The organic flour millers
Hill Top Farm in Spaunton, a village high up at the southern end of the North York Moors, is where Philip Trevelyan grows and mills organic wheat and rye to produce exceptional flour supplying Yorkshire’s best artisan bakers.
Customers for Trevelyan’s flour include Phil Clayton’s esteemed Haxby Bakehouse in York, Bluebird Bakery in Malton, The Baker’s House in Helmsley and Stark Farm Bakery in Easingwold, along with many more restaurants, schools and domestic home bakers. He proudly proclaims he feeds 20,000 people a year.
Yorkshire Organic Millers, with its distinctive mill wheel logo, was launched twenty years ago, though the story begins in 1943 in Newhaven, East Sussex where Philip Trevelyan was born. He’s from illustrious stock. His father, Julian Trevelyan RA, was an established artist and his mother, Ursula Darwin, a potter and a descendant of both Charles Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood.
Philip puts his love of farming down to his time as a young lad in East Sussex, working on local farms, although he went on to become not a farmer, but a documentary film-maker where he made several highly regarded films, mostly based in the countryside, and now considered cult classics.
But farming was always calling and in 1974, Philip and his wife Nelly bought the 100-acre Hill Top Farm, growing organic wheat and rye, and rearing Swaledale sheep, pigs and beef cattle.
The farm is largely unchanged today with wheat and rye grown on 20 acres supplemented with wheat from organic farms across north and east Yorkshire. Four mills of Derbyshire gritstone and the unique French Astrier stones turn gently to provide 85% extraction, which means it retains more of the grain’s nutrients.
At 81, Philip Trevelyan is beginning to step back. He has negotiated a farm share with his cheery farm manager Rob Archer. But while Philip may be doing less of the physical work, he remains committed to sustainable agriculture through organic and socially responsible farming.
He believes that working locally with farmers, millers, bakers and customers, they can limit food miles, reduce transport costs and create what he describes as ‘a mutually beneficial trading network’.
To this end, Trevelyan and Archer are negotiating with other farmers to franchise Yorkshire Organic Millers, a brand that stands for quality, superiority and longevity.