The story of Yorkshire Organic Millers flour in Ryedale

If you bake your own bread and live in Yorkshire, chances are you’ll have spotted the striking millstone packaging of Yorkshire Organic Millers flour on the shelves of your local organic shop.

The highly regarded flour is used by some of the county’s leading artisan bakeries including York’s Haxby Bakehouse, the Forge Bakehouse in Sheffield, and the Bluebird Bakery in Malton. Much of it is grown, and all of it is milled, at Hill Top Farm at Spaunton, an idyllic place where chickens run free and cows and sheep graze on organic pasture and enjoy views of the North York Moors. The farm is owned by Philip Trevelyan, although, having just turned 81, he’s recently handed over the management of it to local couple Rob and Megan Archer.

Philip started his career as a film maker – he’s the son of artistic parents: painter and poet Julian Trevelyan, and potter Ursula Darwin, a descendant of both Charles Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood. He’s probably best known for his cult documentary The Moon and the Sledgehammer, about an eccentric family living off-grid.

Yorkshire Organic Millers flour. (Image: Tony Bartholomew) So how did a Sussex-born renowned film maker end up as an organic farmer and miller in North Yorkshire?

'I was brought up next to a farm and worked there from the age of 12,' says Philip. 'In those days, you were given big responsibility young: I was loading and unloading 14-stone sacks on and off trailers with an ancient tractor puttering away all on my own by the time I was 14. Farming was very much part of my DNA. But then I was sent away to private school and my life changed. I ended up a film maker – when we first came here, I was still making films for Granada TV to keep us going.

'But I always wanted to do something in farming, something practical. I’d done a farming correspondence course to make sure I understood what farming was about – the bigger picture, not just driving tractors! I’d write an essay every week, and it would come back with little red ticks or crosses on it from someone in the middle of England who was my tutor.'

Rye growing near Hill Top Farm,Spaunton to be milled at the nearby mill for artisan flour. (Image: Tony Bartholomew) In 1974, Philip and his wife Nelly sold their London home and initially tried for a shared tenancy on a farm in Sussex, but that didn’t work out and their limited funds led them to Hill Top Farm.

'In the village here there was an old farmer – he was driving tractors well into his 90s – and I’d talk to him,' says Philip. 'I said I wanted to grow wheat crops, and he said that even our little three-acre field which has a steep slope, he remembered being stooked with corn. You could grow corn up here for milling if you got your spring corn in really early.

'I learned to do that – plant seed corn in early January. The ground would be frozen sometimes. We had a few pigs, so we’d top-dress with pig manure, and it worked. From the very beginning we grew crops and combined them with a little six-foot combine that someone had given us. I took it in lorryloads across to Little Salkeld in Cumbria where someone I knew had set up a watermill. He was in at the beginning of the new bread campaign and artisan bakery and milling.'

Phil Clayton of Haxby Bakehouse collecting flour from the mill. (Image: Tony Bartholomew) It also just so happened that at nearby Melmerby in Cumbria, a new bakery had been set up by a BBC producer-turned-baker called Andrew Whitley. It’s a name that inspires reverence in any keen artisan baker today. Whitley spearheaded the artisan bread movement – he co-founded the Real Bread Campaign and is a former vice-chair of the Soil Association.

'The first grains that he started to bake with were grown here at Hill Top,' says Philip. 'His work has been inspiration to many bakers. Andrew came and opened our mill here.'

In the late 90s, Hill Top hit a glitch – Philip admits now that ‘we hadn’t kept our ears to the ground’ about new regulations, and although their crops were totally organic, they weren’t formally certified as such (they are now).

Rye growing near Hill Top Farm,Spaunton to be milled at the nearby mill for artisan flour. (Image: Tony Bartholomew) 'We had a heap of lovely golden wheat but our buyer in Salkeld couldn’t take it without certification. So we decided to mill it ourselves, and bought an old mill from Botton Village, a timber mill with Derbyshire gritstone stones. Within three or four years, we had four mills.

'Then Nelly and I went on holiday to France. We went to the local supermarket, and there was this little bag of organic flour, with the address of the farmer on the back. We went and found him: he had a lovely set-up, and he had a mill made by these brothers, both engineers, in the south of France. André and Pierre Astrié were passionate about bread and milling; all the French bakers were sitting at their feet. Their thinking was that bread should be at the centre of community life, and it should be local.

'I asked the farmer where we could get one of their mills, and he said ‘you’ll be lucky – you’ve got to be organic through and through in order for them to make you one’. But I wrote to them anyway and they agreed. Someone in Brittany they’d licensed to make them to their design – they were very old by this time – made us two. The stones are beautifully made from granite. The top stone sits on a spring which allows you to change the quality of flour from fine to rough. They were doing something special. There are still only a few of their stones in this country.

Rob and Megan Archer who are taking over the management of the farm and mill. (Image: Tony Bartholomew) 'Over the years, we’ve gradually built up a support network of farmers and we now have too much organic grain for this one operation here, despite us having four mills going.

'Yorkshire Organic Millers is a recognised brand now. We’re encouraging other organic farms in Yorkshire to start milling, and talking about maybe franchising our name as something that joins us together with other farms that have the same principles as us.'