Being able to farm and to feed one’s family is fundamental to rebuilding the lives of rural people traumatised by conflict. For the physically disabled this was considered near impossible, but a new farming venture in Sierra Leone is changing that perception.

Already one of the world’s poorest countries, Sierra Leone was devastated by an eleven-year civil war in which tens of thousands of people died and many more thousands had limbs amputated. In 2014,…

Competition for land and water around the world is growing due to surging global demand for minerals and metals critical to transitions in the energy, industry and military sectors. Mining corporations and states are on a collision course with their own citizens, and with farming and fishing communities in particular.

In this session we will hear from community representatives on the frontlines of struggles in Finland, Colombia and Ireland to prevent mining from destroying…

La carrera por la tierra y el agua en todo el mundo está creciendo, debido a la emergente demanda global de minerales y metales, que resultan críticos para las transiciones del sector energético, industrial y militar. Las empresas de extracción minera y los estados están camino de colisionar con sus propios ciudadanos y, sobre todo, con las comunidades agrícolas y pesqueras.

En esta sesión, escucharemos a representantes de comunidades que se encuentran en primera…

A world of possibilities opens up when you forgo the hetero-normative binary. How can we transform agriculture and our food systems when we look at it through the lens of queer ecology and gender diversity? We’ll hear from food producers around the world who are challenging the heteronormative status quo, and, in doing so, are changing the way we think and interact with the natural world.

ADVANCE REGISTRATION REQUIRED. LIMITED SPACES: 500

Designing wine farming to mimic healthy ecosystems has created resilience to the vagaries of climate change, labour shortages and continuous increases in costs of production. Holistically designed vineyards function primarily off of solar energy by using adaptive grazing during any season. Soils remain covered throughout the year, tillage is eliminated, biodiversity and soil carbon can significantly increase while tractor use (fossil fuels), labor, water and fertility inputs can be…

In his talk, Tom Philpott will discuss his new book The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It, which argues that the US model of chemical-intensive, regionally concentrated agriculture is undermining the ecologies the two main places where it alights: the California Central Valley and the corn belt, centered around Iowa. He'll put the argument in a global context, explaining that the same set of transnational meat, grain-trading, and seed/pesticide companies…

En Estados Unidos, las mujeres están tomando cada vez más roles en el proceso de toma de decisiones en la agricultura y, en todo el mundo, el empoderamiento de las mujeres en la agricultura es una estrategia clave para apoyar la resiliencia climática y la seguridad alimentaria. La organización American Farmland Trust y sus socios en los Estados Unidos han desarrollado distintas estructuras de apoyo para las mujeres en la agricultura, como el aprendizaje y…

Among much else climate change will affect rainfall. There will be more floods, more droughts and both will be more unpredictable. Civil engineers immediately think in terms of reservoirs and conduits and the rest - all very expensive and unnatural. But we should as far as possible let nature do the work for us. One of the best civil engineers in the world is the beaver with its supreme ability to manage water: damning streams…

ADVANCE REGISTRATION REQUIRED. LIMITED SPACES: 100 (Full)

In the United States, women are increasingly taking on decision-making roles in agriculture, and around the world, women’s empowerment in agriculture is a key tactic for supporting climate resilience and food security. American Farmland Trust and its partners around the United States have developed a variety of support structures for women in agriculture, including through facilitated peer-to-peer learning and networking. These programs create spaces for women in agriculture to…