2010 - 2025

The average British farmer is in a lose-lose-lose situation, where they damage the environment, create awful lives for animals, and lose money. This session will explore case studies of low-input win-win-win interventions, where animal welfare, profitability, and the land are improved together. Using the examples of mob grazing for chickens and pigs, and developing animal-based income streams for single-use woodland, this panel will explore how new management styles can give animals a life worth living,…

In this session, you’ll hear from two farmers about their experience of reducing organic soya in animal feed by incorporating home-grown or UK-produced legumes into their dairy and poultry systems. We’ll cover topics from the use of clover-rich herbal leys and intercropping to sharing strategies for poultry diets, growing pulses and how to select the right crops for your system.

Over the last few years, a collection of stakeholders in the organic grain sector have collaborated to run on-farm variety trials, helping select the most appropriate varieties for organic farming, as well as the highest quality varieties for the oat miller. Research is funded through a research levy paid by the farmers and the miller for mutually beneficial collaboration. Breeders and researchers also take part, adding value to the initiative in terms of varietal selection…

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.

Not so many generations ago our farming communities would practise land-based rituals and ceremonies to ensure productive harvests and good relations between places, people and the powers of nature. These days we are left only with scattered fragments of what these might have been, when and why they were done. In this session we explore and remember some of the fragments of farming ritual that are still available to us, looking at the consequences of…

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…