Grain people: Oscar Harding.

Function before form.

There is a field at Duchess Farms that, at first glance, does not look like very much at all.

The wheat is not uniform. Tall stands lean beside short ones. Some strips have already been cut, others have been left standing on purpose, and here and there a thistle has pushed its way through, uninvited. To most people walking past, it would simply register as a field of wheat, the kind you drive by without a second look.

To Oscar Harding, it is something closer to a diary.

Every strip in it is a year of thought, a question he asked twelve months ago that the weather has now answered for him. Which wheat can shrug off a drought. Which one can hold its ground against a weed without a sprayer to help it. Which has the flavour, the colour, the milling quality worth chasing for another season, and which has quietly reached the end of its road.

This is not plant breeding as most people imagine it, carried out under lights in research stations and glasshouses. It is something closer to letting the land itself sit in judgement, and trusting what it decides.

Oscar tells me this as we walk the narrow path between two plots, and I believe him more than I would believe most people who said the same thing, because he has spent harvest after harvest finding out the hard way.

It turns out farming has editors too. They are called weather, disease and time.

Every now and then, mid-sentence, he stops walking, bends down, picks a head of wheat and opens it between his palms, blowing gently across it before he carries on talking, barely breaking stride.In the twenty minutes we spent together in this particular plot, he did it three times.

I never thought to ask exactly what he was checking for, which I regret now, though it hardly needed asking. It has become instinct rather than inspection, the kind of habit that turns automatic once you have spent enough seasons reading a field, and Oscar, running Duchess Farms himself for close to a decade now, has already spent enough of them.

Ask Oscar what he notices first when he walks into a field and the answer comes without hesitation. Whether it is still standing.Lodging is the thing that worries him most right now, though what he is watching for changes through the year, a different stage bringing a different worry. Long after most people would have stopped looking, he is still reading it.

I should say plainly that I am not a neutral witness to any of this.

Oscar is a friend, and one of the people without whom Carleschi would not exist in the form it does. We talk most days, often about nothing more than the weather or a delivery that has gone astray, and even now, after years of these conversations, I still come away from almost every single one having learned something I did not expect to. That is really the only reason this piece exists at all. Some people you simply want more people to know about.

Duchess Farms, where this field sits, has been our home since 2023. It is where the flour that becomes our pasta actually begins, and it rarely begins as flour at all. It begins as a decision, made in a trial strip much like this one, often years before a single bag is milled or a single packet is sold.

A hard year, and what it asked of him

This growing season has been an unforgiving teacher.

One of the wettest winters in memory gave way to months of heat and drought that many crops simply could not answer. Some failed outright. Others barely seemed to notice, and stood there almost defiantly while everything around them struggled. Five of the last six springs have been dry, by Oscar’s count, and he admits to being a little tired of being caught out by it every year.

“How many springs in a row is it dry,” he says, half to himself, “before you accept that it is just dry.”

For someone trialling wheat, that contrast is the whole point, though it comes at a cost that is easy to forget from the outside. Behind every wheat that thrived this year sits a farmer who spent the spring watching the sky, wondering whether the ones that failed had taken the harvest, and the income, and a year of work down with them.

It is a line Oscar says almost lightly, but there is real weight underneath it, the weight of someone who has learned to find something useful in disappointment because the alternative is to be crushed by it every single spring.

This year, one wheat in particular stood head and shoulders above its neighbours.

Krivet.

Its name is a shorthand for its two parents, Khorasan and Rivet, bred deliberately together by Dr Edward Dickin. Both are old tetraploid wheats and both are close cousins of durum rather than durum itself.

Rivet spent centuries adapting to British conditions: cold, wet, wind and difficult soils. Along the way it retained the height, vigour and resilience that can help a crop compete with weeds and withstand some of the pressures of a low-input farming system.

Khorasan is the larger-grained wheat some people know from Kamut, prized for its flavour more than its toughness.

