ORFC16 Roundup
This year, I attended the 16th annual Oxford Real Farming Conference on 9th and 10th January. In this blog, I’ll share some of the insights gleaned from several of the sessions I went to - there were so many more I wanted to hear and participate in - but so large is this conference it is impossible to do all the things. Some of the sessions were recorded so it’s worth keeping an eye on the ORFC channels for those.
PANEL: Ritual and relationship with the land
“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 still available to us, looking at the consequences of abandoning them, and looking at the ways in which we might recover them for contemporary times”
- ORFC Conference Guidebook
Rachel Fleming chaired this panel with Manchán Magan, Angharad Wynne, Hop, and Eddie Rixon in which the speakers talked of the human need to come together, to connect with each other, with the seasons, with the plants and animals, with the land. One of the things I took away from this session was some of their ideas for ways to bring back / create anew rituals with the land:
Have a regular sit spot outside near where you live
Notice the mushrooms, plants, animals around you
Make tea from what is growing on the land (make sure you know the plants you are eating)
Make offerings to the land - tea / oats - and scatter them to thank the land for all it offers
Daily, phone-free, walks
Keep rhythm with the seasons
Practice wassails, harvest festivals, samhain fires (like in the photo of the wassail I attended this last weekend in mid-Wales thank by my friend Jenny Norris).
PANEL: Transforming Land Relations: The key to agroecological change
“Land and property relations determine who lives where, who produces what, and who benefits from land use, with major ecological and social consequences. The food movement desires transformation - this requires deep change in land relations. But the way property is currently organised in the UK makes this extremely difficult. Private and corporate owners hold vast (and growing) amounts of power over land use; while many aspiring and existing agroecological farmers and urban consumers are united by their landlessness. This session explains why revolutionising land relations is necessary, and provides some ideas for ways forward.”
- ORFC Conference Guidebook
In this session, chaired by Bonnie VandeSteeg, Olivia Oldham-Dorrington, Alex Heffron and Elise Wach spoke to the damage done by private property ownership.
I really valued Olivia’s sharing about some of the key features of private property, which she had taken from this book - The Colonial Lives of Property, by Brenna Bhandar.
The features she shared were:
Alienability - the right to sell land to someone else
Exclusion - the right to keep others off the land you own
Unilateral authority - the right of the owner to do whatever they want with the land they own
She also shared insights from this book which details how systems of private property have transformed the world / view the world in two spaces: civilised and untamed/wild - terms which are heavily racialised. This form of ownership is based on a genocidal logic of domination and violence to root out anyone who does not conform to its principles - something we are seeing play out in real time in Palestine right now.
PANEL: What does an anti-fascist farming movement look like?
“The recent wave of farming protests that have swept parts of Europe have shown clearly how the discontents of a segment of farmers are increasingly expressed within a reactionary, right-wing rhetoric. At the same time, both white supremacist violence against migrant, racialised, and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, and state repression against popular protest, dissent and solidarity are escalating. How can those of us who want to develop an alternative to the imperialist, exploitative food system ensure that our movements remain clearly aligned against reactionary, nationalist and eco-fascist tendencies? What does a progressive, left-wing, explicitly anti-fascist farming politics look like?”
- ORFC Conference Handbook
In this panel, chaired by Sophia Doyle, Alex Heffron, Tom Wakeford and Sagari R Ramdas the roots of fascism in the organic movement were shared - drawing on a recent pamphlet published by Seeding Reparations called Organicism and Fascism in the UK. The links between Brexit, austerity and the populist speech of the far-right were made - 75% of farmers voted for the Tories or Reform in the last UK election.
Hearing from Sagari about the Indian Farmers Movement offered a different perspective however. In India mainstream farmers, medium scale and small scale farmers were challenging the fascism of the Indian government. It is the movement leading the struggle against the state. She pointed to the silence of the agroecological movement in India against the government - and the risk of focusing too much on looking at how to regenerate the soil without considering wider questions of land ownership, systems of patriarchy, and in India the caste system.
WORKSHOP: Reparations - Learning from examples existing within modernity
“Meaningful reparations are not simply about redistributing wealth within the same system but about dismantling that system entirely. They involve repairing the profound social and ecological harm caused by European colonialism and its aftermath, and co-creating systems rooted in justice, liberation, and care.”
- ORFC Conference Handbook
This session is drawing on conversations which have been slowing building momentum at ORFC on the subject of reparations, including a panel (pictured right) on land as reparations from ORFC 2024.
Facilitated by Sautabh Arora and Andre Kpodonu, this workshop at ORFC in 2025, started to invite ideas for how repair and reparative justice might be enacted. Participants were invited to consider two questions:
What does reparative practice mean to you?
What practices of repair exist or could be imagined?
WORKSHOP: Movement-wide strategy - Working together to change the food and land system
“This movement strategy series…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 explore what draws people to this movement and identify our common vision; explore what it might look like to have a movement-wide strategy.”
- ORFC Conference Handbook
In this interactive workshop, led by Ali Taherzadeh and Christabel Buchanan, participants were invited to think about social movements as ecology - where we have different roles and yet by collaborating together, working through conflict and power dynamics, we might transform the land and food system.
Take aways
Stimulating and important conversations: A big theme coming out of this years conference for me was how do we build solidarity across difference, repair harms, work through conflicts and deepen our connection to each other and the land / non-human / more than human?
Time with comrades and friends: I found that some of my best moments at the conference were in cafes, pubs and the walks in between sessions. The sessions were all interesting and yet it was the time with friends and comrades, tending relationships, catching up, making plans that felt the most energising. With such a full programme of content it is hard to make enough space for this very valuable part of the conference - more time for connection please!
Integrating the edges: This time, I didn’t have a formal role at ORFC - I wasn’t volunteering, or facilitating a session. And it gave me a bit of a taste of being a new participant. It was quite challenging to find a place for myself in the waves of the conference and I wonder if more might be done to integrate those on the edges of the conference - maybe those not with a team, those who don’t already know a lot of people - to find access points to join in and feel a part of the wider movements present.
A movement wheel of the year: ORFC is often a highlight of the year for me - so many rich conversations and a chance to connect with people from across the country and in different parts of the movement. It would be amazing to have more than one touch point a year for the movement to gather… the Land Skills Fair (organised by the LWA) and the Land Justice Gatherings (coordinated by Shared Assets and co) have been good additional markers - where else can we gather, connect, share ideas, make plans together and reflect / feel into what is going on in our movements and the wider struggles of which we are a part?
