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It is the earliest harvest Henry Astor can remember. But walking through the scorched wheatfields of his Cotswolds farm, signs of life are everywhere – swarms of insects, kaleidoscopic wildflower meadows, bushy hedgerows several metres wide. A yellowhammer perches on a nearby tree.
There are 18 other red-listed birds on the farm, says Astor, who this year ringed 23 barn owls, three kestrels, two little owls as well as goshawk chicks. “Last winter we had clouds of goldfinch, chaffinch and greenfinch,” he says. Britain has lost 73 million birds since 1970; but at Bruern Farms, a small but welcome reversal is taking shape.
Between 30,000 and 40,000 trees have been planted over the past decade, many as part of a flood-mitigation scheme, some in a 17-hectare (42-acre) agroforestry section interspersing wheat with heritage fruits such as Cox’s pippin and Blenheim orange apples. Wildflower meadows are rebuilding soil fertility.
As part of his obligations as a member of the North East Cotswold Farmer Cluster, which Astor co-founded, a plot is left for bird feeding, to boost populations. According to the cluster co-chair, Tim Field, this has resulted in flocks of linnets, goldfinch and chaffinch across 40 farms involved in the feeding project, while one farm has seen more than 400 teal feeding among watercress in a wetland area.
Catastrophic biodiversity loss since the postwar “green revolution” has been well documented. Wheat played its part, as heritage grains and mixed populations gave way to vast monocultures of dwarf wheat. Several initiatives are attempting to reverse course with nature-friendly farming, the farms in Astor’s farmer cluster among them.
In all, Astor and neighbouring farmers have 800 hectares of floodplain meadow under restoration, while 3,000 hectares have been set aside for flood mitigation along the River Evenlode, including Bruern Farms’ land.
Despite this progress, Field is one of those unconvinced by the government’s recently announced “30 by 30” nature restoration plans.
“Farmer groups aren’t getting the recognition they deserve, yet we are proof that when farms are aggregated by purpose, we can be more powerful for landscape restoration at scale than has ever been achieved by public or [environmental NGO]-driven schemes.”
Astor grew up on the 490-hectare farm his grandfather bought in 1936, but left for a career as a documentary maker and in advertising. In 2017 he returned, with his wife and three young sons, to run the farm. “My father said let the farm manager farm it, do not get involved,” Astor recalls.
That might initially have been the plan, but the farm Astor returned to was not the one he remembered. When the Milk Marketing Board was abolished in 1994, causing prices to plummet, Bruern ditched dairy. It went from being a mixed farm to wholly arable, farmed by contractors who, Astor says, “don’t really care about trees or hedgerows or nature; it’s a business, they just want maximum yield”.
Yet profits were minimal. Astor says wheat farmers grow a commodity that decreases in value each year, while the costs of machinery and chemicals rise – most recently, fuel and fertiliser increased sharply during the Iran war.
Bruern Farms’ transition from conventional to heritage wheat, grown with the environment in mind, happened in stages. First came an “awakening” at a supermarket. “A bag of crappy flour was £1.20, or £1,200 a tonne. I’m selling wheat at 15p a kilo. Who is taking that money?” Astor thought.
In 2020, he was approached by Fielden whisky to grow heritage grains, including red lammas, orange devon and kent old hoary, on 140 hectares. It led him down a “rabbit hole”, sourcing the likes of miller’s choice, a “population wheat” from the South East Grain Alliance. Before modern wheat was introduced there was variety, he says. “They’d have ‘population wheat’ – 30-40 varieties [grown together], which I do today. It builds disease resistance, weather resistance; you have diversity in the field, and much longer roots, so you’re reaching the minerals.”
Proponents say heritage wheat is also more nutrient-dense, has a protein structure that results in more digestible bread and, when stoneground, retains more of its nutrients than conventional wheat.
In 2021, Helen Evans, a baker at the now-closed Flor in London, inquired about Astor’s conventional wheat, which he still grows on some of his land but hopes to phase out. “I didn’t know anything about baking,” says Astor.
At this point, he was still sending his grain to a nearby mill for processing. Commercial mills reject approximately 60% of the conventional grain sent to them for being too low in protein, and Astor began to wonder why he was accepting this when his flour was clearly in demand.
Astor began personally delivering 300kg of flour a week to Flor. He did not make a profit, but the idea of bypassing wholesalers took shape. He contacted local bakeries and bought a mill. “There was something fundamentally exciting about the idea of growing something, milling it, then having that relationship with a baker,” says Astor.
Astor says his goal is to mill 500 tonnes a year, which will allow him to reduce his cropping by half, promote biodiversity on the remaining land, reduce carbon emissions and run a viable business.
Now supplying more than 40 bakeries, Astor operates the mill as a separate business, paying his farm more than it would receive on the commodity market: £800 instead of £600 a tonne for heritage grain. Last year, the bakery chain Gail’s introduced its Bruern Farms sourdough, which is being launched on Ocado in September, followed by Waitrose in November.
But simply changing the crop will not solve everything. When Astor sent soil samples to an expert last year, they said it was low in minerals, due in part to the area’s heavy clay, which makes drainage an issue and microbial activity sluggish.
He hopes to boost the soil through natural means, such as volcanic ash and microbial teas. He applies minimal fertiliser, and the farm has not used pesticides in 15 years, preferring “intensive intercropping”, with wildflowers to attract predators that feed on aphids.
Carlos Guerra, a soil expert at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, supports this approach. He says modern wheat monocultures have “simplified soils as much as they have simplified landscapes – reducing plant and root diversity, weakening microbial communities, and increasing vulnerability to erosion, compaction and organic-matter loss”.
Replacing these systems with a diversity of cultures, as well as eliminating pesticides, planting wildflower meadows, reducing soil disturbance and using organic or microbial preparations, “can help rebuild soil structure, biodiversity and nutrient cycling”.
Astor hopes his system can be replicated throughout the country, which he believes would make farms profitable and boost food security.
His vision is nostalgic. The farm of his childhood was a “self-sufficient community”: a mixed farm supporting several families. “I’m not interested in farming the way my father farmed – 100% arable with subsidies and chemicals. I’m interested in farming the way my grandfather farmed.
“There was a connection to the village,” he says. “The community were eating the food we were growing on the farm.”
For Astor, this is not just talk. The shop and cafe employ 15 people and the farm supports rural enterprise. A 1.2-hectare market garden is run by a nearby restaurant. One local couple has 150 sheep on the land; another young woman is building a separate flock of Herdwicks. The sheep are integrated into the rotation, helping fertilise the fields.
This year, Astor harvested 190 tonnes of heritage wheat, up from 48 last year. He expects to reach the golden 500 figure by 2028.
“I have three missions,” he says. “Growing nutritional food, feeding the community, and increasing biodiversity.”
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