In 100 years, one wheat-farming family had never tasted their own flour – until now

This story is part of the May 24 edition of Good Weekend.See all 17 stories.

In the last week of summer, driving north to Narromine, the flat, farming plains west of Dubbo in NSW don’t look like they’ve seen much rain. To the right of the one-lane bitumen road, an emu steps jerkily through a dusty sheep paddock. A tractor on the left pulls an enormous plough through a field, cutting orderly rows in bare dirt. My car is enveloped by the red cloud of topsoil churned up by the tines, and I breathe it through the air-conditioning all the way to Bruce Maynard’s farm.

I’m excited to meet Maynard. I’ve had a small Vegemite jar of his wheat on my desk for two years, passed on to me by a Sydney baker. For me, it’s somewhere between reminder and talisman. Most of the time, I sit at a desk in the city writing about food eaten in restaurants. I find it grounding to look at seeds. This is where it all comes from: plant potential waiting to push up and down, towards sky and deeper into earth. When I feel crushed by deadlines and diary, I shake my jar of wheat and hear both music and story.

Wheat is bound up in some of humanity’s biggest narratives. Its domestication about 10,000 years ago was a driver of agriculture, which in turn prompted settlement. Granaries supported the world’s first large towns, and their religion, art and politics. Over the millennia, wheat carved trade routes, and created and ruined empires. A lack of wheat was a spark for the 1789 French Revolution. High wheat prices were a catalyst for riots, which turned into the early 2010s Arab Spring. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was partly to stymie its wheat exports.

Wheat is also intrinsic to modern financial machinations: commodity trading, futures, the metrics of capitalism that link success and endless growth. These wheat stories are grand and sweeping, but hard to hold on to. They seem far from food, distant from the pleasure of buttering a slice of sourdough or slurping noodles. The smaller stories are the ones that hook me in – the ones you can fit in a jar. And as it turns out, the little tales are big, too.

Bruce Maynard’s style of farming doesn’t turn up soil or use chemicals, and he is as much interested in lizards and birds as yield, sales and margins. “We call it no-kill cropping,” says Maynard, a riff on “no-till cropping”, which doesn’t disturb soil but still relies on sprays. He’s a cheery chap, 60, with a bright face and smiling eyes. We walk across the farm that’s been in his family for four generations. The red dirt is stubbled with grasses and scrub; mauve flowers open to the sun. “That’s a legume called medick,” says Maynard, pointing. “That’s native tomato: there’s a lot of bush tucker here. That’s wire grass, that’s galvanised burr.” The latter is spiky. “It’s not what people call a desirable plant, but it’s a great habitat for lizards,” he adds.

Bruce Maynard describes his farming style, which doesn’t turn up soil or use chemicals, as “no-kill cropping”.Credit: Rob Locke

Into this diverse pasture, the Maynards sow wheat in late summer or autumn, and harvest in spring. Hopefully. The crop depends on rainfall and whatever else might happen. Last year, locusts ate it. He points at some grey, dead grass “which rots, becoming slow-release fertiliser”, and his sheep’s droppings, which are “compost heaps enriching the soil”. Maynard’s son Liam, 25, drives a tractor, pulling a jerry-rigged seeder that lightly scores the soil and drops wheat seeds. There’s no dust. The grasses and flowers remain.

“Conventional agriculture minimises nature, while we farm to expand biodiversity,” says Maynard. Reed warblers, a native songbird, are seen in the vicinity. Migrating superb parrots stop by. The average wheat yield per hectare might only be one-quarter of a conventional farm. “But our costs are radically lower; we spend less than a tenth of what conventional farmers pay because we do much less. It’s lazy farming.”

The family has long been in wheat. In 1937, Maynard’s grandparents took first prize at the Chicago International Hay and Grain Exhibition. Over the decades, the Maynards did the usual things: clearing fields to bald earth, killing weeds with poisons, spraying crops with fertiliser. “As a child, I yearned for more wildness,” he says. After 30 years replanting, his land looks different to other farms in the area: more trees, shrubs, birds and animals, less orderly. “Conventional farming means more intensity and – for me – less enjoyment.”

A handful of Maynard’s wheat.Credit: Rob Locke

Is it important for farmers to enjoy their work? There were 180,000 farms in Australia in the early 1970s; there are 90,000 today, largely because smaller farms have been swallowed by agribusinesses. Bigger farms mean fewer farmers and less reason for young people to stay in, or move to, rural areas. Unless they inherit land, they can’t afford it anyway. Towns shrink and die. People remaining can be isolated and unhappy. Suicide rates among Australian farmers are 94 per cent higher than the general population. Extreme climate events are linked to even higher rates. Wild weather is the new normal. What happens to the farmers?

