ORFC 2025 reflections
The Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) brings together farmers, land workers, activists, researchers and others working to (re)birth an agroecological food system. The conference takes place in the opening days of the year, perfectly situated for contemplation and inspiration. I was fortunate to attend for a second time this year, and I’d like to share some reflections from the event.
In a moving opening plenary, six farmers and advocates each offered a word that best reflected their hopes for ORFC 2025: solidarity, sovereignty, love, inclusion, wisdom and resistance. One of these speakers, Dee Woods, ‘food action-ist, Afroecologist and earth wisdom keeper’, also implored us to channel the old Ghanaian proverb, ‘Sankofa’. She loosely translated this as ‘reach back and get it’ or ‘learning from the wisdom of the past whilst making something new’. This idea rattled around my head the rest of the conference, as it shares important parallels with an approach to food innovation that Josh has written about and that he and I have been trying to articulate further in a forthcoming paper. A timely (and meta) reminder that people much wiser than ourselves have long held similar ideas.
Numerous examples throughout the packed ORFC programme testified to the innovative spirit of agroecology. I’d like to share reflections on four talks I attended that stood out to me, as I continue to explore how to tie our food innovation research programme more explicitly to land use and agroecology.
The first talk I attended was called ‘Re-rooting agroecology as a social movement’. Here speakers discussed the history of agroecology and persuasively argued why it must remain a social movement and not be ‘co-opted’ or watered down. This thoroughly resonated, whilst adding to my recent ruminations on what might be at stake in trying to tie our food innovation research more closely to agroecology and land. What is the role of universities and other research institutions in bringing about transformative agroecology? How could we do so with integrity in a research environment where some colleagues seek to decouple food production from land use entirely? At the same time, I was also reminded of the words of Andy Dibben, head grower at Abbey Home Farm and one of the speakers in the opening plenary, who urged for solidarity and to consider a wide toolbox of solutions for agroecology. Perhaps food innovation, conducted with agroecological principles in mind, could be part of that toolbox, rather than a force of co-option. In an upcoming essay, I hope to wrestle with these ideas some more.
Later I joined a thought-provoking session called ‘Cultured meat - gamechanger? Disruption? Or just hot air?’ The panel discussion revolved around findings from a new report from the Royal Agricultural University in the UK called ‘Culture clash: what cultured meat could mean for UK farming’, based on participatory research with UK farmers. Too often, conversations on the future of food are incredibly polarising, with farmers frequently ignored or vilified. This report offers a balanced critical evaluation of how livestock farmers might be impacted by cultured meat and how they might potentially adapt (or not) to co-exist with it e.g. by supplying animal cells, valorising farm by-products into growing mediums, and taking advantage of a potential new competitive edge by marketing themselves as ‘real’ meat. This work was refreshing in its openness to exploring a nuanced, messy, non-utopian future in which different food system ‘solutions’ might coexist. Whilst our research group doesn’t work with cultured meat, the discussion struck a chord with the ‘both–and’ approach we use to frame our work with other food innovations like plant cheese, upcycled foods, and plant-based umamification. I’d like to see more conversations like this at future ORFCs and in general.
On Friday morning, I joined a workshop called ‘Beyond the tech divide: rethinking innovation for agroecology’. I’d been looking forward to this workshop since I’d recently read some great pieces by the facilitators, namely ‘Paths of least resilience: advancing a methodology to assess the sustainability of food system innovations - the case of CRISPR’ by Chantal Clément and Francesco Ajena and ‘Agroecological Intelligence - establishing criteria for agroecologically appropriate technology’ by Ayms Mason, Pat Thomas and Lawrence Woodward of ‘A Bigger Conversation’. In groups, we discussed different criteria, laid out in the latter report, that could be used to assess the appropriateness of different technologies for agroecology. ‘Practical’ criteria included ‘is it affordable?’ and ‘what might the unintended consequences be?’; ‘political’ criteria included ‘who benefits?’ and ‘who owns and controls it?’; whilst ‘philosophical’ criteria included ‘does it affect farmer autonomy?’ and ‘does it support diversity and complexity?’. Recently I’ve begun diving into the scholarly field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), with which many of these ideas resonated. We also discussed how assessing technologies against well-established agroecological principles (per the former paper) could be a powerful way to shape their agroecological appropriateness, building on thoughts I’d had about integrity sparked from the first session. I hope to examine our own research programme through these lenses in the coming months.
The final session I attended was the excellently moderated ‘Better meat, more plants: opportunities for farmers?’ This discussion explored an important question for the agroecological movement: if animals are important for healthy agroecosystems, but to maintain a healthy agroecosystem’s carrying capacity we’d probably need to eat a lot less meat, what then will fill that protein gap? Much of the discussion focused on the ‘less but better meat’ side, including a holistic vision for UK animal agriculture and a discussion of the roles of supermarkets and certification. Plant-based alternatives were discussed with some scepticism as they were imagined to be categorically ultra-processed and therefore unhealthy and undesirable. I’ve come across this sentiment elsewhere e.g. with Slow Food. I felt that an agroecological vision for plant-based alternatives to animal products was missing from this otherwise excellent conversation. Though well-intentioned and aspirational, assuming that whole plant ingredients like legumes alone will bridge the protein gap in a ‘less but better meat’ scenario seems to me to gloss over important food-cultural factors, like familiarity, taste preferences, desire for convenience, and food literacy, among others. This feels like a ripe space for agroecologically appropriate innovation. Our research group, for example, is working on plant cheese made from fermented plant ingredients. Products like these have short ingredient lists and are arguably no more processed than traditional cheese varieties, so probably shouldn’t be categorised as ‘ultra-processed’. Perhaps they too should be more widely considered as part of that toolbox of agroecological innovation.
These were just a handful of the talks that I attended at ORFC 2025. I would have loved to attend countless more in the abundant programme. Alas, one simply cannot be in more than one place at a time. As my train departs Oxford, skating through a flooded and frozen landscape illuminated by a dusky pink-blue sky, I have much to ponder—not least:
What might food innovation that embodies the spirit of ‘Sankofa’ look like?
How could food innovation enable and be enabled by agroecology without co-opting it?
Through this kind of agroecologically-informed food innovation, what hybrid and messy futures of food might emerge?
What criteria can be used to determine if food innovation is agroecologically appropriate or not?
What role could food innovation play in solving the ‘less but better meat’ conundrum?
Helpful provocations that I think will guide my writing and thinking this year.
Contributions & acknowledgements
Eliot wrote the article. Josh provided editorial feedback.
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