Originally posted on the WRFFC website here. I wasn’t on the committee this year so I had a good view of things.

This year was the sixth WRFFC, and what a long way we have come!  The structure has not changed much, although this year the addition of artists and a closing ceremony brought an extra dimension.  But as relationships have built over the years, and the sense of an interconnected food system has grown, so it has become clearer what the event can achieve.  Like a mushroom emerging periodically from an underground mycelium, it allows us to sound the depths while connecting with present challenges.

Extreme weather is one of those, and it struck on the first day.  Guest speaker Derek Walker, the Future Generations Commissioner had to call in from his car, and the party from Farms for City Children missed the session altogether.  Fortunately, another school group was able to bring their appearance forward and so we heard instead from Ysgol y Dderi, in nearby Llangybi.  As one of them said, describing a visit to nearby Bwlchwernen Fawr:

“While we were there, we met Patrick Holden and his sons who were busy harvesting organic carrots for schools in Carmarthenshire.  This made the children of Ysgol y Dderi very cross.  Why can’t we have Bwlchwernen carrots?”

Now, thanks to Castell Howell and Food Sense Wales’ Veg in Schools project, and a lot of letter-writing by the children, they are promised the carrots for their Christmas dinner.  Patrick Holden bounded on to the stage brandishing a bunch of carrots.

Ysgol y Dderi have been doing outstanding food education for many years and their headteacher Heini Thomas spoke at the WRFFC in 2022.  And she had helped organise an organic school meal as far back as 2003, for Ysgol Dihewyd, in the days of Organic Centre Wales and Antur Teifi.  The present project has roots in Food for Life, an initiative that was being talked about at the Soil Association’s conferences in Cirencester over 20 years ago.  We are in it for the long haul.

The Nature Friendly Farming Network has been a strong supporter of the event since we began in 2019, and they put on an inspiring session about farmer successes, to which Deputy First Minister Huw Irranca-Davies was a last-minute addition.  As the Sustainable Farming Scheme and the Community Food Strategy near their delivery dates and set the scene for the food system in Wales, let us hope that there is a good balance between inclusivity and high standards.

Local Food Partnerships now cover all of Wales and are at various stages of development; Bwyd Sir Gar’s project to convert a county farm from dairy to vegetables (see image above) is an ambitious and symbolic step.  The Food Policy Alliance Cymru is leveraging this popular support to drive the call for a national Welsh food strategy.

But all this change is driven ultimately by human relationships, and it was guest speaker Denise Bentley of the First Love Foundation who brought that into focus on the second day.  As the Foundation’s website says, they “show empathy where there may not have been empathy previously”.  She was talking about the people who come to their advice centre in Tower Hamlets but the same applies to the conference.  Human connection makes things happen.

We also need to see ourselves as part of bigger systems, and recognise how poverty, poor diets and environmental destruction are not about individual failure as much as a society that is organised along the wrong lines.  For Denise, and also Pearl Costello of Food Cardiff responding to her talk, community food projects are about building the social structures and culture that can support a better food economy.  They are not the answer to food poverty, to which the solution is money, and the dignity that it brings.

As ever, much of the value of the conference was the conversations in between the sessions, and over food, which this year was a triumph of local and organic sourcing, thanks to chef Barny Haughton and University of Wales Trinity St David’s Kevin Hodson.  It’s in this social space that friendships are renewed, and random encounters reveal new possibilities.  It can also be a space for contemplation and sideways thinking, and Carreg Creative’s ‘Wrth wraidd – at root’ was a popular space for exploring unanswered questions through soil, vegetables, writing and talk.  And we can’t wait for ‘Food – the Musical!’ which started life in a workshop of that name.

Many sessions responded to the need to bring people together, in a world where algorithms drive us apart.  ‘Why farmers and ecologists need each other’ was one such, led by the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, and Cardiff University’s ‘creating spaces of learning across difference’ was another.  Discussions on agroecology explored how food, farming and society are all linked and must be considered as a whole, while other sessions looked at drawing more of the public into the food movement.

Another role of the conference is to shine a spotlight on knotty technical questions and look for creative solutions.  A session on the role of farm data in preparing for the Sustainable Farming Scheme was popular, while others examined the tensions between values-based farming and automation, the balance between conservation grazing and beef production, and the logistics of public procurement. It was new this year to have a closing ceremony.  Angharad Wynne invited us to set an intention for the following year and take a handful of wheat seed home with us to sow.  Our wishes were a mixture of the serious and the funny, the high-flown and the everyday, and all of it held lightly and with warmth.  When we sow the seeds next year, these intentions will become the crops we harvest, real or virtual.  Whether or not you attended our conference, may 2025 be a fulfilling year for all of us.

Image: Jeremy Moore.

It’s a cliché, but true nonetheless, that our society has lost contact with the land. In particular, we do not pay much attention to where our food comes from and forget that the natural world is crucial to our survival. Wildlife organisations do all they can to remind us of this fact, and there is an abundance of scientific evidence too, yet somehow it bypasses our consciousness. Witness the media indifference to the recent Restore Nature Now event protest in London.

