Facilitators: Sara Moon, Samson Hart,  Edwin Brooks, Leonie Nimmo

Join this action-oriented workshop to explore how members of the UK agroecology movement can cultivate long-term solidarity with farmers and food producers in Palestine who face ongoing violence, murder, aggression and confiscation of their lands at the hands of Israeli occupying forces; a degree of devastation which UN human rights experts have amounted to a genocide. The workshop will begin with pre-recorded messages from farmers bringing in the 2024 olive harvest, followed by an introduction to the LWA Palestine Solidarity Twinning Project (a collaboration with the Palestinian Union of Agricultural Workers’ Committees), and a facilitated discussion to explore what we can do on a personal, farm, and movement wide level to offer meaningful solidarity and support to land-based communities in Palestine.

ORFC 2025 Workshop: Cultivating Long term Solidarity with Farmers in Palestine

Facilitators: Shama Khanna, Rae Hippolyte, Idman Abdurahaman

A soft space for conversations about working towards liberation through tending the land. Recovering a more reciprocal relationship to the land through farming and gardening can be nourishing on many levels. But what is needed to make all experiences working the land a liberatory act? Can flowers liberate as much as food? This session is inspired by new farms and growing projects emerging from urban centres, which take an inclusive, intersectional approach, prioritising meeting each other’s needs, alongside the needs of plants and the land. This session is a dreaming space for what liberation on the land looks like and how we can get there.

ORFC2025 Workshop Where Liberatory Gardens And Farming Meet

Speakers: Rufus Pawsey, Mark Lea, Steven McAllister, Catherine Howarth

Chair: Andrew Trump

Over the last few years, a collection of stakeholders in the organic grain sector have collaborated to run onfarm 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 and data collection. The community approach is paramount, and also shows larger scale grain supply chains can be hugely beneficial, not least in providing healthy, affordable food. This is an innovative model that others could follow.

ORFC2025 Grain Supply Chain Collaboration Through On - Farm Research

Speakers: Lindsay Whistance
Chair: Matt Smee

The practice of making tree hay predates the making of hay from herb and flower rich meadows and has been used for over three millenia. In Europe and modern farming landscapes the practice has fallen out of favour, however the fodder can provide a vital source of feed and nutrients, add resilience to farm systems and provide a supplementary feed source. Join us for this session to learn all about the benefits, challenges and considerations related to the process of adopting tree fodder on farms.

ORFC2025 Tree Fodder — What, Why And How

Speakers: Nic Renison, Johnnie Balfour, Chris Clark

Chair: Barnaby Coupe

More and more farmers are discovering that farming with nature can not only help restore lost wildlife and habitats but can also help farms to become more environmentally sustainable, more resilient to unbudgeted events, and more profitable. The path to this better future is encapsulated in the concept of maximum sustainable output (MSO). The principles behind MSO have been set out in Less is More published by the RSPB et al, Farming at The Sweet Spot published by The Wildlife Trusts and Nature Friendly Farming, and the latest 5M Books publication The Profitable Farm — Balancing Business, Nature and Energy through MSO.

ORFC2025 The Future For Sustainable Farming — Maximum Sustainable Output

Speakers: Steph Ackrill, Ian Boyd, Matt Lobley

Chair: Russ Carrington

Imagine a farming world where family succession is easily discussed and talked about without emotion or taboo, and where business control and management responsibilities smoothly transition from one generation to the next. Unfortunately today succession in family farming businesses is one of the biggest barriers to progress. It is also a major source of poor mental health, anxiety and stress — so much so that it causes some businesses, or the people that run them, to cease, collapse or go bankrupt. Come and hear more about this topic and how one family has been successfully tackling succession head-on.

