Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) has played a critical role in feeding local communities during the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic has highlighted the weaknesses and gaps in our global food production and distribution systems. In contrast, smaller more local farms and direct sales models are being celebrated as more resilient and veg box customer numbers soared in 2020.

Join this session to hear from CSA farmers in Europe and the global CSA movement Urgenci, about the…

The importance of local, fresh, seasonal, healthy, sustainable food has gathered momentum, stimulated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the need for food of high nutritional quality has yet to be widely recognised.

We are increasingly aware of the links between the heath of our soil and nutrient content of the food we produce. In this session, we will explore such questions as: Has the decline in soil fertility led to poor nutritional quality food? And…

ADVANCE REGISTRATION REQUIRED. LIMITED SPACES: 100 (Full)

Subtle but powerful, this workshop addresses the inevitable next big step in the evolution of sustainable agriculture. Grounded in the indigenous worldviews and experiences of farmers and food gathers over millennia, it explores how we can reclaim our co-creative relationship with nature through working with subtle energies in non-physical realms.

Julia Wright will chair this workshop and provide an introductory overview based on the forthcoming publication on this…

**Many apologies, this session has now been cancelled due to ill health.**

Richard Perkins is an innovative farmer, educator and the author of the widely acclaimed manual Regenerative Agriculture. He is also the co-owner of Ridgedale Farm in Sweden where he teaches farm-scale permaculture. His blogs have been viewed more than 9 million times and he has over 100,000 Youtube subscribers for his live trainings and online courses.

Richard spent 2020, talking with past students…

Being able to farm and to feed one’s family is fundamental to rebuilding the lives of rural people traumatised by conflict. For the physically disabled this was considered near impossible, but a new farming venture in Sierra Leone is changing that perception.

Already one of the world’s poorest countries, Sierra Leone was devastated by an eleven-year civil war in which tens of thousands of people died and many more thousands had limbs amputated. In 2014,…

Competition for land and water around the world is growing due to surging global demand for minerals and metals critical to transitions in the energy, industry and military sectors. Mining corporations and states are on a collision course with their own citizens, and with farming and fishing communities in particular.

In this session we will hear from community representatives on the frontlines of struggles in Finland, Colombia and Ireland to prevent mining from destroying…

A world of possibilities opens up when you forgo the hetero-normative binary. How can we transform agriculture and our food systems when we look at it through the lens of queer ecology and gender diversity? We’ll hear from food producers around the world who are challenging the heteronormative status quo, and, in doing so, are changing the way we think and interact with the natural world.

ADVANCE REGISTRATION REQUIRED. LIMITED SPACES: 500

Designing wine farming to mimic healthy ecosystems has created resilience to the vagaries of climate change, labour shortages and continuous increases in costs of production. Holistically designed vineyards function primarily off of solar energy by using adaptive grazing during any season. Soils remain covered throughout the year, tillage is eliminated, biodiversity and soil carbon can significantly increase while tractor use (fossil fuels), labor, water and fertility inputs can be…

In his talk, Tom Philpott will discuss his new book The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It, which argues that the US model of chemical-intensive, regionally concentrated agriculture is undermining the ecologies the two main places where it alights: the California Central Valley and the corn belt, centered around Iowa. He'll put the argument in a global context, explaining that the same set of transnational meat, grain-trading, and seed/pesticide companies…