2010 - 2023

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 the UK, many of the landworkers within our movement are new entrants: people who haven’t been born into farming families, or who are new to agroecology. If you’re a new entrant of any age and involved in any kind of land work, join us for this session where we will share our experiences and inspiration as landworkers.

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.

How to cultivate Jewish identity and community rooted in ‘radical diasporism’? How to mobilise the Jewish community to act on food and land justice issues? How to link in to the wider land justice movement whilst articulating a specific Jewish experience in relationship with land? This session will share the work of Miknaf Ha'aretz in building a radical, diasporist, Jewish food and land justice movement in the UK, offering Jewish identifying folks more access points…

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.

Twenty-five years ago, Nicolas left Paris for a village in Brittany, where he decided to make bread. The wheat comes from his own farm, where grains, peas and beans grow side by side. The baker works with coarse salt and fleur de sel from Bourgneuf-sur-Retz sent to him by a friend. Directed by Eileen Byrne, Germany, 2022.

Just how much trouble are the invertebrates in; why does this matter; and what can we do about it? In this session we will be exploring these questions with Dave Goulson, Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, who is one of the leading scientists studying the ecology, behaviour and conservation of bumblebees and a supporter of citizen science where the public can actively support scientists via observations. He is also a brilliant and…