ORFC2025 Managing Succession In A Multi-Generational Family Farming Business

Speakers: Jonty Brunyee, Andrew Court, Pat Thomas

Chair: Lisa Morgans

Right now, policymakers are deciding whether cultured meat could help the UK meet our climate targets. But what would it mean for UK farmers? Competing on price and further consolidation of power and profit? Or could it mean new markets or earning a premium for ‘the real stuff’? Before decisions are made that will have far-reaching impacts on our food system, it is time to join the debate. In this session, hear from farmers who took part in a two-year study modelling a future with cultured meat, and then have your say.

ORFC2025 Cultured Meat: Gamechanger Disruption Or Just Hot Air?

Speakers: Marianne Landzettel, Amy Quirk, Megan Perry

The decreasing number of small abattoirs negatively impacts animal welfare and reduces opportunities for direct marketing. This session gives an update on the current situation. Marianne Landzettel’s book, The Sustainable Meat Challenge — How to graze cattle, slaughter humanely and stay profitable, shows solutions from the EU and the US: from farmer owned small abattoirs and on-farm slaughter to slaughter boxes and new ways of value adding through processing and branding. The presenters are working to develop a prototype small sheep mobile slaughter unit in the UK (similar to a US model), which would benefit in particular upland and hill farmers.

ORFC2025 Sustainable Meat: Minimise Transport, Slaughter Humanely, Stay Profitable

Speakers: Tom Pearson, Kelly Parsons, Sarah Williams, Tim Lang 

Chair: Rebecca Wells

This panel explores how different aspects of food resilience — usually considered in isolation — can be connected. Farmers are natural experts in embedding resilient approaches on-farm. Food resilience is rising up national and local government agendas, in the face of food supply shocks and stresses. Those ultimately impacted — the public — rarely feature in discussions.

What lessons from farm risk management and diversification could help inform approaches to embedding resilience? How can we ensure farmers and citizens are better represented in food resilience policy? How can farmers support their local citizens to improve their own resilience?

ORFC2025 Improving Food Resilience Connecting Farmers, Government And Citizens

Speakers: Francis Rayns, Audrey Litterick, Emma Restorick, Sebastian Kipp 

Chair: Mary Dimambro

We remain reliant on peat in horticulture despite the urgency to transition away from its use. Whilst some crops are now commonly sown into peat-free modules, many seedlings are grown in blocks that contain a large proportion of peat. This session will showcase the effort that is being made at multiple scales to remove peat from seedling blocks. It is vital that we keep driving progress towards removing peat from our growing systems and this session will provide a platform for constructive discussion and further collaboration.

ORFC2025 Progress Towards A Peat- Free Horticultural System

Speakers: Iain Tolhurst, Richard Gantlett, Dominic Amos

Chair: Mark Measures

Ploughing and cultivations are coming under increasing criticism, and yet field-scale organic and agroecological farmers are dependent on tillage for crop establishment and nutrient supply, weed control and crop yield. Research shows that far from being damaging, cultivation and plough-based organic systems can maintain or increase soil organic matter levels, ensure good soil structure and increase biological activity. No-till methods have not proved to be commercially viable in the UK. We will hear from farmers and growers, look at the science and discuss best cultivation practice.

ORFC2025 The Role Of Tillage: Science And Best Practice

Speaker: Sonia Lee

Learn from fully-replicated no-till field trials at Newcastle University and East Durham College. Vegetables were grown in mulched cover crops (crimp rolled or mowed) or transferred mulches of silage or compost and compared with tillage-based controls. The trials include different scales, using both 4-wheel and 2-wheel tractors. Differences in yield and weed pressure have been marked, and monitoring investigates underlying causes, including weeds, soil moisture, earthworms, soil penetration resistance, and the release of nutrients from mulching materials. Some of the no-till treatments show great promise with minimal weeding and higher yields than the tillage-based controls.

ORFC2025 Research In No-Till Vegetable Production

Speaker: Mark Lea

Chair: Matt Smee

Living mulches offer an alternative approach for growing arable crops, with research showing the practice can improve nitrogen availability, reduce runoff, increase biodiversity, promote soil health and improve ecosystem services. However, adopting the practice comes with many challenges and considerations. Join this deep dive session to hear from Mark Lea of Green Acres Farm as he looks back at four years of living mulches work on his farm in Shropshire. Hear about the challenges Mark has faced, the key practical considerations needed to adopt this approach and understand the findings from field research.

