2010 - 2024

How can a farm reach net zero? This session focuses on the innovations of three farmers as part of a 43-strong community in Cornwall funded by the Climate Action Fund, part of the National Lottery Community Fund. The Farm Net Zero project is driven by farmers to improve farm resilience by reducing emissions from feed, fuel and fertilizer but at the same time increase soil health and ecosystem services. The speakers are part of an…

From labourers to landowners, livelihoods in agriculture are often precarious. A lack of funded pathways into farming makes careers in producing food both hard to access and difficult to sustain. Finding ways to support these livelihoods will be critical to building the resilient, sustainable and just local food systems we need. This is an interactive workshop as well as the launch of a new report, with findings from a year
of hosting conversations with…

Design is arguably a vital element within an agroecological future. The Masters students of the Architecture School have been working with leading agroecological practitioners including Wakelyns, the Apricot Centre and Community Farm to develop ideas around how good design can support and promote agroecology. They will be displaying their work and asking for your input through some thought provoking questions. Come, see and critique the projects and programmes they have been working on. And maybe…

Exploring Donna Haraway’s wonderful sense of ‘worlds world worlds’, the printing press will be exploring the parallels between the wildly imaginative worlds nurtured at the ORFC that we all take with us out into the wider world, and the worlds that exist within the soil, and the life and possibility they grow. Printing small A5 posters using an 8x5 Adana Printing press, and a selection of vintage and hand-carved rubber stamps, including earthworms, protozoa and…

In the UK, farmland is predominantly used for food production. But as the building industry’s interest in the benefits and applications of lower energy and less harmful materials like hemp, straw, flax and earth grows, competition with and tension between using land for food and for material production is going to increase. This panel will make the case for why we need to look at farmland as a space in which we produce more than…

At the end of our time together in Oxford, please join us to reflect on what we have learned and what we will take away from our 15th ORFC. There will be short summaries from leaders in the movement and the obligatory highlights video to ensure that any embarrassing dancing will remain on record forever!

An interactive session introducing a new finance assessment tool which will help to evaluate to what extent projects contribute towards the agroecological transformation of our food systems. The toolkit has grown out of work by many organisations, including the global Agroecology Coalition, that together have been tracking the volume and quality of funds flowing towards agroecology. In this session, speakers will introduce and discuss the tool kit and explore its potential uses in many different…