Krivet crosses the two deliberately, in the hope of keeping something of what made pasta wheat worth growing in the first place, before decades of modern durum breeding placed increasing emphasis on yield, uniformity and industrial consistency.

The hope is not nostalgia. It is a genuine and quite exposed question. Does it still perform, here, now, in a field that has just survived both a flood and a drought in the same year?

Function before form

Oscar comes back to one phrase more often than any other, and it has become something like a compass for how he works and, I think, how he lives. For Oscar, function before form begins in the field.

Before flavour or colour or the romance of an old variety comes a simpler question: can this wheat actually do its job?

Can it establish itself, compete with weeds, survive a drought and still produce a worthwhile harvest?Only once those questions have been answered honestly does flavour get invited into the room.

It is a philosophy that quietly pushes back against a lot of the romance that gets attached to heritage grain. Age on its own is not a virtue to Oscar, and he will not pretend otherwise for the sake of a nicer story. A variety earns its place by doing its job, season after season, or it does not earn anything at all, however old or however beautifully named it happens to be.

“We don’t pursue anything that doesn’t start with functionality,” he says, and there is something almost moral in the way he says it, a kind of quiet refusal to be sentimental about something that has to feed people.

Walking the trial plots, you can actually see this principle at work rather than simply hear it described. Where a wheat has grown tall and strong, the ground beneath it is close to bare. No thistle, no poppy, nothing has managed to get a foothold. Where the wheat is weaker, the weeds have moved straight in, uninvited but unbothered.

In organic farming, a vigorous crop is not just a crop; it is part of the weed control. The wheat itself must take the space, light and moisture before anything else gets the chance.

And somewhere in that, the pasta begins too.

Field performance cannot tell us whether a wheat will make exceptional pasta, but it decides which wheats earn the chance to find out. What happens next, at the mill and in the pasta room, will show whether the vigour visible in the field carries through into the flour, the dough and eventually the bowl.

One go a year

If there is a single sentence that explains why Oscar farms the way he does, it might be this one.

Farmers only get one go a year.

A chef might cook through several hundred covers in a single night, adjusting and correcting as the evening goes on. We refine a pasta shape or a drying temperature batch by batch, sometimes several times in a week. A farmer plants once, waits an entire year, and only then finds out whether the decision was the right one. There is no second service that evening, no chance to quietly fix it before the next table sits down.

Twenty varieties might go into a field like this one in a single season, in the full knowledge that most of them will quietly disappear and only a handful may earn the right to come back next year.

It is a strange kind of patience to ask of anyone, and Oscar carries it well, though not without cost. That single unhurried cycle is exactly why a trial field like this exists in the first place. It is a way of trying to compress a lifetime of experience into something closer to real time, of not wasting a single harvest.

Standing beside the towering Krivet, Oscar allows himself something close to satisfaction, though he is careful with the word, the way people are careful when they have learned not to celebrate too soon.

Who is Oscar Harding?

Oscar Harding lives, farms and mills at Duchess Farms in Hertfordshire, where he oversees grain from field to flour.

That unusual perspective allows him to ask a question few people can ask in full: not simply whether a wheat grows well, but whether it deserves to become food.The farm has been converting to organic in recent years, a process Oscar describes less as a change of method than a change of habit, the same instincts he always had, finally given the room to lead.

Function before form.

Any success feels more like relief than celebration in farming.

Those two ideas probably explain Oscar Harding better than anything else I could write.

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Continue reading in Pasta Journal

• Before Flavour Comes Function
• What is rivet wheat?
• Krivet: from trial field to pasta
• Why we make slow-dried pasta
• Fibre is not something you add: it is how wheat is built

Notes

This profile is based on conversations and field observations recorded at Duchess Farms during the 2026 growing season.

Field observations and technical contribution: Oscar Harding, Duchess Farms.

Words by Giovanni Carleschi, pasta maker and founder of Carleschi.