Every January in central Oxford, two farming conferences take place half a mile apart, at the same time: the venerable Oxford Farming Conference (OFC), first held in 1936, and the upstart Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC), established in 2010 to promote “an alternative to conventional agriculture”. Their names differ by just one word, but the events seem to come from parallel universes.
At the OFC I was told about new technologies like disease-resistant pigs, while at the ORFC I heard more about traditional methods, indigenous wisdom and old heritage breeds. The OFC is dominated by big businesses and academics, the ORFC by small family farmers and campaigners. Whereas the ORFC represents what delegates call a movement, the OFC reflects the established order. The OFC talks the language of capitalism, at the ORFC they talk of dismantling it. Sometimes the cultural differences border on parody. At the OFC, the day begins with optional prayers in the college chapel, while the ORFC offers meditation for farmers.
The same divide plays out in the consumer and retail worlds, where the choices are between chain stores or local independents, factory-farmed meat or free-range and pasture-fed, supermarkets or farmers’ markets. The stark divide is unsurprising in a wider world that seems so polarised—between red and blue states, remainers and leavers, nationalist populists and liberal democrats. Societal fissures like these present fundamental challenges to the peace and stability of nations, and the legitimacy of their governments.
The food world’s split might appear comparatively unimportant but, aside from mattering in its own right, it offers a perfect case study for how division arises, grows and might be healed.
Perceptions about the nature of any polarisation will differ on each side. To denizens of the OFC, the ORFC claim to represent “real farmers” rings hollow. They believe they are the genuine farmers, running productive commercial farms that serve the mainstream food system. The ORFC farms, in contrast, are run by hippies, dreamers and luddites more interested in romantic Arcadian fantasies, bringing down capitalism or communing with Mother Earth than in producing food. From the other side, the mainstream appears to be driven by neoliberal ideology that prioritises profit before all else, and an extractive, polluting industrial agriculture that strips the land of nutrients and wildlife.
For those living almost entirely within one of these worlds, these caricatures are constantly reinforced, although those who freely cross the divide understand they are nearly always far too crude.
Take Sophie Gregory, a first-generation organic dairy farmer and a member of a farmer-owned cooperative. That might make you think her tribe is the ORFC. But the cooperative, Arla, is the largest producer of dairy products in the UK and a major supplier to businesses like McDonald’s. Its farms do not fit the stereotype of big bad business or traditional family farms.
Gregory is at ease with having a foot in each world. “There’s not one right way to farm,” she tells me. “I’ve got stuff to learn from smallholders through to large-scale farming.” Gregory can straddle the divide because, except at the extremes, it does not force binary choices.
Or take the extent to which farms are nature-friendly. This is central to ORFC identity: its farmers describe themselves as organic, regenerative, agroecological or some mixture of all three. Not so long ago, mainstream farming was over-reliant on polluting inputs, and is still the sector where the worst practice is found. But the days when every industrialised farm sprayed pesticides and pulled up hedgerows willy-nilly are long gone. Today, many mainstream farmers belong to the Nature Friendly Farming Network (NFFN), and focus on things such as lowering nitrogen inputs, removing crops with low disease resistance to reduce fungicide dependence, and using cover crops and herbal leys over the winter to minimise synthetic fertiliser use.
Patrick Barker has been reducing his synthetic inputs, improving his soil health and bringing wildlife back on his “proper intensive arable farm” in North Suffolk. He is clearly passionate about this, telling me that among the 428 different species recorded across the cluster of which Lodge Farm is a part, they have found 29 with special designations, including the rare Bombus ruderatus (the Large Garden Bumblebee).
Lodge Farm shows that what is often derogatorily called “Big Ag” can be environmentally friendly. Indeed, Lynn Dicks, professor of ecology at the University of Cambridge, argues that best practice is not always found on the agroecological farms. What’s more, if a small-scale, nature-rich farm isn’t producing much food, that might be bad for the global environment. “If we produce less food here, we will import more from places like Brazil and South Africa where biodiversity is much richer than here,” she explains. “If we care about stopping extinctions and saving the whole world’s nature, we should be thinking about the Atlantic forest in Brazil, which is currently being cut down to grow things like soy and oilseed rape to fill the hole in our markets, while we’re looking after blue tits and great tits.”
However, the mainstream shift away from synthetic inputs has not brought the two camps together. Social fault lines are often linked to a strong sense of identity. Dicks has seen this in her social science research with farmers. “It’s all tied up with how people identify themselves and the people they identify with.”
That’s certainly how Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, who trades as the Black Farmer, sees it. Although the ORFC vocally supports underrepresented and marginalised groups, and as Emmanuel-Jones rightly says, “I’m probably one of the most high-profile persons from a non-traditional farming background”, the 2025 OFC was his first invitation to speak at either conference. As a former Tory candidate who sells his sausages in supermarkets, he is more commercial and right-wing than the typical ORFC delegate. “A lot of these organisations attract the people that feel they belong to their tribe and I wouldn’t be perceived as someone that belongs to that tribe,” he tells me.
