Oxford Real Farming Conference 2025

About the Oxford Real Farming Conference

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Working with partners in the UK and internationally, the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) brings the real food and farming movement together every January.

An alternative farming conference

ORFC attracts farmers, growers, activists, policymakers and researchers from around the world who are interested in transforming our food system.

In 2009, the agricultural writer Graham Harvey invited Colin Tudge and Ruth West (founders of the Campaign for Real Farming) to help establish a new kind of farming conference. It was to bring together practising, mud-on-the-boots farmers and growers with scientists and economists, and activists and lawyers, and everyone else with a serious interest in food and agriculture. The idea was and is to ask the really big questions – like what kind of farming do we really need and why; but also to focus at least equally on the minutiae of practice – and to see who, right now, in the UK and the world at large, is truly farming  in ways that the world really needs, and others can emulate.

So in January 2010, the Oxford Real Farming Conference was launched as an alternative to the Oxford Farming Conference, which happens at the same time.

ORFC has always been the place to share progressive ideas. Subjects include agroecology, regenerative agriculture, organic farming and indigenous food and farming systems. The broad programme delves deep into farming practices and techniques as well as addressing the bigger questions relating to our food and farming system.

In 2021 and 2022, the conference went entirely online, but the physical gathering has traditionally been in Oxford. Now, we welcome 1,800 delegates to each January, when we take over Oxford City Centre.

Driven by the participants

Crucially, it has always been the participants who provide the ORFC programme. As always, the conference is programmed by you, brought together from hundreds of brilliant proposals we receive in response to our open Call for Submissions with the help of our programme partners. We’re committed to exploring the most urgent, innovative and illuminating topics this movement is interested in, and it is the diversity of participants and interests that keeps ORFC alive and growing.

Here are a few of the themes you’ll find in our programming at ORFC 2025:

FARM PRACTICE: There’ll be lots of great take-home advice, deep dives into the success and challenges of individual farms, and practical discussions on topics such as natural flood management, activating soil enzymes, pest control, and biodiversity and livestock. The farm practice strand is organised in collaboration with Soil Association and Pasture for Life,

FOOD AND FARM POLICY: For everyone impassioned by the politics of food and farming, we’ve selected a brilliant series of policy focused sessions with Sustain and the Soil Association. What are the practical political tools that can be used to achieve transformation? Come along to sessions looking at all facets of the just transition: from creative ways to fund it, to moving beyond intensive livestock; and for discussions on public farmland, pesticide policies, ecocide law, agri-misinformation in elections, ELMs, and more.

JUSTICE STRAND: The Justice Strand, hosted by Solidarity Across Land Trades (SALT), Shared Assets and Seeding Reparations, invites those from marginal perspectives to connect, share knowledge and empower each other. Sessions centre on equity, solidarity and collaboration and explore topics such as: land access, reparations, abolition, health justice, racial justice, queer liberation, neurodiversity, alternative economies, migration, workers’ rights and anti-oppression.

LANDWORKERS ALLIANCE AND LA VIA CAMPESINA: La Via Campesina (LVC) is a global grassroots ‘movement of movements’ representing over 200 million peasants, farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk and Indigenous people across 81 different countries. The Landworkers’ Alliance is a member organisation of LVC, and works to build the movement for agroecology and food sovereignty across all four nations of the UK. This year, the LWA x LVC programme will bring together landworkers, young people, trade unionists, and activists from the UK and internationally to explore what it means to be a social movement and why building a social movement is key to achieving agroecology.

LISTENING TO THE LAND: this strand explores what it means to have a more reciprocal relationship with Nature and how a heart-based approach to our work might support and progress the transformation of our food and farming system. Working with partners, the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) and Animate Earth, you will find various sessions seeded through the programme that explore traditional or indigenous knowledge systems, farming practices based on an intuitive relationship with the land to establish a more embodied connection to landscape.

YOUTH: In partnership with Emergent Generation, La Via Campesina, and FLAME, we’re hosting youth-oriented sessions across the conference this year. There will be space for youth movement collaboration, intergenerational discussions, art exhibitions, and relaxed networking. Later, there’ll be a relaxed roundtable on inspiring more youth to join activist movements, before an evening drinks where newcomers passionate about the politics and practice of food and farming will have a chance to meet movement leaders.

SOCIALS AND ENTERTAINMENT: We’ve got plenty of social opportunities – from landmatching lunchtime gatherings to evening socials for our LGBTQIA+ community, food and farming newcomers, and journalists. We’re excited to be hosting wonderful live music, poetry and storytelling performances in the evenings.

Free online tickets are available to all those in majority world countries – this is defined as anywhere outside Western Europe, the US, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

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