Bread Chairman Andrew Whitley is the Speaker for Trill Farm’s Supper & Conversation Talk Title – My Life and Loaves Six loaves, from Seneca’s white to sourdough rye, nestle in Andrew Whitley’s knapsack, providing food for thought on his life’s journey. In a ‘conceptual fermentation’ entitled My Life and Loaves he ponders how a fascination with […]
Food campaigner, writer, broadcaster and consultant Geoff Tansey joined Scotland The Bread Chairman Andrew Whitley in 2015 for a filmed guided tour of Macbiehill Agroforestry Farm in the Scottish Borders. Andrew is now preparing to move from the five-acre farm closer to Balcaskie Estate, where we are now based at Bowhouse and our grain is […]
On the 25th September 2018, immediately preceding our AGM, we started what might well be the first ever community science experiment of its kind: a ‘People’s Plant Breeding’ grain selection event. ‘A small, quiet and entirely benign revolution.’ We recommend you read in more detail about the background to the event here, but in brief: […]
In 2018, Scotland The Bread grew 70 tonnes of wheat and rye on the Balcaskie Estate in Fife. There are 10 ‘varieties’ which, with the exception of one modern spring wheat Paragon, are characterised by considerable genetic diversity within the crop. This is especially true of the ‘evolutionary varieties’ that we have brought over from Sweden. […]