ORFC2025 Living With Living Mulches

Speakers: Andy Dibben, Ben Raskin

Chair: Harriet Bell

This session will explore how to intelligently integrate trees into horticultural crops. Both speakers have designed, established and managed agroforestry systems and have extensive experience in commercial horticultural crop production. This session will cover the benefits of trees for horticultural crops, potential crops from trees, system design options, planting, early tree establishment, tree protection, tree understory, cropping tree crops and potential negative impacts of trees on horticultural crops. It will also look at the very important role trees play in reversing biodiversity decline and in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

ORFC2025 Silvohorticulture — Integrating Trees Into Vegetable Growing Systems

Speakers: David Carruth, Annie Rayner, Clare Hill

Chair: Lindsay Duncan

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, regenerating the land, and creating new income streams, without necessarily requiring large capital investment.

ORFC2025 Low-Cost Interventions To Benefit Animals, Environment, And Farmers

Speakers: Jo Kamal, Pauline Shakespeare

Chair: Nicola Scott

This panel will focus on learnings from Stir to Action’s project, Pathways to Land: Exploring financing for BPOC farmers to gain land security in England. Our panel will include project partners as well as project participants. It will draw upon ideas and perspectives from BPOC landworkers and community food organisers about the barriers to accessing land and finance for farming they have faced. It will also explore tangible steps that emerged from our two forums with them, funders, and farming specialists, about what can be done to facilitate greater land security for BPOC landworkers.

ORFC2025 Learnings From Pathways To Land For BPOC

Speakers: Adam Payne, Dee Butterly, Helen Graham, Franco Fubini 
Chair: Clementine Hain-Cole

This workshop will provide food citizens with the space and opportunity to discuss and determine practical ways in which kitchens and farms can work together more closely to drive food system change. Drawing on the experience of our farmer, supply chain and chef panellists as well as the participants, we will engage in the collaborative creation of a toolkit that proposes practical solutions to enable wider access to agroecologically grown produce.

ORFC2025 WORKSHOP Farms And Kitchens — Forging Connections Between Food Citizenship Hubs

Facilitators: Daniel Tyrkiel, Adam Swan

Double the nitrogen in the starting straw with this simple static composting strategy. We’ll teach you how to capture atmospheric nitrogen in ambient conditions using wheat or barley straw with naturally occurring nitrogen-fixing bacteria. By stacking several bales on each other, ideal conditions for cellulose decomposition and feeding of nitrogen-fixing bacteria are created. The result is a low cost method for increasing the supply of nitrogen on-farm. This method can provide a minimum of 20% of all nitrogen necessary for an intensive wheat crop.

ORFC2025 WORKSHOP Increase Nitrogen On Farm With Straw-Only Compost

Facilitators: Roisin Taylor, Olivia Wilson, Zanna Hoskins, Hannah Lamb, Calixta Killander

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 to the farm of an expanded customer base, as well as providing top tips on how to make growing flowers work for you.

ORFC2025 WORKSHOP Adding Flowers To Your Farm: Increasing Profits And Pollinators

Facilitators: Chantal Wei-Ying Clément, Pat Thomas, Ayms Mason, Lawrence Woodward, Saskia Colombant, Robbie Blake, Inès Tielas da Silva

Join IPES-Food and A Bigger Conversation for an interactive workshop exploring technological innovation in agroecology. This is an opportunity to help reframe and reclaim the innovation narrative, redefining technology in service of dignity, justice and resilience in food systems. Through small group discussions we will explore the elements of innovations that support diverse, sustainable production systems. We will collectively discuss real-world examples to understand tech and innovation, reflecting on benefits and trade-offs of various approaches and exploring ways to empower communities in shaping innovation pathways. Come ready to participate actively and share your insights!

