Farming For Coeliacs

 

I’m not an arable farmer, but a stud owner with lots of farming friends.

I would suspect that crop rotations are more likely driven by economics of subsidy than the economics of quality.

An old friend of mine who died many years ago, used to grow seed barley, which of course fetches a high premium. So he rotated it with rape or sugar beet. The only way he could get it to the desired quality was to weed the wild oats or ‘volunteers’ out of it by hand. Many a day I saw him walking through the fields doing it!

In these days of extensive agriculture, I doubt that you’ll get any profitable alternatives to wheat and barley, which will mean that contamination will occur. We also have the problem that sugar beet may cease to be grown here. (Should we subsidise it, when we can buy all the cane sugar we need from the developing world?)

The only good thing is the new EU agricultural subsidy, which is based on hectares. So if you come across a gf corn, you can grow profitably for bread and rotate with say rape, then you are on a winner.

I think it may be a case of watch this space.

One last thought! Wheat and barley must be related to wild grasses. Does anybody know whether any of our common grasses are not gluten-free?