2010 - 2025

Join Nature Friendly Farming Network’s Farming Champion Florence Mannerings to hear about her journey into nature friendly farming at Chilton Farm in Kent. Florence will explain how she and her family turned an intensive farm that was in a very poor state into a thriving dairy business where food production and nature work together. The talk will cover conservation grazing on a variety of landscapes, how hedgerow planting and pasture creation are improving resilience to…

By sharing the story of our first year operating Carmarthenshire’s Tool Library for Small-Scale Growers, our challenges as well as our successes, we hope to inspire other tool libraries. We’ll discuss how and why the initiative was funded and our co-design process, as well as exploring some of the practicalities of selecting tools, managing hires, lease agreements, membership options, maintenance and insurance. Whilst we certainly don’t have all the answers, there’ll be plenty of time…

Join Jenny Goodman, doctor and author of Getting Healthy in Toxic Times, for a lunchtime talk to hear her prescriptions for healing your body and the planet. Pesticides and synthetic fertilisers began as weapons of war, and as they travel from factory to soil to crops to food to people, they wreak havoc on all living cells. Jenny has seen the damage in her clinic, with diseases linked to these pollutants. But if dominant forms…

Over the past year, sustainable agriculture was subject to intense political debate — as well as manipulation, with misleading narratives spread by everyone from farmer-influencers on YouTube and the far right, to agri-industry and governments. In this panel we share insights from DeSmog’s 2024 investigations into agri-misinformation with a focus on the UK, Ireland and EU elections. The session will seek to explore: how do falsehoods start, who is behind them and what are the…

Join us for an informal discussion of the government’s proposed inheritance tax legislation. Policy expert Jeremy Moody and Riverford founder Guy Singh-Watson will be digging into the impact the new policies could have on farmers and landowners, and explore the bigger questions of how best to use farmland with policies that are just and well-designed. How do we ensure that land stewardship and access to land are protected for good food and farming? And how…

This 45-minute talk by writer and filmmaker Manchán Magan is an exploration of the rising connection people are feeling with the spirit, the lore, and land of Ireland… and its resonances with Indigenous cultures around the world. Ultimately, this talk is a celebration of the extraordinary heritage our ancestors have passed down to us and how it can inspire and empower us, guiding us in how to live, how to feel and how to relate…

In this session, the 2023 Scottish Young Farmer Forester of the Year, David Carruth, will tell us all about Brodoclea Woodland Farm in Ayrshire where he and his team practise an innovative approach to agroforestry. As well as explaining his award-winning work with “trees and pigs”, David will speak about his own journey from conventional to regenerative farming — highlighting some of the challenges facing farming communities in the shires west of Glasgow. And of…

Join new-entrant farmers Francesca and Hollie as they talk about their journey setting up Nunwell Home Farm in 2021. The farm is based on a share farming agreement with the Nunwell Estate and currently includes 100 native breed cattle, eight breeding sows and 300 laying hens. They also graze conservation sites owned by the National Trust and Wildlife Trust, and in 2024, they started a joint venture with a local chef to set up a…

Unless you are eating breakfast, it’s likely that the plate in front of you contains chicken. Yet the ubiquity of chicken meat is recent, arising from technological developments in poultry rearing from the 1960s that significantly lowered the price of the golden bird. Why chicken? The meat is very nearly flavourless, especially when raised in the new way, which involves confining the animals so that muscles remain undeveloped. To be sure, the rise of chicken…