Food & Water featured

There are simpler, healthier paths we can take. With instability in more than our climate systems, it is time to examine where we live, where we draw the line.

We are putting the concepts mentioned into action, experimenting to see if new scales and ecosystems are possible. This creates hyper-local, context-led action held gently by a wide boundary systems view and strongly held duties of care. We cannot wait to start producing our own tangible, hold-in-your-hand, outputs.

When farmers, researchers, designers and policymakers work together, farms and bio districts can become true laboratories of resilience – capable of regenerating ecosystems while shaping fairer and more adaptive governance models.

Keep records. Learn the new patterns — if there are any. Because the challenge we will be facing for decades to come is a seeming lack of pattern, and we humans don’t do well in random time.

Some thirty years ago, one of the organic pioneers, Carl Haest, said about sustainable agriculture, “friend in the field, foe in the market”. That seems to hold also for regenerative agriculture.

Shane has been busy with the next generation on and off the farm too, visiting schools with a herd of Old Irish Goats. Once a common sight in the Irish countryside, this rare native breed is helping to revive a cultural heritage that has lessons to teach us today, on biodiversity, wildfire management, and the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next.

Why water scarcity is not a climatic inevitability, and how nature-based solutions can rebuild life in landscapes under stress.

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.

Unfortunately, the extremely simplistic narrative that plants are good and animals are bad has been given far too much prominence in the public debate. For sure, industrial livestock production has a number of serious flaws, but so does industrial crop production.