Future heritage: grain farming today with Abi Aspen Glencross

Observer Food Monthly, Aug 2020

Abi Aspen Glencross is the Head of Grains at Duchess Farms and was recently on the cover of the Observer Food Monthly, which featured four female farmers from the Farms to Feed Us community. She told Tiger Lily more about the unfolding story of her life and work with heritage grain…

There’s never a day the same in the life of a farmer, working in cycle with the seasons, which, Abi tells me, is one of the things that endears her to the career. At Duchess Farms, her daily workload can include anything from visiting chefs, health and safety, designing packaging, as well as testing, harvesting, processing and delivering grain, to budgets and pricing. 

“When people think of a farmer, they just think of someone standing in a field with a flat cap on, but you’re expected to be a spokesperson, a social media guru, a delivery driver and a farmer!”, Abi explains. Alongside 3 days a week at Duchess, she’s also been editing food magazine Jellied Eel, and running an ecologically explorative dining experience.

Abi, 29 and her friend Sadhbh, founded The Sustainable Food Story in 2017, setting out to “tell stories of what sustainability could look like from all walks of life; chefs, farmers, academics, activists and citizens, so as not to feel totally helpless in the ecological crisis. We’re all learning, so if we share stories and collaborate a bit more, maybe we can work out what we’re supposed to do.”

Photo by Ben Peter Catchpole

Growing up in Cornwall, frolicking in fields and with one of her best school friends living on a dairy farm, Cornish Gouda, Abi tells me it was only later, living in the city, when she started to really understand how the food system works; “I obviously cared about good food but I don’t think I really knew what good food was”.

The route of entry to farming took some unusual turns for Abi. Studying chemical engineering, she was designing petrochemical distillation columns for an oil and gas consultancy when she fell into the topic of lab-grown meat for her PhD. Initially “spellbound” by the possibility that lab-meat could be “the solution to all our problems”, Abi eventually came to her own conclusion, whilst appreciating what lab meat aims to achieve, “that technology should be used to empower growing and be in touch with the ecological world, not pull away from it.”

Lab-grown meat, she explains, “still needs carbohydrates and proteins to feed the cells...which must come from the world around us. You’re never without the natural world and native ecosystems, but tech tries to pretend that we don’t need it. We don’t really look at the repercussions of the whole system... We can grow meat in the lab but where does the source come from?

Mother Nature has developed over millions of years to create a balanced ecosystem and we’ve disrupted it, or furthermore, completely changed the face of it. And we’re using tech to solve the problems we’ve created. People say things like ‘it’s healthier’, but we don’t really understand what ‘healthier’ means. We should look at the fundamentals of our food system before we go for silver bullets to solve a problem.” 

Focusing on the fundamentals, Abi was drawn to grains and farming, so she left the lab for Blue Hill Farm in the Hudson Valley, where she was shown what a different system could look like by pioneering ‘farm-to-table’ chef, Dan Barber, and head growers, Jack and Jason.

Back in the UK, at no-till farm, Weston Park in Hertfordshire, Abi learnt that grain is grown, on a vast scale, to feed animals, rather than humans. This is largely because farmers struggle to meet the steep standards of commercial mills, which made no sense to Abi, who “likes big projects”, and decided to try and find a way of organically growing grain to feed people.

“Most of our wheat has been developed for high input systems - you might get 4 or 5 tonnes per acre, but you’ll have to use chemicals for it to grow. ‘Heritage’ grains haven’t been developed for high input systems - they don’t need a lot of fertiliser or insecticides. They grow taller, your yield is lower, but you have a really delicious crop at the end.”

Photo by Doug McMaster

Duchess currently produces Einkorn, Lys Brun, Ölands, Popstram, Kil Brun, Spelt, and a variety introduced by #Ourfield, a project founded by 6 females, including Abi, who brought together a collective of 40 people to work with farmer John Cherry on growing a field of wheat each year, sharing the risk and reward. She also works with 4 farmers growing different grains, which Duchess buys back for above the market price; “so they get more than they would if they were selling feed wheat, but put no chemicals on the land.”

Better at competing with weeds and with strong, deep roots, the heritage crops are helped along by herbal lays and field rotation, fallow years and not tilling too deeply, whilst 150 acres are left to nature. This year’s harvest has been challenging for many farmers, Abi tells me, as the quick change from dry to wet weather has made some of the grain ripen and sprout, ready to drop its seeds.

“We used to eat a lot more sprouted grains. It releases more nutrients and converts the phytic acid, which is what makes grain harder to digest, meaning lower gluten. So you don’t get the really stretchy, hard wheat, but we work with a lot of bakers who are cool with seeing what they can do with it... We all need to learn to work with variation, because that’s nature.” 

No longer reliant on bigger mills who don’t want to work with such variable, small quantities of grain, Duchess is now setting up machinery to mill it themselves, thanks to a crowdfunder launched at the onset of Covid. The impact of the pandemic on restaurants, their main market, meant that sales took a hit but, at the same time, wholesale, shop, bakery and online sales increased, resulting in a more diverse supply chain. In the first week of Farms To Feed Us when everyone was desperately trying to find flour, Abi alerted us to two tons at Duchess that had just been milled, and no sooner had it gone online, sold out within a week!

“Finding the seed, then finding the farmers, then finding the market, you realise that they’re all there, like puzzle pieces, it was just a question of putting them back together... I’m not doing anything new. As we’re finding with a lot of cooking and farming and food, it’s borrowing and learning from knowledge of the past and our ancestors, and applying it in a modern setting, using technology to empower us.”

With the last of the crops being harvested, once this year’s yields have been examined, Abi and  Oscar, whose family has run the farm for six generations, will decide what to plant in the winter and spring. Although she loves this time of year, “it’s nerve-racking because nothing ever goes to plan with the harvest!”, so she’s “trying to live more for the moment than looking too far ahead.”. It’s a philosophy, I feel, that reflects the way she farms, working with nature, rather than against it.

Photo from Observer Food Monthly

Find Duchess Farms on the Farms to Feed Us database, or head to their website and follow them on Instagram