Gregory, Barker and Emmanuel-Jones show that in the food and farming world differences do not fall neatly along one axis but several. Each of these contains a spectrum, on which most people fall somewhere around the middle.
Polarisation “blocks change” says Sue Pritchard, chief executive of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC). “It puts us in the wrong conversations, in the wrong time frame, and about the wrong thing.” However, it is equally naive to deny there are real divides. A more nuanced understanding of where the real disagreements lie, and the common ground, is needed to deal with polarisation.
Pritchard believes the main fault line lies across the political economy of food and farming. “At ORFC it’s taken for granted that we have to surface the failings of the current political economy and tackle them at a deeper structural level. At the OFC, the default assumption is that’s too hard: we’ll work with what we’ve got, we can adapt what we’ve got, and we can make progress with what we’ve got.”
This divide is not always a chasm. Among those who don’t believe in fundamental reform of the food economy there are plenty who want substantial ad hoc changes to policies around subsidy and taxation, for example. And not everyone on the other side is demanding the end of capitalism. Edwin Brooks is a farmer and regional organiser for the Landworkers’ Alliance, which wants “power put back in the hands of producers and communities rather than supermarkets and industrial processors” and stands against all oppression including “imperialism, racism, patriarchy, sexism, gender discrimination and classism”. But he knows not all the organic farm, regenerative or hill farmers he considers natural allies have the same political concerns.
We also need to be realistic about the chances of finding consensus. Michel Pimbert, emeritus professor at Coventry University, talks of “difficult conversations” and “incommensurable values, difficult, unbridgeable views”. This seems inevitable, given that Pimbert believes that “the industrial food agricultural model, particularly of the capitalist type, is deeply exploitative and in deep contradiction with the survival of nature and the fabric of societies”.
Another risk is ending up with what Pritchard calls “sludgy, lowest-common-denominator policy alternatives”. The art of compromise requires avoiding the worst of both worlds while striving for the best. One method is to understand that there is no one point of convergence situated halfway between the two extremes. Rather, you need to break down the points of disagreement and find the optimal settlement for each.
On the need for farming to be more nature-friendly, the consensus looks to be settling closer to the ORFC’s original vision. But on the political economy, the only realistic option in the short-to-medium term is reform of what we’ve got. Food and farming has never been a laissez-faire free-for-all. It is part of a regulated market economy shaped for decades by subsidies, taxes, tariffs and policy and there is great scope for these to be harnessed for the good.
Another danger is that compromises tend to benefit the stronger party in the dialogue. Pritchard worries that “while progressives are busy collaborating because we think that's a lovely thing to do, the folk who currently have all the power and the resources are talking that language, but still lobbying, producing shitty food, harming the environment and harming the landscape”.
When we consider divides with substantial philosophical and political differences, it is easy to overlook the human dimension. Pritchard’s theory is that “in times of crisis, when you’re asking people to change, they’re more likely to listen to people who look and feel like them. You have to start with building rapport.” That’s why she helped organise a joint dinner for OFC and ORFC delegates. It was the first such event and almost everyone I spoke to was in favour of further engagement.
David Finlay, who runs a dairy farm in Galloway in which calves are kept with cows, spoke at the OFC this year precisely because it was a more difficult crowd. “If I talk at ORFC I’m talking to our congregation, whereas these guys here are very sceptical.” It takes time and effort to overcome these mutual suspicions. Dee Woods, a grass-roots food activist more at home at the ORFC, also spoke. “We’re all producing food for people. So me going to speak at a conference that isn’t really grounded in a social movement is about cross-pollination.” And one channel has been facilitating such conversations in Oxford for some years. As Woods says, “the real work gets done in the pub”.
But the desire for more dialogue is not going to see the conferences merge any time soon. And there is a case for strength through difference. David Hill, one of the OFC’s directors, acknowledges that “ORFC has provided a platform for a part of British agriculture which might have felt under-represented and we can applaud them for achieving that”. Ruth West, one of the ORFC’s founders, told me that with the two conferences taking place together Oxford becomes a “‘destination’ farming event, attracting more attention from press, media, and so on. This way we’re able to more draw attention to the system that has produced the crisis we’re in; and raise the profile of agro-ecology and food sovereignty and its holistic vision for change.”
Polarisation is often more a perception than a reality and is shaped as much by identity and history as it is by substantive differences. Polarised identities have deep historical roots, which means they persist even when the world has changed. People come to see real divides as being more intractable than they are, ignoring the diversity of opinion and practice within each side. Overcoming polarisation requires recognising that neither agreement nor disagreement is absolute. You can be poles apart on some issues and have common ground in others. Perhaps the hardest lesson is that division is not just a consequence of an inability to agree. It is also caused by not knowing how to disagree.
