2010 - 2024

Every year we hear stories of the woeful incompetence of the Home Office to manage the hemp licensing process. UK farmers want to grow hemp, but the enormous amount of red tape makes even getting the licence a challenge without professional guidance. We need a hemp growers guild to collectively strategise how to make the necessary changes so that hemp is accessible to all farmers in the UK and not just those supplying big pharma.

How do we heal the wounds of colonial history? Oppression and harm continue to make and shape the world we share. This session explores ongoing work towards repair and asks what still needs to be done. This is bigger than a conversation about financial debt which is often the focus of reparations inquiry. But what constitutes repair and reclamation? What is the place of land workers in that conversation? What are the land stories that…

A farming journey, founded on the vital importance of meadows. The meadow is the mother of the farming system. We want to bring back this old saying with natural unfertilised meadows; to show you how to produce everything you need for a healthy life and sustainable business through increasing biodiversity using the meadow system. By feeding animals meadow hay you bring in micro- minerals and fertiliser to your land, enabling the creation of amazing produce,…

The power of pesticide companies and the drive for profit is hindering the efforts of campaigners and policy- makers when it comes to pesticide reduction. We will discuss the ways in which corporate influence on policy and science underpin injustice in global food systems. We will explore the topic of investors influencing, or withdrawing support for companies that are driving biodiversity decline and harming human health, and what we can learn from the climate movement…

Each of us has the power to change the food system three times a day- a truth obscured and mistold as a result of the systematic disconnect between kitchens and farms. The more we can do as farmers, chefs and food citizens to re-establish active lines of communication and cooperation, the more opportunities we can create for each other to feed into the transition to an agroecological food system. The session puts forward practical ways…

We shall discuss the pros and cons of natural burial. Can natural burial be rolled out across more farms as part of farm diversification? Is saturation level and proximity to existing sites an issue? We shall explore the topic of de-carbonising funerals and how natural burial can become mainstream as part of farm diversification. Could “planting our carbon bodies” become a valuable part of regenerative farming and can this help people connect with farming and…

Resilience is best described as the ability to respond to change, but many things can affect this ability, and not all are within our control. This interactive session will introduce the concept of resilience as a series of patterns, patterns that we can identify, practice and grow. We’ll explore the internal drivers that push us towards burnout or exhaustion and the feedback loops we’re most responsive to and that affect our ability to prioritise our…

This is a captivating story of black oats lost and found. Gerald Miles spent 20 years searching for the black oats his grandfather grew. Through a connection with a folk musician, another older farmer was found to be still growing these almost extinct oats. We formed a group called Llafur Ni and embarked on a journey to eat these oats for the first time. Discovering that eating oats wasn’t as simple as we thought, we…

The Youth Convergence on Land Justice will bring together young people aged 16-24 from across the UK who have a shared interest in discussing issues and opportunities young people face in the realm of land work, from farming to forestry, activism to nature restoration. In workshop form, the convergence will provide a facilitated space for youth representatives from organisations, movements and unions doing innovative work to share learning. We will discuss the potential of intergenerational…