I've been thinking of having a go at producing home grown wheat flour to make bread. Researching it, I find there are wildly different figures of how much wheat can be produced from a given area of land. Taking a median figure, I come up with the estimate that each square metre planted in wheat would yield around 800 grams of bread. Putting it another way, for one loaf per week for a year I'd need to plant about 42 square metres of wheat. Theory is all very well, but has anyone done this in practice?

I think your idea is really good if you have the space to do it. Watching Victorian farm they did it in a field of about 10 acres for their needs for 1 year.

It would also need to be a certain type of wheat that is used for bread making. as in the Gourmet Farmer he found the wheat produced in Tassie was totally different to the one in Queensland.

John Seymour in his book has grown all kinds successfully. He did say it depends on the climate and the area as to what will and won't grow. Maybe we should look at some of the old types of wheat that was grown over 100 years ago.

Hey Mate!

I think it varies pretty widely too. Years ago I tried it in the back yard on a plot that was, I suppose about 600 x 4000mm. I got approximatley a 100ml bottle full, which I still have.

Good Luck!

Nev

Maybe 1 acre for a year not 10.
I used to grow large areas of wheat, 10 acres would fill 2 semi trailers.
Different strains of wheat grown in different climatic zones will all have different uses.
Lots of homework there getting the right one for bread.

Have been looking at growing some wheat also, tried some feed wheat, the wombats loved it. So have been preparing a fenced area. Just bought some spelt seed(not supposed to take as much out of the soil, but lower yields?)
Gday Bushy, as you are now the expert(have grown wheat before), a question for you, most info says to plant in Autumn, harvest in mid summer, I am in a heavy frost area, Is it possible to plant early spring harvest late summer???
Cheers Pinetree

Although we've never grown it to harvest stage (we've let the chooks at it, or moved house), we've found wheat grows amazingly well in a chicken run. Much denser and quicker than in the garden, it loves it. HTH

Pinetree..... haha, no expert, but have a few clues..
I see you are in southern highlands so that advice is correct, plant autumn harvest mid summer.
That goes for oats, rye, barley etc. The frost has no affect on the plants.
If you planted now prolly still get grain but less yield as the plant would not develope a strong root system before it naturally runs to seed.
If planted early enough and good growth happens, it can be cut off and used as feed or green mulch and still harvest grain

Thanks Bushy, I will give both timetables a go and see what happens, the wildlife will I think determine which timetable works. Any thing green gets hit hard around here in winter.
Cheers Pinetree

Wazza

A lot of the folks on a home brewing forum that I frequent were looking at growing their own barley. They all discarded the idea because of the amount of space required.

This yield calculator may help - soilquality.org.au/calculators/yield_potential

It works in t/hectare.

The gotchas in calculating yield are that a lot of yields are given in raw yields. This drops by nearly half to give the dry weight of the grain and by around another quarter to give the weight of milled flour. If you are looking at the amount of bread you can produce then a good estimate is to double the flour weight.

I suspect 42 square meters will be way low. These are broadacre crops for a reason...

Cheers
Dave

Edit: oh yeah... for bread you also need a hard wheat. Most of these are winter varieties so that may narrow down your options somewhat.

Wazza, dont know if it would be helpful to you or not, but heres a link to the Wheat thread I started, there are comments in there from you as well. www.aussieslivingsimply.com.au/forum/veg...at-at-home-winnowing

Dang... busylizzie beat me to the link.. grr

Interesting calculator Airgead. From my experience the yield also depends greatly on the quality of the soil as well as the water. I have seen variance of between 2 tonne/acre to 7 or 8 tonne/acre. A huge difference.

That is correct about hard wheat for bread so that will determine your possibilities Wazza. We have grown Buckwheat and Millet on a larger scale (an acre) as well as oats and wheat on a small scale (garden bed). It was interesting in all cases, as the soil improved so did the yield, so keep that in mind when you are determining viability.

Andre wrote:
Sorry Andre

mauzi wrote:
Yeah.. If you read the fine print it says that those yields are for "rainfall limited" crops. I take that as meaning that they have sufficient soil quality and nutrients to achieve maximum yield if they get enough rain. You probably want to take those figures as best case figures and expect yields a good bit lower.

Cheers
Dave

Quiet good idea to have own grown wheat flour if you have their own land..I never try this and hope to grown my own..I learned about farming and it's really very hard work..