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.