Farming & Environment

What does our post-carbon, post urban, post-industrial future look like and how do we get there in ways that allow the current and future generations of life on this planet to flourish?

How can we feed ourselves while re-establishing our connections to the web of life? In a world where global food systems are extractive and destructive, how can we regenerate our land?

The Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) is one of the highlights of the regenerative farming year. Running from 4th – 6th January, this year sees a return to the in-person conference as well as a continuous rolling on-line programme. As part of the lead in, Accidental Gods was honoured to speak with Satish Kumar, one of the god-fathers of the regenerative, redistributive movement.

At our deepest level, we know meat is murder. We are human because for most of our evolutionary history, we have eaten meat and held this tension in ways that gave thanks and treated animals as relations. But in the past decades, we have created hells on earth in our industrialised farming and abattoirs so that eating from them is no longer remotely ethical. How do we resolve the paradox?

What happens when you follow your dreams of living on the land, in connection to the seasons, to life and death, to the more-than-human world? How does it feel to follow your heart and see what truly makes it sing – and to do it in connection to the land that called to you?

BioChar, plant-dyed wool, rare breed sheep and cattle, veg boxes, and a commercial kitchen: all part of building a local regenerative, circular economy providing affordable food to local people. And it happened in the past six months.

What is agro-forestry and how does it differ from Silvo-pasture or Agro-ecology? And when we’ve sorted that out, how is it that trees can become an integral part of our farming landscape, so that we can feed ourselves, while increasing the life, resilience and vibrancy of the soil? With Ben Raskin of Head of Horticulture and Forestry at the Soil Association.

How do we weave together the four pillars of people, landscape, economy – and spirit – into a working system that allows farmers and landowners to work with the land to grow the food humanity needs, while healing the broken earth? With Caroline Grindod of Roots of Nature, a regenerative agriculture consultancy that works on all scales at all levels from single small farms to large scale multinationals.

The Holocene is over, we all know this. The Anthropocene may segue into the Symbiocene, with the opportunity to experience the surprising abundance of the world, but only if we work at it. Joe Brewer, bioregionalist and earth regenerator, offers a rawly honest evaluation of where we are, and where we could go.

How can we improve our health, reduce the costs to the NHS by 50%, restore soil biodiversity, reduce flooding, reverse ecosystem decline and draw carbon down from the atmosphere into the earth’s crust? Regenerative Farming does all of these and more – and Patrick Holden, Founding Director and Chief Executive of the Sustainable Food Trust is at the heart of a movement to spread the word around the world.