Agriculture and Theology project

JRI/Redcliffe College Environment day Conference: Food Futures
Organised in partnership with Redcliffe College, CMS and the Agricultural Christian Fellowship

9.30am – 4.30pm, Saturday 6 March 2010
Newspapers and TV programmes herald the ‘end of cheap food’, warning us that the global food systems on which we have come depend are increasingly fragile. The cost to other nations and the environment, and the impact on UK food producers, mean that in a few years we will not be living as we do now. The Food Futures Day Conference at Redcliffe College, Gloucester help us respond by asking what God wants us to learn and how we could personally change and adapt. We will look at what Scripture says about our relationship with food and those that produce it, and at what can be done to improve global production, food security, and patterns of trade. For those of us who do not grow food but do eat it, we will explore the jungle of food ethics and whether ‘conscience in the supermarket’ is an adequate response to the coming storm.

Speakers include:
The speakers are Rev Dr Mike Rayner (British Heart Foundation, Oxford), Patrick Mulvany (Chair of UK Food Group) and Ruth Valerio, author of ‘L is for Lifestyle’.
The Food Futures day is in association with Redcliffe College, the Church Mission Society, and the Agricultural Christian Fellowship.

Cost: £35 including a two-course lunch.

To book:
Please download the booking form and send with a cheque to Mrs Diane Carter, Redcliffe College, Wotton House, Horton Road, Gloucester GL1 3PT.
A LEAFLET with more details is now available.

There is a special Facebook Event Page for this meeting. Do join us there for updates and the latest information. You will need to be registered with Facebook to do this.

Farming Dilemmas – Continuity and Succession

The annual ACF conference this year will be at Stoneleigh on 19th November 2009. See programme

Details: No farmer lasts forever, half a century at most.  However, land lasts for aeons and there is a remarkable degree of continuity in farming families.  Transition that engages real people at deep levels has always demanded a lot of human nature and involved pain and failure as well as success.  For several reasons, this process is becoming harder and more uncertain, often leading not merely to an end of one family’s involvement, but to the disappearance of the farm as an entity.  We want to explore people’s personal experiences of this.  Very possibly some issues will emerge which can be carried forward but this day’s focus will be on the personal experiences, and we hope people will come ready to share some of their own insights.

However, all this does have a context, both in our understanding of family and human relationships and in our understanding of our relationship with Creation and of farming.  Does scale and “familyness” matter?  Would it matter if half of England was farmed by a couple of farming companies?  Is a banana plantation as good as farms, which grow bananas?  Should square miles of the Ukraine be farmed by foreign companies or half of Mauritius be leased for a hundred years to the Daewoo motor company?  There is much at stake all over the world as well as in our farming lives, but we will focus on our lives and experiences.  We will begin with biblical reflection on farming, family, community and land.