Dear <<First Name>>

Greetings! It’s been a while…

There was something sadly prescient in Veronica’s picture of swans taking flight from our snowy pond in the last Bread Matters newsletter – way back in January 2018.

Treatment for her cancer had by then run its course and she died here at Macbiehill Farmhouse that April. I wrote these words about her shortly afterwards. 

If that partly explains the long gap since the last newsletter, what follows sets out where I’ve decided to go with Bread Matters.

First things first. I’m on the move.
 

Macbiehill Farmhouse is on the market

You can probably imagine how hard it will be to leave Macbiehill after almost ten years here. We came in December 2009 from Melmerby (Cumbria) where I’d lived since starting The Village Bakery in 1976. We extended the old steading to make the space for Bread Matters courses (complete with large wood-fired oven), built a barn for storage, outdoor catering, goose plucking, grain threshing and more, and planted 6,000+ trees to create an agro-forestry scheme. 

After two years conversion, the land was certified organic with the Soil Association in 2012 and has remained so ever since. At 250 metres above sea level in the hills, growing was always going to be something of a challenge (though the wind turbine was happy), but the polytunnel and glasshouse were a boon – and anyway, we were on the ‘sunny side’ of the Newlands Valley with views that made it always ‘a great place to have a bad day’. 

If you know anyone who might be interested in taking on Macbiehill Farmhouse and its five organic acres, please pass on the details.
 

Bread Matters online shop

Once I’ve sold Macbiehill Farmhouse, I’ll be moving to Fife to be near the new Scotland The Bread HQ. The diverse nutrient-dense grains that we’ve been researching for the past seven years are now growing on the Balcaskie Estate and we’ve had wonderful support from the owner Toby Anstruther and his team to set up our low-energy eco-mill in one of the production units at the Bowhouse. 

In the next few weeks, we’ll be amalgamating the Bread Matters online shop with the Scotland The Bread one and all orders – for flour, books, proving baskets, tins etc. – will be despatched from the Bowhouse. The Bread Matters website will remain, with a link to the Scotland The Bread shop for online orders.

In the run-up to the physical move of the stock from Macbiehill to Fife, there will be more interesting offers in our ‘Last on The Shelf’ section where you’ll find items that are being discontinued. 

We will invite followers of Bread Matters to sign up to the Scotland The Bread newsletter and I hope that many of you will ‘come with me’ by becoming shareholders and/or supporters of the non-profit charity (formal name: Bread for Good Community Benefit Society) that is leading the way on research into more nutritious and digestible grains in Scotland.
 

Cultivating Diversity

I am off to participate in the Cereal Diversity Festival in Denmark next week where I will share experiences with people from all parts of Europe who are finding, growing, selecting and, of course, baking with the grains that will work best in the net-zero-carbon, people-centred, agro-ecological farming of the future. Watch the Scotland The Bread website for developments.

I will be in touch again when the online shops merge. Silence may be golden (especially in these raucous times) but I promise I won’t leave it another eighteen months.

Good wishes for a baking summer!

Andrew Whitley