2010 - 2025

As farms need to diversify to secure their future, growing and selling flowers can offer agroecological businesses a viable complement to their existing production. Hear from Hannah Lamb, Yorkshire Edible Flowers, and Calixta Killander, Flourish, about growing flowers and foliage alongside fruit and veg, and from Zanna Hoskins, Spindle, about farm diversification into foliage cropping. The workshop covers how these farms started growing flowers and foliage, the biodiversity benefits of these crops, and the benefits…

Organic unites a diverse international community around principles of health, ecology, fairness and care. Organic production standards seek to put these principles into practice. Standards and certification provide a level of assurance to producers and consumers but maintaining integrity and certifying these practices can carry costs that small-scale producers often can’t meet. We need to unblock this challenge so farmers at the heart of the movement can access the market, whilst upholding the principles and…

Landownership patterns around the UK are markedly concentrated, with too few people owning too much land. In this session we will look at the different routes to accessing land for agriculture across England, Scotland and Wales, exploring what we can learn from each context and how we might be able to forge more equitable and diverse landownership models.

The session will bring together an intergenerational mix of participants in an interactive workshop to discuss campaigns against genetic modification. It will include archive photos and footage of demonstrations, blockades and GM crops being pulled up. It will explore questions including: what ignited fires of resistance then, and what has changed? What can the food activists of today learn from the campaigners of yesterday? Are concerns about GM a thing of the past too, or…

Between 2020-2023, LION and Ubele released the Rootz into Food Growing and Jumping Fences reports, describing BPOC workers’ experiences of discrimination, oppressive workplace cultures, low/no pay, lack of access to land, and isolation in the UK’s agroecology sector. This led to the mobilisation of a group of workers to form a new Trade Union branch aiming to build collective power to challenge oppression and increase accountability in our workplaces. Drawing on evidence gathered by LION…

Join Amy as she shares gentle movement practices that help us 'meet' and nurture exchange with the land that we work with. With the aim of expanding ‘regenerative’ practices into the life of the landworker, Amy has been drawing on her training in somatic movement to devise simple exercises that support us in attuning to presence, for listening and conversing with the landscape of our own bodies, as well as other beings’ bodies (human/more-than-human). There…

Double the nitrogen in the starting straw with this simple static composting strategy. We’ll teach you how to capture atmospheric nitrogen in ambient conditions using wheat or barley straw with naturally occurring nitrogen-fixing bacteria. By stacking several bales on each other, ideal conditions for cellulose decomposition and feeding of nitrogen-fixing bacteria are created. The result is a low cost method for increasing the supply of nitrogen on-farm. This method can provide a minimum of 20%…

This workshop will provide food citizens with the space and opportunity to discuss and determine practical ways in which kitchens and farms can work together more closely to drive food system change. Drawing on the experience of our farmer, supply chain and chef panellists as well as the participants, we will engage in the collaborative creation of a toolkit that proposes practical solutions to enable wider access to agroecologically grown produce.

Join this intimate interactive session and workshop with members of the Propagate Regenerative Farming Network, to work through: how and why to set up a farmer led cluster group, the difference it makes to farmers on the ground, and how to be empowered to advocate for changes locally, regionally and nationally. Using the South West Scotland group as a living example, we'll cover everything from building friendships to talking to politicians and influencing policy. And…