Perhaps we need a more direct and personal approach. At this year’s Hay Festival there was a warm reception for Robin Wall Kimmerer, US author of Braiding Sweetgrass, who blends knowledge from her career as a plant scientist with the traditions passed down through her Native American ancestry, to the enrichment of both strands of human understanding.

She writes in particular about her own practice of putting people in touch with soil, rivers and plants. This featured too in a session on native wisdom traditions at this year’s Oxford Real Farming Conference, where Angharad Wynne from Wales was a speaker. “When you bring people together in a space where the aim is to build community and honour the space, magical things happen,” she said, emphasising also the need to ‘welcome the stranger’. [59-61 mins]

With all this in mind, it was exciting to be part of a new venture on my own patch, a wassailing ceremony at Gogerddan Heritage Orchard near Aberystwyth. How do you start a new tradition? The orchard is just seven years old and its 250 trees are planted scientifically in rows so it’s hardly a repository of ancient lore. Wales might have a fine tradition of orchards with accompanying cultural events, as Carwyn Graves describes in his Apples of Wales, but they have long died out and there are no obvious instructions for how to do our own.

But the will was there, and we worked with what we had. The initial impetus came from Olga, one of the Aberystwyth Conservation Volunteers who have been involved with the orchard from the start. She had been to wassailing events in London so was familiar with the basic plan: tie toast to the trees, read them poems, chuck cider at them, make a noise, and celebrate, all with the general intention of encouraging them to fruit well that year.

Meanwhile Welsh apple enthusiasts had recently decreed that 9 February, the birthday of St Teilo, should be a national day of apple activity. That gave us our date.

Then there was the place. The orchard is in the grounds of Plas Gogerddan, home of the former Welsh Plant Breeding Station led by Sir George Stapledon, whose scientific approach to farming was mixed with visionary idealism; he would probably have approved. Just up the road in the village of Penrhyncoch lives Rhiannon Ifans, author of Sers a Rybana, a study of Welsh-language wassailing songs. Local residents Brenda and Eleri chose verses from the book and set them to suitable tunes, so we had Welsh wassails alongside the English ones. Olga also invited musicians from Twmpath Aberystwyth, who provided an accordionist and a fiddler.

We gathered after dark, some 20 or 30 of us, set up our things on a picnic table and got to it. We chose three trees to honour. The first was Pig Aderyn, a cider variety from St Dogmael’s Abbey, which some of us had helped harvest last year. A sprawling, ungainly tree with masses of red fruit, the stalk sometimes resembling a bird’s beak, there are several specimens in the orchard and the fruit last year went into a single variety cider. We read it an English poem, splashed it with cider and banged saucepans.

On then to Marged Nicholas, a dignified old lady with a strong upright habit. Marged comes from Carmarthenshire and is a cooking, eating and cider variety. Her fruit had made it into a general mix for cider, and she got a Welsh wassail.

I can’t remember what the third variety was – it was dark and hard to find the right tree – but I know which it should have been: Court of Wick. This is a prolific variety from Somerset, very good for eating. With a flavour somewhere between a Cox and a Russet, the apples are small and nutty with a red blush and gold flecks. There are eight of this variety in the orchard and last year we saved the fruit for distribution to local primary schools. We’d even walked a gang of five-year-olds half an hour each way from their school to help with the picking one sunny September afternoon.

Afterwards there was celebration with music, dancing, cider and apple juice, before we tidied up and went home. What surprised me was how easily the event flowed, without any artificiality. It seemed quite natural to express gratitude for last year’s harvest and joy at the thought of next year’s. How miraculous that apples should exist in such abundance and variety, and that there are insects to pollinate them, and sunshine and rain to make them grow.

While we’re at it, how wonderful that publicly funded projects administered in offices should generate whole orchards for our benefit, and that university staff and volunteers should come forward to care for them. What a privilege to be able to collect and distribute their fruit, and how we hope that the next season will be as good.

Plans were immediately made to celebrate Orchard Blossom Day in April, this time in daylight, and with poetry and more dancing, and we did that too (see the amateur video). No doubt there will be more celebrations at harvest time.

These are strange times, as it can feel that the natural world is collapsing around us, and that humanity is bringing about its own destruction. But this is no time to despair. The message I took away from these orchard events is that it’s not hard to make a connection with the trees and the soil, and with each other. We just need to be willing to try.

Republished from the WRFFC website. We’ve now done five of these events and people still worry that we don’t have enough farmers. I wrote this to explain why we have exactly the right number.

People who have been to the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference, which has now been held every November since 2019, tend to speak highly of it. They say how much it inspired them, how much they learned and how good it was to spend time with like-minded people. And then often, as if they might have been taken in by something too good to be true, they will add: “but how many farmers do you actually have?”

