Oxford Real Farming Conference - Making Health Infectious

puppies

13 Jan

As we all piled into the car for our journey into Oxford, none of us could quite believe it. We were actually going to a genuine, live, in person Oxford Real Farm Conference, the first one since lockdown. There was nearly one last year, but the tides changed at the last minute and it had been online. This time it was really going to happen.

For those of you not familiar with the ORFC, it is an annual event timed to coincide with another event, the Oxford Farm Conference. A bit like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival runs alongside the Edinburgh International Festival.

The ORFC sets out to explore the wide range of sustainable and eco-friendly systems of farming that are available. Check out the ORFC for their own description of what they do.

We were manning the stand for Whole Health Agriculture as well as running a workshop exploring how we can make health infectious. There was a constant stream of people interested to know what Whole Health Agriculture was all about. Over the year we had become nicely focused on three key aims:

Investigate – all the various ways a farmer achieves success with a Whole Health approach.
Inform – by providing readily available, well presented, inspiring information to all people who want to know more.
Educate – via empowering, practical, experience-based training, courses, webinars and mentoring.

It was great to talk to so many people, to hear their stories of how they farmed, and to share our findings of what is useful to achieve amazing results.

The workshop looked at How to Make Health Infectious. The room was packed and it was wonderful to see so much interest. There were three of the WHAg team running the session. Between us we shared how, by using a Whole Health approach, it really is possible to have systems that are so inspiring and effective that others want to know how they can learn. It was lovely to see the faces of the audience light up as they grasped the message, and became animated and interactive. By the end, everyone was buzzing with the stories and simple Whole Health concepts we had shared with them.

The beauty of the Whole Health system is that it is so simple and yet so powerful. As more and more farmers start applying the principles on their farms, health truly will be infectious.

To find out more check the Whole Health Agriculture website and the Learning Centre.