The Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) was started in 2010 by Colin Tudge and Ruth West (founders of the Campaign for Real Farming) and agricultural writer, Graham Harvey, to highlight the alternatives to conventional farming and to offer all farmers a different kind of farming conference.
It has developed over the last twelve years to become the unofficial gathering of the agroecological farming movement in the UK, including organic and regenerative farming, bringing together practising farmers and growers with scientists and economists, activists and policy-makers in a two-day event every January. Working with partners, the conference offers a broad programme that delves deep into farming practices and techniques as well addressing the bigger questions relating to our food and farming system.
Its radical and inclusive programme is suggested and developed by its delegates and is the result of a call for submissions that goes out in July each year with a deadline of mid-September. The scope of the call for sessions is broad and includes ideas and proposals which consider farm practice, policy developments, food sovereignty, climate justice, biodiversity, animal welfare, access to land, racial inequity in the food system, spiritual and ethical questions, knowledge sharing and communications. The selection of the proposals takes into account the ORFC’s guiding principles, which can be seen here.
Over the years, the conference has attracted many well-known speakers from the UK and further afield. These have included the then UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter; US activist and farmer, Leah Penniman; co-founder of Le Ferme du Bec Hellouin, Perrine Herve-Gruyer; pioneering organic farmer Eliot Coleman; regenerative agriculture expert, Richard Perkins; and journalist and author, George Monbiot. These keynotes sit alongside hands-on workshops which address practical subjects such as agroforestry, heritage wheat or silvopasture, as well as social and networking events.
The conference’s 1,400 tickets sell out very quickly every year. The two-day tickets generally go on sale in October and are around £75.00 for farmers and £95.00 for non-farmers. In 2021, as a result of COVID-19, ORFC hosted an online, global event with more than 5,200 delegates and speakers from six continents. In 2022, ORFC will host its first fully hybrid event in-person in Oxford and online.
Statement from ORFC Founder, Ruth West:
“The point of ORFC is not to attack the status quo but to look ahead: to ask what the world really needs, and what’s possible, and to show what really can be done. Always on the agenda, or thereabouts, is the dream of Agrarian Renaissance: to restore agriculture and all that goes with it to its proper place at the heart of the economy, and indeed of all our lives. Agriculture at present, and farmers, are marginalised. The thing that matters most for humankind is low on the global agenda.
From the outset, ORFC had a buzz. Farmers and scientists and activists and others came together in support of real farming and new relationships and initiatives were formed. Crucially, it has always been the participants who provide the programme and the sessions reflect their diversity, ranging from the intricacies of soil microbiology to new kinds of marketing, setting up a micro-dairy to the value of introducing mob grazing and agroforestry to the farm; from the joys and tribulations of crofting to the kind of economic structure we need to support the kind of farming and marketing that we need. It also considered the underlying morality of farming and the overwhelming need for an enlightened land policy. It is this diversity of participants and interests and concerns that we believe keeps ORFC alive and growing.”