2010 - 2023

The ORFC is full of great initiatives demonstrating agroecology and nature-friendly farming in action. But at a national and global level, progress is still too slow and we need to understand why.

Join us in a conversation with three entrepreneurs working in food and farming and two funders exploring alternative financing models.

This workshop explores practical and embodied tools to explore social permaculture principles, reflecting on transitions, interconnections and empathy concepts in community practices, centred on progressive learning and co-development.

Many people are interested in deepening or enriching their own connection to land, place and the nonhuman as part of a wider rejection of extractivist, capitalist modes of being in the world. They seek more traditional forms of knowledge, which might involve some elements of ritual or ceremony. But how can this be achieved without appropriating yet again from other cultures?

The Emergent Generation is a new ecosystem of young regenerative thinkers and agroecological champions. It is facilitated by the FarmED team. In this session you will hear about our process of co-design, and the diverse range of outcomes, inspiring successes and lessons learnt from our three-day launch event held in September 2022.

On the one hand the agroecological farming movement petitions for transformation in the food and farming sector. Yet on the other hand, there is the sense that this can happen whilst we retain our familiar western mindsets and beliefs, our ways of knowing, feeling and communicating. Can we really have outer transformation without a parallel inner one?

Jumping Fences is a collaboration between the Ecological Land Cooperative, Land in Our Names and the Landworkers’ Alliance which seeks to understand and address the barriers to access to land for Black people and people of colour(BPOC) in agroecological farming in Britain. The research was published in December 2022, and this session is an opportunity to hear the findings from the project, and join a Q&A with a panel of farmers, researchers and activists ideating…

With the climate crisis and threats to food security and human health increasing by the day, meat and alternative proteins are now firmly in the spotlight. In the UK, policy change and increasing investments affecting livestock and plant-based alternatives are imminent, from support for a protein transition and regenerative livestock management, the commercialisation of lab-grown meat, to improvements to animal welfare legislation.

In this session, experts and activists promoting agroecology will share their experiences in advocating for public policies and initiatives that support these transitions from pesticide dependence to agroecology and initiatives that offer the opportunity to transform our food systems.