UK Wheat Milled and Flour Production 🌍

It's not a particularly catchy title, "UK Wheat Milled and Flour Production", and somewhat ambiguous, but the fact that I've been able to access this document is part of a significant breakthrough. That breakthrough is the release of large amounts of UK government data via the just launched UK Public Sector information and data site data.gov.uk.

A search there for "windmill" turns up nothing, but for "mill" leads to the page about the dataset, and from there on to the Defra host page for the data, and the PDF containing the latest figures. The data is made available under Crown Copyright, which is aligned to be interoperable with Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence.

As for the figures themself, they relate to commercial milling - 2.5 million tonnes of wheat milled, producing 2 million tones of flour between July and November 2009. The flour production is split into

• Bread flour (sub divided in to white, brown, wholemeal)
• Biscuit-Making flour
• Cake Flour
• Household Flour
• Food Ingredients
• Other (inc. for starch)

There is also a category for self-raising flour, which is a significant distinction when the flour is sold, but less so at the production time, and the figures for this are all missing. It's interesting that there is no breakdown of the figures into any other grouping that consumers might consider important - such as stoneground, or organic.