The short answer, at least at Lampeter in 2022 for which we did analyse the ticket sales as best we could, is about 13%, together with a similar number of growers, and a further set of consultants and advisers working with them, so that perhaps 30% of the delegates were closely connected to commercial land management. That may not seem a very high percentage for a farming conference, but it makes perfect sense for an event that aims to put farming in a wider context.

First of all though, let’s look at the question. Why are people so keen to see a good turnout of farmers? Certainly, there is concern about intensive farming methods and a desire from some to have that debate head on. And others see that farmers might be missing out on something that would be very helpful to them. Ultimately though, I think the concern is that if farmers are not part of the discussion, then it loses credibility.

This reflects an understanding that farmers (and growers, and fishers) manage a vital connection between human society and the natural world. Farming poses dilemmas that relate to the economy, food security, wildlife, flood management, animal welfare, tourism, the Welsh language and health, to name just a few. The heat and sometimes acrimony associated with these topics – most recently, tractor protests against the Sustainable Farming Scheme – is a measure of how much is at stake, for all of us.

But land management and our food supply are too important to be left to farmers and growers alone. There is some justice in the complaint that farmers are being required to shoulder much of the burden of achieving Net Zero while the rest of us carry on much as before. How many of us, going round the supermarket with our trolleys, check labels to see where our meat, veg and milk came from and how they were grown, and choose to reward good farming practices out of our own wallets? How many of us have created wildlife habitats in our gardens, or reined in our car use, or supported projects that share cooking and gardening skills in the community?

The debate must go wider, and that’s why we have the other 70% of the delegates: community food organizers, nutritionists, environmentalists, food businesses, vets, educators and food traders, to name a few. Farmers are at the sharp end of food production, and we need to build a healthy food system around them. That is ultimately the purpose of our event.

At our fifth conference in the agricultural college at Llysfasi, we had sessions on farming itself, looking for instance at flood management, livestock health, emissions from dairy farming and soil analysis. But we also explored local food trading, community composting, beekeeping, seed saving and a host of other topics, illustrating how food runs through our society and connects us all. Iwan Edwards’ talk following wildlife from gardening to the landscape was a particularly powerful statement of that, and Prof Tim Lang’s call for a civil food resilience framework was the inspiring conclusion.

This isn’t just about showing the network of transactions that links the farm (whether in Wales or elsewhere) with the table. More fundamentally it is about building a culture of respect and a sense of community. This in turn creates the safety that arises from deep commitment and allows difficult questions to be faced. Farmers are facing tough challenges at the moment, but they are going to come to all of us in the end. We need to stick together and work things out.

It helps here to have a vision. A healthy soil is the foundation of healthy crops and livestock and therefore of human society: that was the founding principle of the Soil Association (hence its name) and a similar vein of thought runs through the later arrivals to the progressive farming movement, notably regenerative farming and agroecology. That is a view which has wide intuitive appeal, and it gives farming (and growing) a central and honourable role in a greater whole. It is that whole that the conference exists to serve.

In a session on ‘the way forward for farming and nature in Wales’, which featured three farmers, it was interesting that the conversation moved towards public education and school visits. I think it is in these settings that we can ask the most fundamental questions about what farming is for and where food comes from, and begin to mend the gap between farming and the towns and cities most of us live in. It was heartening to hear in other sessions the work now being done on school meals in Wales, which draws on earlier work by the Soil Association’s Food for Life programme, and by the local food partnerships.

Finally, the conference is about personal stories. In the opening session, Llysfasi principal Elin Roberts drew a line between her grandmother’s resourceful farm diversification a century ago and the creative drive of the students at Llysfasi, while Sarah Dickins, organic farmer and former BBC correspond remembered the miners’ strike that she covered early in her career in calling for a just transition to agroecological farming. We are all in this together.

And so the question is not “how many farmers came to the conference” but “what quality of connection did the conference make between farmers and the rest of the food system?” On that measure, I think we did very well.

Image: Amber Wheeler

Article published by the Institute of Welsh Affairs on 4 April 2023

A public demonstration against intensive poultry units (IPUs) outside the Senedd on 15 February was just the latest eruption of public concern over the pollution of the Wye, Severn and their tributaries, which is blamed on the explosion of intensive poultry farming in Powys over recent years.

This demonstration was organised by grassroots community group Sustainable Food Knighton who successfully brought a case against Powys County Council in 2020 after they gave permission for a new poultry unit without proper consideration of the environmental impact. The event brought together a range of concerns. 

River pollution was the primary focus of campaigner Angela Jones with her ‘Death of the Wye’ coffin. Nutrients from livestock manure and fertiliser running into rivers cause algal blooms followed by a serious loss of biodiversity, and it’s not just IPUs. Dairy farming, horticulture and sewage are also implicated. 

For the rest of this article, which discusses the role of the Welsh government and the Future Generations Office and calls for stronger citizen involvement in the food system, see the IWA website.

Image: Sustainable Food Knighton