There is no better way to start your farming year than at the Oxford Real Farming Conference. The event, held in the first week of this month, consisted of two inspiring and energising days of socialising and hearing from all sorts of speakers involved in the UK’s new agricultural renaissance.
The Oxford Real Farming Conference coincided with the famous Oxford Farming Conference and aimed to counterbalance the latter’s free market ethos and ‘sustainable intensification’ agenda.
The Oxford Real Farming Conference stands for Agro-ecology. To paraphrase the words of the conference founder Colin Tudge: the conference is about small-scale, mixed, skills-intensive, labour-intensive and low input. Basically organic farming. It is for people doing the complete opposite of the status quo. The new agricultural renaissance is about “building something better in situ and letting the status quo wither on the vine”.
With such revolutionary talk, the Real Farming Conference has become a real thorn in the site of the Oxford Farming Conference. This year was particularly satisfying in that more people attended ‘ours’ than the corporate sponsored event just down the road. What is particularly encouraging is that more and more people are going to both!
Due to the huge increase in numbers, the event was held in the historic Oxford Town Hall; the opening speech from Ruth West set the scene for the two days. She described the amazing breadth of activity going on across the UK and it was amazing to hear Manchester mentioned as a hot-bed of activity alongside Bristol, Brighton and Stroud.
The two days were structured around four broad themes:
- Farming outside the box - releasing the potential of your farm’s resources
- Digging deep - economics, science, politics as though farming matters
- New generation, new ideas - farmers as social entrepreneurs, issues of succession, on-farm opportunities for new entrants - share your ideas and experiences
- Nuts & Bolts: Additional Seminars and Technical Workshops - soil analysis, the science of GM, business planning and direct marketing - more in depth discussion
Kindling spoke at a session on supporting new entrants into farming. We talked about our FarmStart incubator farm project and helped to organise and facilitate a round table discussion with local and national NGOs on establishing more incubator farms.
Reflecting on an amazing two days on our train journey home, our conclusions was: next year we must take the whole of the Kindling team with us.
For more information about the Conference please visit: http://www.oxfordrealfarmingconference.org/
For a short film (featuring our Helen) about the conference see: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheORFC
Also here is an Ecologist article about the two conferences:
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2705020/a_tale_of_two_farming_conferences_the_future_is_real_and_organic.html