A "DUSTY MILLER" is demoting himself from boss to just one of the workers after the sale of a village's organic flour mill.

The cottage industry project was started 16 years ago by husband and wife team Mr Graham Roberts and his wife, Joan, when they reopened Thorpe Mill in the centre of Grewelthorpe, near Ripon. The building had been derelict for 20 years.

Now the business has been bought by a local farmer, 40-year-old Mr Mark Exelby, and his 38-year-old wife Lynne, who will perform an action replay on a new site. They, too, will convert a derelict barn on their farm, giving the firm a new home 1 miles outside the village.

Mr Roberts will work for the Exelbys; his wife is retiring from the business.

Originally, 53-year-old Mr Roberts worked as a salesman with a commercial feed business. While doing so, he realised huge combines no longer catered for individual farmers' needs, simply producing standard mixes. So the family firm filled a gap in the market.

With a 35pc grant from the Council for Small Industries in Rural Areas the family project took off, later adapting to changing needs by becoming an organic flour mill to meet growing demand from health food shops, bakers and delicatessen outlets, and including famous names among its customers.

Mr Roberts thanks Prince Charles for helping to move along the organic culture but the new owner, who takes over on December 1, says so far they have failed to capture the heir to the throne as one of their customers.

Mr Roberts, who is a board member of Yorkshire Pantry, which represents 140 specialist food firms in the county, says: "Although I will work for someone else, I will still do the same job. One of our biggest tasks will be getting all the machinery out of the building and into its new home."

Mr Exelby, a member of Grewelthorpe Parish Council, runs a sheep and arable farm at The Hutts on the fringe of Grewelthorpe Moors.

Once the new business moves from its present cramped site, computers will take over the office side of the business.

There will be a name change too.

The business will no longer be known as Village Craft Flours, but Sunflours.

With the business set for further expansion, Mr Exelby said he was changing the name because he thought the word craft could conjure up a waterwheel-type tourist attraction when, in effect, they were a working mill producing stoneground organic flour.

Converting the old barn has secured a grant for the project from a Euorpean farm diversification fund which Mr Exelby believes will be one of the last of its type.

"Graham's help and experience of starting and working in the business for so long will be invaluable as we work together," said Mr Exelby.

Apart from its many commercial customers, the firm's products are popular with the home-baking brigade and a selling point could be established in the village, replacing the void left by the mill's move to farming pastures new.

The existing mill in Grewelthorpe, which takes its name from the Thorpe family who once ran it, is likely to be turned into a home by a property developer, following conversion to cottages of adjoining commercial premises, once occupied by an electrical contractor