MMB: SOIL TO SOURDOUGH
Back in Spring 2020 Megan saw an opportunity to get involved in something pretty unique.
An opportunity for the Mini Miss community to have their very own Mini Miss field of heritage wheat grain, grown and milled on our behalf, just half an hour away from Saffron Walden at Duchess Farms. It would then be delivered to MMB by the sack load ready for us to turn into the most incredible, interesting, flavoursome sourdough.
In order to do this she needed to rally the troops to raise £3000 for the Duchess Farms crowdfunder. They needed a de-huller and a mill to mill their own grain, which to date was being milled off site. If £3000 could be raised for Duchess Farms, Mini Miss could get a field of wheat in return.
Megan couldn't do this on her own. And actually she didn't want to. She thought the more people that she could get involved in this, the more people will learn about a new way of farming that could ultimately influence the way we all source our food, not just our bread. At the very least they would get more excited about where the flour used to make their MMB sourdough comes from.
So Megan set up her own Mini Miss crowdfunder to get others involved, without any idea whether they would get as excited as she did about this opportunity.
48 hours later she had her answer; the Mini Miss community had raised £3000. It was incredible. And money was still coming in. A week later enough had been raised to secure TWO fields of Mini Miss grain. People, it seemed, were equally excited.
And so the MMB: Soil to Sourdough journey began. Over the next year and half we witnessed the whole process from start to finish, with visits to the farm and regular updates on how the team at Duchess Farms were progressing with 'our' fields of grain.
The project came full circle by Autumn 2021 and in November 2021 we took receipt of the first batch of Lys Brun heritage grain flour. Each crowdfunder received a 1kg bag of this flour plus a loaf of bread baked with the flour at MMB as a thank you for their support.
What an adventure!
If you missed the chance to be one of the members of this project you can still read more about it in the newsletters Megan sent round during its progress, below:
Click here for the December 2021 newsletter
Click here for the September 2021 newsletter
Click here for the April 2021 newsletter
(includes details of dates for the Duchess Farms visits)
Click here for the February 2021 newsletter
Click here for the September 2020 newsletter
Click here for the August 2020 newsletter
We still use the flour grown in our MMB fields in our bread every week and hope to continue buying flour from Duchess Farms, supporting their regenerative agriculture processes, for as long as we can.
