Next January the theme of the Oxford Real Farming Conference – the third in the annual series – will be: A CROSS-THE-BOARD RE-THINK.
Farmers, writers, diplomats and academics of many kinds will be asking the questions that really need to be addressed as humanity negotiates what perhaps are the choppiest waters that we have yet had to face. What would farming look like if it was really designed to feed people without wrecking the rest? Is the global, neoliberal economy really suited to such farming? What kind of governance is needed to ensure that good farming can thrive? Why don’t the people who frame farming strategy talk to farmers? How can we create a new generation of farmers, in an economy that seems intent on getting rid of them? On the technical front: what is the role of grazing, mixed farming, and all the rest? And how do we provide energy on farms?
For more details, check in to www.oxfordrealfarmingconference.org. And please hurry, because places are limited!
(Please, too, don’t confuse the Oxford Real Farming Conference with the established, Oxford Farming Conference, which is held at about the same time on the other side of the road. For in January 2012, as the economy worldwide sinks deeper into depression, and Europe’s most powerful leader warns of war if the European Union breaks up, and civil wars threaten in the Middle East, while a billion people (one in seven) are permanently hungry, and another billion are sick from eating too much, and a billion more (almost a third of all city-dwellers) live in urban slums, and half our fellow creatures are in danger of extinction, and the climate is changing radically in ways we cannot in detail predict, the overriding theme of the official 2012 Oxford Farming Conference is – power and competition!
The ORFC was in part conceived as the antidote to the OFC, and an antidote is certainly needed).
