ORFC 2024 4 – 5 Jan
Street Goat is an urban micro dairy collective based in Bristol which aims to bring animal farming back into urban spaces and bring people closer to where their food comes from. Since the project's foundation in 2015, it has grown to have three milking sites across Bristol and a regenerative grazing project called Meat Goat.
A session describing why and how to monitor beneficial beetles on farms. This will focus on carabid beetles (which eat crop pests and weed seeds), dung beetles (which cycle cattle dung, improving pastures and reducing associated pests) and the farm measures that can encourage abundance and diversity of species in different systems.
How can spatial practices within a framework of critical research intervene in the pressing ecological issues of our time? Investigative Ecology assembles artist-researchers from the Centre for Research Architecture (CRA) whose investigations look into the political forces shaping agriculture and the environmental space.
Should we all give up meat and dairy if we’re to have a hope of avoiding climate breakdown? This is what the headlines seem to tell us. But is this too simplistic a picture – and what would this mean for Cornwall, where most of our farmland is used to raise livestock or to grow crops for these animals to eat?
The UN reports that the only way we can meet the global target of 1 billion restored hectares in the next eight years and avoid ecosystem collapse is to support people across the world to engage in localised ecosystem restoration. Join this lunchtime session and explore how we can leverage online learning to support a peer-driven, participatory global ecosystem restoration movement.
This presentation will explore working and environmental conditions at the bottom of the corporate supply chain. Wage workers are often at the sharpest edge of the exploitative practices of corporate food systems that aim to extract wealth from both the land and the people that work it.Catherine McAndrew
The native ponies of Wales are in decline. They live in many landscapes including coasts, moors, marshes and mountains that provide a range of socio-ecosystem services. These services include supporting (e.g. biodiversity), provisioning (grazing), regulating (flood prevention) and cultural services.
Farming is fabulous, but it is not only hard work, it is also frustrating to be a farmer in these challenging times.
Farmers relying on ‘subtle energy systems’ for farm and livestock health, such as bio-energetic, biodynamic, homeopathic, radionic and other resonance systems, report a corresponding amplification of the health and vitality of the whole farm. This session shares the experiences of farmers achieving measurable results with such systems and explores the questions this raises.