Come along and join us at a visit to a sustainable and co-operative farm in Newtownards.
With climate change threatening to collapse food systems and their current exploitative industrialisation destroying our water, soil, air and species, this is an opportunity to learn about how we can do things differently.
Proposed Programme
0945 - Welcome, tea, coffee
1000 - Talk: Agroecological Food Sovereignty in ANDBC: Utopian Ambition or Transition Imperative?
1045 - Discussion and Q&A
1115 - Farm Walk - to see no dig market garden, field scale herbal lays and juxtaposition with conventional arable system in adjacent fields.
Key Themes to be presented and discussed:
• Background to Food and Farming in Northern Ireland: Facts and Figures; A Class Analysis of Farmers in Northern Ireland; Popular Fallacies to Avoid
• Critical Analysis of Current Farming and Food Policies: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
• A Utopian Vision for a Food and Farming Revolution based on Agroecological Food Sovereignty, Democratized Agrarian Localism, Reinstating the Commons.
• Pragmatic Proposals for transition from where we are now, based on positive activities happening already.
• Review of Stakeholders: Whose messages should be and could we we amplify? What movements can we join and support? Who should we take care of
• Practical Actions for Activists: Messages to Amplify, where to get your hands dirty, developing a positive movement building approach rather than purely negative campaigning.
About the farm:
Ben Vista Farm between Dundonald and Newtownards has been in the Ferguson family since the 1880s. It represents an unusual juxtaposition of conventional arable by the Gilliland Family who have been tenants for the last two generations, and a new agroecological approach being led by 6th generation grower, Barry Ferguson who has
established a farmer led CSA Veg box scheme on part of the farm. It is just off the main Newtownards to Belfast Dual Carraigeway, at 59 Ballyrogan Road.
About the Movement which Ben Vista Farm CSA is part of:
Ben Vista CSA is a community farming project, producing over fifty kinds of fruit and vegetables for fifty families in the area. Part of the Landworkers' Alliance, Talamh Beo, Organic Growers of Ireland and various other progressive farming groups, the farm is moving significantly in the direction of a community owned, cooperative run model
which could broadly be called agrarian localism. Agroecology and Food Sovereignty are the core concepts which define what we are doing.
