ORFC 2025 9 – 10 Jan
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…
The UK imports 85% of its fruit and 43% of its vegetables. Countries we import from are already experiencing the impacts of climate change, while financial pressures are causing UK growers to leave the sector. Yet, across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, market gardens are attracting new entrants, supplying local communities, integrating productive systems with biodiversity, sequestering carbon and engaging with the public. This session will launch the LWA’s new report ‘Horticulture across Four…
There is increasing evidence that nature-friendly and agroecological practices must play a key role in supporting healthy and resilient food systems while restoring nature across the farmed landscape. Yet somehow these systems are still relatively niche in the UK. Organic farming, for example, only covers 3% of UK farms. What more is needed to shift the narrative, and support truly transformative change in our food and farming systems? Using the Consensus on Food, Farming and…
In the last 20 years, in Andhra Pradesh, India, grassroots women in a secular movement of self-help groups are collectively transforming the food they grow, their families’ health, and increasing their income. They are the largest transition to agroecology in the world, simultaneously addressing rural livelihoods, nutritious food, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, climate change, water scarcity and pollution. Their True Cost Accounting measures social capital: collective action, trust and support, community cohesion (including confronting domestic…