In the drive towards shorter and more farmer-focused supply chains, retailers play a key role. If we want to build real alternatives to the supermarket system, how do we support retailers and ensure they are a force for good in the chain from field to fork? How can retailers share logistics and support each other? What role do retailers play in growing the market for organic produce? And what does the future of ethical food…

An in-depth look at various ways to propagate perennials in an organic system.

In this session, we will explore the best of farming and food policy from across the UK nations that has the potential to enable a transition to agroecological farming and local food systems.

A discussion of the benefits of creating space on working farms for people with learning disabilities and who are autistic or otherwise neurodiverse.

This session brings together community enterprises representing a variety of views about and experience of the part that social impact plays in their mission.

The UK’s industrial food system is buckling under a series of converging and mutually reinforcing crises: the cost of energy, the cost of off-farm inputs, the inaccessibility of land for new growers and the system’s tendency to pollute and deteriorate the ecosystems it relies on. This panel suggests that alternative forms of ownership could hold the key to a more just and ecologically regenerative food system.

In this session, biodynamic farmers and land workers will share how an openness to spirituality connects them to land, people and nature, and underpins their practical farm work, as well as how it affects their own mental and physical wellbeing.

Evoking past colonial practices, corporations are now using digital tools to entrench industrialised farming methods into the practices of small-scale farming and fishing communities. Current trends in digitalisation thus threaten biodiversity, the wider environment and human health. So far, few have challenged the tech industry’s hype about this ‘fourth industrial revolution’. This session will outline the issues, based on ETC’s recently-published report Food Barons, explore how we can assess the pros and cons of digital…

Most fungi live out of sight, yet they're all around us, and make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that support and sustain nearly all life on Earth. The more we learn about them, the more fascinating fungi become. In this conversation, Doug Bierend and Merlin Sheldrake will discuss some of the ways these extraordinary beings – and our relationships with them – change our understanding of the world in which we live.