Meet Field Bakery and Mill at Gothelney Farm

Field Bakery and Mill on Gothelney Farm was created by baker Rosy Benson, in collaboration with farmer Fred Price. You can read more about them here.

The Open Food Network UK met up with Rosy at Groundswell 2025, where she joined in a spoken word event as part of Gaia Foundation’s We Feed The UK presentation at Groundswell. We are grateful to the Gaia Foundation for their permission to use some of the poetry from the artist Dizraeli as part of this blog post.

Rosy works hard to link her bakery with the local land, people and other enterprises that make up her local food ecosystem. Her bakery products change seasonally as she integrates not just grains from Gothelney Farm but also pork and beef produced at Gothelney Farm, herbs and vegetables grown on Rosy’s allotment, Bristol-grown flowers and dairy products from other South West producers.

When she was choosing a software platform for her bakery, Rosy wanted a system that allowed her to be linked to those producers.  As bread and pastry sales grow, she plans to offer her customers other products from local farms on her own shopfront. Open Food Network producers can easily become hubs.

I will never be able to offer the same range as a supermarket but the more I can link up with other local producers that I trust, the more we can help each other – it builds solidarity. Us small businesses don’t have huge amounts of time or budget for marketing so we need to help each other by encouraging our loyal shoppers to also buy products from our neighbouring producers.

The other element in Rosy’s decision to use the Open Food Network platform was ethical.

I ask my customers to trust me. The customers know us and they see the farm. Even though we currently have to operate within the capitalist system, I want to choose more ethical systems whenever I can. I chose an ethical bank and ethical insurance. In terms of tech, we need to make decisions that reflect on our core business. Because OFN is open source, I know that I am helping to build a system that is driven by the food producers who are using it. My financial contributions to the OFN are not being used to pay shareholders. It is a much better model. As a business the bakery, albeit small, has some leverage. We need to use this to support what we want to see more of.

Rosy also wanted a system that would help her minimise waste. Gothelney Farm grows a limited amount of grain each year and there is a lot of work involved in growing the grain, milling the flour fresh for each bake and then the baking itself. This means she needs to be able to accurately assess how much to bake each week. The OFN pre-order system helps her do this. For example, bank holidays can be times of bumper or very low orders. By looking at the pre-orders, Rosy can make a judgement as to which way it will go each time.

The other way Rosy competes with supermarkets is to give people a completely different experience of their bread.

We are not like high street bakeries. We are part of the farm. By getting people out each week to the farm, people develop their own appetite for agroecologically produced food. Their bodies sense its nutritional value and respond to good flavour by returning week on week.

 

Supermarket bread might have bright flashy packaging but with no real legal restriction on real bread labelling (see The Real Bread Campaign) can the consumer really trust supermarket bread with its host of additives and processing agents and external costs to our health and the environment?

People need bigger, more embodied stories including the human side of the food story. We build their appetites when we give them the whole story from the soil to the loaf.

Rosy is keen for her bakery to inspire other bakers to connect with farmers and growers in their local area. She encourages all bread-buyers to ask more questions of their local bakers about the provenance of the flour in their baked goods – does it come from extractive global commodity systems or does it support diverse organic local grain systems?

Have a look at these other bakeries on the OFN and read a detailed case study of Longstraw Bakery here – Rosy mills a proportion of Longstraw’s flour, to increase their local use of fresh stonemilled diverse grain.

Photos by Phyllida Warmington with kind permission from Field Bakery. Poetry excerpts by Dizraeli of Hot Poets shared with kind permission from The Gaia Foundation.