ORFC2025 WORKSHOP Beyond The Tech Divide: Rethinking Innovation For Agroecology

Speakers: Manchán Magan, Angharad Wynne, Hop, Eddie Rixon 

Chair: Rachel Fleming

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 abandoning them and the ways in which we might recover them for contemporary times.

ORFC2025 Rituals For The Land

Facilitators: Julian Ellerby, George Simons, Eddie Rixon, Emma Gardner, Heather Knight

The Roots and Rhythms project at Lopemede Farm, in collaboration with multi-generational farmer Eddie Rixon, focused on restoring biodiversity and creating opportunities for deeper nature connection. Through life-centred practices, the project supported a shift from egocentric to ecocentric ways of working and being. This workshop invites you to experience one of these practices: the Interspecies Council. Inspired by Joanna Macy’s work, the session cultivates empathy for the living beings and systems that share our landscapes, encouraging a more-than human perspective to guide future land stewardship.

ORFC2025 WORKSHOP Interspecies Council Life-Centred Practice For Land Stewardship

Speakers: Miranda Geelhoed, Agnes Rennie, Rosemary Champion, Jamie McIntyre

Chair: Donna Smith

Crofting holds great potential to increase access to land at a time of overheating land markets. Historically, crofting was introduced to keep families on the land from which they had previously been cleared. These days, more than ever, we need people taking stewardship over the land collaboratively, in ways mutually beneficial for human communities and nature. Creating new crofts can facilitate exactly this. In principle, nothing prevents us from establishing thousands of new crofts across Scotland. The panel builds on previous ORFC events on crofting and explores the possibilities as well as the political and legal stumbling blocks along the way.

ORFC2025 Creating New Crofts: A Pathway Towards Land Justice

Speakers: Mathias Van Steenbergen, Walter Pirri, Esther Hoedemakers 

Chair: Cid Van Veerdegem

The Food Hub is a Belgian cooperative wholesaler that works with small-scale, organic producers from Southern Europe. They are a multi-stakeholder coop, so both suppliers (farmers) and customers (shops) are shareholders. In a traditional model, those two have conflicting interests, but The Food Hub have facilitated a model to divide profits by working with a ristorno policy: this shares profits based on the associate’s transactions with the cooperative. But how do you create a fair division between the different shareholders? This promises to be an interesting discussion!

ORFC2025 How To Divide Profit In A MultiStakeholder Cooperative

Speakers: John Seed, Rhodri LloydWilliams, Rachel Phillips,  Hannah Blitzer

Chair: David McKay

Across the UK, farmers, growers and crofters are navigating an increasingly challenging environment, with complex and often conflicting demands on land use - from food production to wildlife restoration, climate adaptation, and more. A ‘whole farm approach’ is often recommended to help maximise the multifunctionality of agricultural land, but what does that look like on-farm, and how can it be better supported by agricultural policy? In this session, we identify key characteristics of whole farm planning, hear from farmers who have started putting this approach into practice, and explore how policymakers across the devolved nations could support more farms to follow suit.

ORFC2025 Systems Thinking: Exploring The Benefits And Barriers To Whole Farm Approaches

Speakers: Julia Kirby-Smith, Holly Purdey, Jimmy Woodrow

Chair: Sarah Wakefield

In order to achieve our multiple health, environmental and animal welfare goals we need to think differently about the amount of meat and dairy that we consume and produce. But there are many real and perceived barriers to achieving this, and many questions about how we can overcome them. Join the Eating Better alliance for a stimulating discussion answering your questions on what ‘less and better’ means for farming. We’ll explore how to make dietary change possible, and discuss the pivotal role that ‘less and better’ meat production, alongside increased plant consumption and production, has in reshaping the food system.

