Oliver Moore

Among other things, the Oxford Real Farming Conference shows that there’s more to the movement than mere conventionalisation. The movement is doubling down—it’s attempting to deepen its understanding of the world. And there’s no time like the present for that.

Farmers, following a bodhrán deftly drummed by Talamh Beo’s Fergal Anderson, brought themselves and their produce from their farms, telling a little of their stories of who they are, what they do, and how they do it. They stood front and centre, and it centred us too.

Community owned farms may not be able to answer every question posed by a dysfunctional agri-food system, but they can offer insights and realistic alternatives to many of them.

So what’s needed, and what can be done to help embed and amplify agroecological local food provisioning by communities, for communities? 

Feeding ourselves is a lot of things – it’s a network, it’s an event, it’s movement building – and it’s growing. First with CSAs, then agroecologists, then local food proponents, then those with wider food justice concerns, then environmentalists and ruralists, and now also conventional farmers from the region – in all their way, with their own diversities.

A recent rural resilience gathering in the Loire-Atlantique, France saw farmers, cooks, elected officials, analysts, rural activists, volunteers and others drawn from the local and European agroecology and rural resilience movements, meet to work on the future of the socio-ecological transition.