In the spectrum of services farmers can access to help them transition to regenerative practices, where does mentoring fit? Often overlooked or poorly executed, does mentoring have a place alongside other services farmers access to support their practice?

For the first time, UK policymakers are actively researching the potential for agroecology to help deliver net zero. In Spring 2022, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) commissioned the University of Aberdeen to review a range of agroecological farm practices – such as reduced and minimum tillage, leys, extensive livestock systems and cropping approaches – and assess their impact on GHG emissions, vegetation and soil carbon stocks, and changes to yields.

What’s the state of UK food security and should we be growing more food in the UK? In December 2021, the UK government published the first of its new triennial Food Security Reports. This painted a picture which could either reassure or concern us.

The ORFC is full of great initiatives demonstrating agroecology and nature-friendly farming in action. But at a national and global level, progress is still too slow and we need to understand why.

Join us in a conversation with three entrepreneurs working in food and farming and two funders exploring alternative financing models.

This workshop explores practical and embodied tools to explore social permaculture principles, reflecting on transitions, interconnections and empathy concepts in community practices, centred on progressive learning and co-development.

Many people are interested in deepening or enriching their own connection to land, place and the nonhuman as part of a wider rejection of extractivist, capitalist modes of being in the world. They seek more traditional forms of knowledge, which might involve some elements of ritual or ceremony. But how can this be achieved without appropriating yet again from other cultures?

On the one hand the agroecological farming movement petitions for transformation in the food and farming sector. Yet on the other hand, there is the sense that this can happen whilst we retain our familiar western mindsets and beliefs, our ways of knowing, feeling and communicating. Can we really have outer transformation without a parallel inner one?

Jumping Fences is a collaboration between the Ecological Land Cooperative, Land in Our Names and the Landworkers’ Alliance which seeks to understand and address the barriers to access to land for Black people and people of colour(BPOC) in agroecological farming in Britain. The research was published in December 2022, and this session is an opportunity to hear the findings from the project, and join a Q&A with a panel of farmers, researchers and activists ideating…