In this week’s column, Ellen Pearce reflects on the two farming conferences she attended in Oxford, where she was able to share some of the work being done here in North Lancashire with the wider farming community…
Every year, in early January, hundreds of farmers, landworkers and food system workers descend on Oxford for the two farming conferences.
There’s the original Oxford Farming Conference, which has been running for 80 years, and the now much larger Oxford Real Farming Conference which has been bringing people together for 17.
For many of us working on local food issues, it’s a chance to meet friends in the wider network, connect and form collaborations, and find out what’s going on elsewhere.
This year, we also had the chance to share some of the work being done here in North Lancashire and the North of England, and bring back learning and inspiration for what more could be done.
One of the sessions explored the Landed Community Kitchen project, which is food justice centred work to try and move away from the reliance on surplus food in community kitchens.
Instead this project focuses on connecting, at a community level, local farms, kitchens, cooks and those who need to eat (ie all of us).
A network of Northern farms and kitchens are currently collaborating to share learning and different ways of working, and importantly trying to see how the funding model could work for a community meals programme at neighbourhood level.
I was involved in running a session about how to grow more pulses for human consumption in the North of England. Adam Palmer from the Honest Bean Company is based in Yorkshire and he shared his passion for getting British grown pulses onto plates, especially in the North.
Lots of ideas were shared about how pulses are a relatively cheap source of protein and were originally a staple crop in the North of England, with areas focused on producing for the canning and mushy pea factories.
What lessons did we bring back? That there’s power in the collaborations and stories from different places, and that despite the very obvious challenges happening across the world, at the field and kitchen level, when there’s a space to share a meal, it can enable nourishment, for the soul as well as the body.
