Walking the talk! Food as a lifestyle medicine
Back to my roots with this form of health care, and tapping into one of my top values, food, what you eat, how and when you eat, lastly even more to the point, feeding the people I care about.
Last Friday saw, girls on a mission – Nikki, Camphor and Susie on a field trip to Farm Ed and The Cotswolds Flour Mill.
Big thanks to my good friend Nikki who researched and forward planned the trip.
There were lots of questions about regenerative farming, beyond the obvious ones, where did the name come from, it seems that in many respects ‘Regenerative can also be seen as ‘back in the day, old school Farming’ Rotation of crops, pasture grazing by cattle and sheep, and of course diversity.
Farm Ed is based in Kingham nestled in the beautiful Cotswolds countryside, it was established 10 years ago by the Cotswold seed company as a way of giving the community an interactive space, entrepreneur farmers the opportunity to try out their dreams and so much more.
They are not certified organic as in addition to regenerative they also farm one strip in a commercial manner as a means of comparison, On the farm walk they dug up a sod from the regenerative strip so we could compare this with the commercial soil strip, the difference was incredible
Regenerative soil, crumbly with multiple worms, root fibres, a rich fresh soil smell, all very much alive.
Commercial strip soil, solid, sweet smelling, heavy and dead. No life visible at all.
We saw how they are creating field divider of trees that are planted to break the wind.
A field water drainage system that has saved the local village from flooding when there is heavy rain.
An incredible diverse orchard of apple, (did you know there are more the 360 different variety, so you could eat a different variety of apple every day of the year and still not taste them all) apricots, peaches(not fruiting as yet) pears and more.
There is a kitchen garden, that operates a veg box scheme, subscribers pay a monthly fee to get a weekly box all year round of basically organic veg and fruit. In addition to this they can also order milk from the farm dairy, locally made bread, local meat and honey from the farm’s bees.
One farmer fresh out of Harper Adams agricultural collage approached them with his dream of making ice cream, he now has a small herd of cows on the farm and a horse box converted into an ice cream sales wagon that he takes to local festivals and shows.
From Farm Ed we went down the road to Matthews Cotswold Flour Mill, Bertie Mathews whose family set up the mill in the 1800’s gave us a wonderfully detailed and insightful tour of the mill, the mill has gown massively over the generations and continues to do so, it’s constantly changing to keep up to date with technology and keeping pace with the changing times, whilst keeping true to their own values, they believe the importance of bringing regeneratively farmer grain to the market and recognising the importance of getting this out to a broader markets, happily that they have recently got their flour into Tesco’s stores.
The mill builds and fosters contact with the farms directly so they can guarantee that the grains they buy are farmed to a comparable standard. It also helps to keep the prices competitive for farmer, the customer, and the mill. They do import some grains from Canada and some ready milled flour from France, as they feel that it is best to do what you do, to the best of your ability and buy in good quality products to expand your range and meet demand.
Flood prevention, overflow water management, water is fed down into this pond via a network of gullies and channels divided by natural stone dams, that have now been covered with foliage growth.
*Camphor all set for the farm walk.
*Healthy soil full of life and winter bird seed mix and mixed cover, including clove and chicory.
*The dairy herd and horse box ice cream van.
*Kitchen garden for veg box scheme.
*pollinating bee hives.
*Tree field divider to disperse the wind and diversity fruit orchard.
Flood prevention, overflow water management, water is fed down into this pond via a network of gullies and channels divided by natural stone dams, that have now been covered with foliage growth.
*Nikki ready for the mill tour. Camphor was on car guard duty this time and stone ground flow, test mills.
*Wheat comes in and is sorted to clear out the chaff from the grain, it is then sucked up into this large pine grain store.
*Roller milled grains. The grain is flushed through with water to soften the endosperm before passing through a range of mills.
*The final output where the different degrees of milling are separated, course bran to highly refined flour, from here the flour can move on the bagging station.
*Flour from the Farm Ed shop, baked as a 10 minute tin, with the addition of pumpkin seeds in honour to Halloween!