reblogged from Ben Eagle’s excellent Thinking Country blog. Ben interviewed a few of us at the Oxford Real Farming Conference.
Around 800 people descended on Oxford Town Hall yesterday morning to attend the 9th Oxford Real Farming Conference. This is my third time attending the event, but it feels just as exciting and in many ways just as groundbreaking as my first a few years ago. This year the ORFC is focusing on four distinct strands:
- Farm Practice
- Growing and Supporting
- Food Sovereignty
- The Big Ideas
Particular congratulations and thanks must go to the conference organisers who have yet again provided delegates with a packed programme of sessions, with topics ranging from growing heritage cereals to valuing sustainability, animal welfare to permaculture and biodiversity to micro-dairying. An entire room is dedicated to Brexit and this year is also the first time that a Secretary of State for Defra has been invited to attend the conference, yet another milestone achieved for the ORFC.
credit: © Hugh Warwick
Yesterday, Michael Gove took…
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a new nature blog 
Interesting times. Spot on about public goods that can’t be quantified.
On the ‘public money for public goods’ debate, we must not lose sight of the amount of funding that is required to turn farming around for nature: it is significantly higher than the RDPE currently allows, and the complexity of the schemes significantly depresses take-up of schemes at the moment. These should not be seen as indicators of likely demand under a new system.
thanks Lisa and happy new year.