The Real Farming Manifesto - Good Food for Everyone Forever
Providing the people of the world with a dependable supply of healthy nutritious foods is perhaps the greatest challenge facing humanity. Our current farming methods are clearly failing. They are over-dependent on fossil fuels; they damage soils and deplete scarce water resources; they degrade everyday foods; they reduce biodiversity and squander precious wildlife; they pollute our global environment. They are part of a global food system that is at the mercy of speculators and is every bit as precarious as the world banking system.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. We, the organisers of the Oxford Real Farming Conference, are convinced that the Earth’s natural resources are easily able to provide a good, healthy diet for everyone living on the planet today – and everyone likely to be living on it 50 years from now and indeed forever. All it will take is an agriculture based on principles of sound biology rather than economic dogma.
Our aim in establishing this conference – which we hope will become an annual event – is to encourage and stimulate fresh thinking on this, the greatest challenge of our time. We don’t believe high-input, industrial agriculture is capable of reform. Rather than feed people, its aim is to serve the interests of global chemical, trading and investment corporations. Far from creating a secure supply of high-quality food, today’s agribusiness can be counted on to obstruct progress.
We believe the people of this country – like the people of the world – are entitled to the best foods our land can provide. Our conference will investigate the most effective ways of achieving this. Though we are passionately committed to good science, we’re not convinced that new technologies are required to feed the world well. The key to securing good food for all is rather the careful management of the world’s natural resources by well tried and trusted methods. What’s needed is the radical re-working of the very best traditional systems.
Among the glittering prizes of a rational farming system are the host of social and environmental benefits that go along with it. As well as fine food, good agriculture will provide clear streams, teeming wildlife and thriving rural communities. It’s a measure of the failure of our present farming methods that the countryside is so depleted of these things.
Our speakers include farmers, academics, writers and business people. We are united by the desire to see the people of Britain and the world provided with better food than they are currently offered. We have no agenda other than to secure a system of agriculture that feeds the world well.
If these are aims that you share please support our conference. Join with us on this adventure. What we’re seeking is nothing less than a renaissance – for farming, for our countryside and for the world.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. We, the organisers of the Oxford Real Farming Conference, are convinced that the Earth’s natural resources are easily able to provide a good, healthy diet for everyone living on the planet today – and everyone likely to be living on it 50 years from now and indeed forever. All it will take is an agriculture based on principles of sound biology rather than economic dogma.
Our aim in establishing this conference – which we hope will become an annual event – is to encourage and stimulate fresh thinking on this, the greatest challenge of our time. We don’t believe high-input, industrial agriculture is capable of reform. Rather than feed people, its aim is to serve the interests of global chemical, trading and investment corporations. Far from creating a secure supply of high-quality food, today’s agribusiness can be counted on to obstruct progress.
We believe the people of this country – like the people of the world – are entitled to the best foods our land can provide. Our conference will investigate the most effective ways of achieving this. Though we are passionately committed to good science, we’re not convinced that new technologies are required to feed the world well. The key to securing good food for all is rather the careful management of the world’s natural resources by well tried and trusted methods. What’s needed is the radical re-working of the very best traditional systems.
Among the glittering prizes of a rational farming system are the host of social and environmental benefits that go along with it. As well as fine food, good agriculture will provide clear streams, teeming wildlife and thriving rural communities. It’s a measure of the failure of our present farming methods that the countryside is so depleted of these things.
Our speakers include farmers, academics, writers and business people. We are united by the desire to see the people of Britain and the world provided with better food than they are currently offered. We have no agenda other than to secure a system of agriculture that feeds the world well.
If these are aims that you share please support our conference. Join with us on this adventure. What we’re seeking is nothing less than a renaissance – for farming, for our countryside and for the world.