Bruce Maynard can’t make the profits his neighbours do, but he doesn’t carry as much risk. And he’s pretty happy. “It’s rewarding to see life blossom,” he says.

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On Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, Jason Cotter grows wheat on sloping paddocks between the road and his house. He grows wheat off-site, too, mills it all here, then uses the flour in his bakery. I’ve been to Tuerong Farm a few times, turning up the long, gravel driveway and leaving with armfuls of bread. Last time I asked him for a cup of wheat, too: it’s in another Vegemite jar on my desk, one more little maraca I can shake to moor me to earth.

One Sunday morning, I meet Cotter, 49, at Tuerong Farm’s bakery and mill, a minute’s walk from his house. He’s wearing flour-dusted pants and a blue windcheater. He’s tired. Friends camped behind his house the night before and the farmer-miller-baker ended up asleep on an armchair with his son Clancy, 5, conked out on the couch.

Jason Cotter grows and mills his own wheat, then uses the flour in his bakery.Credit: Rob Locke

I move a tin of coloured pencils aside to find a spot for my phone to record. Cotter tells me the wheat genome is five times larger than the human genome. Conversations about wheat can replicate its complexity. There’s all that history and legacy, there are multiple ancient and modern varieties of this busy plant, there’s a galaxy of detail wrapped up in nutrition, and there’s the trouble so many people have with gluten these days – or perhaps it’s with modern sliced bread, which Cotter says is “more a mousse of flour and water” built for efficiency, not health or flavour.

While we’re talking, a couple come in to buy fougasse, a flatbread slashed to resemble a head of wheat: they’re excited to have bread from the guy who grew the grain. A baker washes up, flitting in pink light from leadlight windows. A magazine cutout of the Milky Way is tacked to a wall: a big story made tiny. On another wall, a threshing tool is strung up like art. A plaque on a lintel has a quote from Vincent van Gogh. “If I am worth something later, I am worth something now, for wheat is wheat, even if in the beginning it looks like grass.”

I rarely hear farmers bagging other farmers, even when their philosophies clash. Even the artisans understand the pressure to produce crops reliably at scale and to spend as little as possible doing it. They also know consumers need food that delivers affordable kilojoules. Wheat is Australia’s biggest crop: we grow an average of 25 million tonnes a year, up to 75 per cent of which is exported. Cotter grows 150 tonnes, which mostly stays within an hour or two’s drive. He’s realistic. “I believe we should have farms both big and small, near and far. Returning to some imagined utopia of local supply would mean we have to eat less, pay more, and alter our diets according to availability.” At the same time, he’s creating his own utopia, sprinkled with flour rather than fairy dust. “We tell the story of our grain, and people respond to that.” Cotter’s style of boutique farming is more expensive: the narrative is part of his added value.

Is it important or just nice? “It’s nice to engage authentically with a local food producer,” says Cotter. “It’s important because people like connection, and they are often disconnected from the origins of their food.”

Zelda Bakery’s Maaryasha Werdiger.Credit: Rob Locke

Even farmers can be distant from their produce. Not far from Bruce Maynard’s farm, further west at Trangie, Richard Quigley, 33, recently tasted his grain for the first time. In 100 years of farming, it’s the only time anyone in the family has knowingly eaten their own flour. “We usually send our produce out the gate and never see it again,” says Quigley. “We know we are feeding the world, but we don’t know what happens to it.” That changed this year when they grew some grain for Jason Cotter. “We trucked it to him, and he sent us back 40 kilograms of flour. We’ve made cakes, apple crumble … it’s been feeding the team while we’re harvesting cotton. It is meaningful to taste our own product and to know Jason’s bakery is using flour from our fields.”

There’s always Tuerong Farm bread on the bench at Jason Cotter’s place. “My children know bread comes from flour, which comes from seeds, which come from plants, which grow from the sun. They know their lives are part of something huge, mysterious and beautiful. I get a lot of satisfaction from the human part of it.”

Cotter’s flour is used in bread at Zelda, the Melbourne bakery I line up at twice a week for sourdough. “If your neighbour grows and mills the flour, gives it to you himself, it’s the ultimate,” says baker Maaryasha Werdiger. “I am part of a food system that nourishes your family. It’s an honour to do that.”

It’s great bread, too, fragrant and satisfying. It reminds me that flour comes from plants and has flavour. I make toast, spread butter on it, then Vegemite, slowly emptying another jar to fill with seeds for the next story.

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