As an ORFC partner, the Landworkers’ Alliance have pulled together an exciting programme of in-person sessions – four of which will be live streamed as part of the Online Conference. Here they share the process of bringing together their sessions, and what to look forward to at #ORFC23.
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In the spring and summer of 2020, when on-screen meetings became the norm, the viscerality of embracing our friends and family became a distant memory, and face-to-face conversations were few and far between, we sacrificed an important part of our movement. We lost a level of intimacy and bonding that has been key to our movement-building work since the very beginning.
Covid-19 is still a harsh reality for many, and we remain acutely aware of the ongoing suffering caused by Covid-19 to many of our members and the wider public as well as the need to support those who remain vulnerable. But we also understand that being together in person is invaluable to the real farming movement.
Land work can often be a solitary livelihood, and while connection to the land and the natural world is nurtured, connecting to the wider movement can be challenging. So for those who are able to join both online, and in-person, we are very much looking forward to getting together once again to share our passions, our knowledge, our frustrations, and our hopes for the new year.
Building the movement
We live in a time of multiple and intersecting crises, straddled by our food and farming systems. From the climate crisis, to the biodiversity crisis, to the cost of living crisis and the food crisis, the way we produce, distribute and eat food is entangled in both the problems and the solutions to these issues.
We know that if we want to reach a critical mass within our movement, a mass of groups and individuals wanting to achieve whole system change, we need to start working together to coordinate our efforts and make the linkages between food and farming and wider environmental and social crises clear.
It’s events like ORFC that are the cornerstones of our movement, providing a place for real connection between farmers, activists, academics and campaigners who are all seeking to fundamentally transform our food and farming systems for the better.
Starting to come together again
Over the past year we’ve begun to once again come together for in-person events, and we’ve really seen the difference it can make to the movement.
The Land Skills Fair in July was a chance to bring people together from different regions, generations and cultural groups to share knowledge, engage in conversation and debate, feel a spectrum of emotions together – from rage to joy – eat and relish good food, make new friends, hold hands and dance together. It was a much needed dose of jubilance that has left us feeling rejuvenated and ready for what lies ahead.
Our in-person away days for the LWA staff team, as well as our second in-person LWA Organisers’ Assembly in October in Sheffield gave us a chance to collectively strategise, to bounce ideas off each other, to put faces to names and associate names with places. It was a reminder of the real people who hold our organisation together, and the creative and strategic fertility of bringing these people together to share a space.
We’ve been able to organise more farm-visits, regional group gatherings, in-person training sessions and actions and demos. LWA has also been able to engage more on an international level, sending delegates to the UN in Rome, to LVC gatherings in South Korea, Portugal and South Africa, to ECVC trips in Honduras and Spain, and to COP27 in Egypt. The importance of building international networks of solidarity and coming together in person to make lasting connections cannot be overstated.
Bringing people together this year
Bringing people together to share knowledge lies at the heart of ORFC, and this year we will be bringing people together from different countries, regions and groups: from a cooperatively owned grain mill in the heart of Nottingham, to a food hub on the edge of London, and from a blackcurrant farm in Norfolk, to a dairy farm in Dorset.
We will also be bringing perspectives from different countries – we’ll hear about land justice struggles in Scotland, land occupations in Brazil and using media for change with tribal land-defenders in East Africa, and we’ll be bringing together campaigners advocating for small farms in new subsidy reforms in Scotland, Wales, England and Ireland.
We’ll also be bringing together different age groups for intergenerational knowledge exchange and bring together key movers and shakers in the movement to think about a movement-wide strategy.
We can’t wait to see you there!
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