ORFC2025 Better Meat, More Plants: Opportunities For Farmers

Facilitators: Vicki Hird, Tammy Smalley, Lucia Monje-Jelfs, Laura Stratford, Julien Etienne, Robert Caudwell

Lowland carbon peat soils are precious — from storing vast amounts of carbon to being a key wildlife, food and hydrological resource. Yet they are severely degraded, leading to soil and nature loss and greenhouse gas emissions. This is partly due to major horticulture, arable and livestock production which needs to change or move elsewhere. This session is led by the Wildlife Trusts, Soil Association, and Greater Lincolnshire Food Partnership. A panel of practitioners and experts who work with local growers will initiate a group discussion on key issues, and on how local dialogues, issues of place, and livelihoods matter. Small groups will then work on lowland peat production and solutions to discuss in a final wrap-up.

ORFC2025 WORKSHOP Creating Solutions For Farming On Lowland Peat

Speakers: Mark Walton, Henri Greig, Charlotte Molyneux

Chair: Sarah Williams

The session will look at local powers and levers driving the adoption of agroecological practices and the role of food partnerships in this context. The session will offer participants an overview of the role that local authorities can play to support the agricultural sector including examples from Devon County Council, farmers, policy experts and food partnerships. This is a workshop-style session where there will be opportunities to exchange ideas, ask questions and contribute to a discussion as to how local powers could further support the sector.

ORFC2025 WORKSHOP Local Powers And Levers Driving Agroecology

Facilitators: Boglárka Bozsogi, Giacomo Ranalli

This workshop facilitated by Emergent Generation aims to connect food and farming youth movements in the UK and Europe promoting agroecology. We invite youth under 35 engaged in food and farming action to map our activities, identify synergies, pinpoint gaps, and find opportunities to collaborate — turning ideas into action, setting plans in motion. Whether you are a representative of an organisation or simply curious, this is a space for young people to discuss the challenges and rewards of network building, explore ways to achieve greater impact and reach, voice our needs, and connect with others on a regenerative journey.

ORFC2025 WORKSHOP Agroecological Youth Movements — Let's Connect!

Hosted by Sustain, Emergent Generation, Soil Association and Roots to Work

This session aims to provide an informal, inclusive, and engaging networking opportunity for anyone who is passionate about — or curious about — the politics and practice of food and farming. The event is aimed at fostering intergenerational cohesion by welcoming those newer to the movement and those established in it. Come along to meet new people, share ideas and opportunities, and build new connections. Please note that this event is in the café on the second floor of the Cheng Building, you will need to take the lift or stairs up.

ORFC2025 WORKSHOP Intergenerational Learning And Campaigning On Genetic Modification

Speakers: Shinya Imahashi, Matthew Adams, Jana Rock

Chair: Ben Raskin

This panel will explore how we can recognize and nurture the innate life force in seed, soil and plants to advance human and planetary health. Panellists will provide perspectives on how growing practices and the consciousness of the farmer can lead to greater resilience, nutrition, and flavour in food. The panel will discuss ways to assess nutrient density, the importance of food vitality and community engagement, and how our relationship with nature nurtures mind, body and spirit.

ORFC2025 Nurturing The Life Force In Seed, Soil And Plants

Speakers: George Bennett, Steven Sidhu

Building a retail offer around customer choice needn’t be at the expense of farmer’s time, effort and leftover stock. George Bennett shares his experience at Sandy Lane Farm of switching from fixed contents to customer-controlled customisations of veg boxes using lean principles to increase sales while reducing admin, customer support, packing and delivering time and leftover stock. Steven Sidhu, Founder and CEO of Growing Good Technology shares how they are helping unlock the full potential of local veg box retail with a deep dive into the data.

ORFC2025 A New Horizon For The Humble Veg Box

NB Recording incomplete

Facilitators: Ali Taherzadeh, Christabel Buchanan

This is the second part of this movement strategy series which will bring together those working and organising in the movement for land and food justice in the UK, to explore how we can work better together to achieve the changes we want to see. We will look at practical ways that we can work more effectively together as a movement; develop a shared understanding of power and representation within the movement; find strength in diversity, and overcome barriers to working together by developing a plan for a shared strategy.

Oxford Real Farming Conference

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