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.