3 Real Farming Trust
The Real Farming Trust (RFT) is a UK charity that supports enlightened agriculture – farming that provides good food for everyone forever, without cruelty or injustice and without adversely affecting other people and the biosphere.
Enlightened Agriculture (aka ‘Real Farming’) is based on three key concepts: (1) agroecology, where individual farms are conceived as ecosystems, and agriculture as a whole is seen as a key component of the biosphere; (2) economic democracy, in practice rooted primarily in small to medium-sized enterprises that are generally conceived as social enterprises and are often cooperative in nature and community-owned; and (3) food sovereignty, the idea that individuals and communities everywhere must have control over their own food supply.
The charitable objectives of the RFT, as set out in the objects contained in its Articles of Association, are that “the Trust supports farming and food production projects that are economically sound, democratic, socially just, humane to animals, and promote the long-term protection of the biosphere”.
In service of these objectives, the RFT’s mission is to ‘to facilitate, support and encourage a fair and just agricultural transition by rethinking food and farming from first principles and engaging people from all backgrounds to provide good food for everyone forever’.
In pursuit of this mission, the RFT advocates and supports the three component parts of Enlightened Agriculture, namely economic democracy, agroecology and food sovereignty. One on its own will not work. They must be considered together, and this is why the RFT’s mission extends well beyond farming. As well as encouraging and supporting changes to farm practice through agroecology, the RFT focuses on the wider economic framework, supporting small local food enterprises, community ownership, cooperatives and social enterprises. It also sees the concept of food citizenship as central to its mission, and will encourage, welcome, accommodate and value different food citizens and facilitate opportunities to strengthen community interactions through food.
The Real Farming Trust is a company limited by guarantee (no. 3336839), registered as a charity (no. 1061607)
The RFT works towards its vision through the following main activities and strategic priorities:
- Creating radical, diverse and inclusive gatherings for the real food and farming movement. Through the Oxford Real Farming Conference, the RFT works to strengthen and expand networks from within and beyond the food movement, learning from each other and exchanging knowledge in order to support and enable a just agroecological transition.
- Bringing people together to explore and understand the transformative potential of agroecology and food sovereignty. Through the College for Real Farming and Food Culture, the RFT explores and develops the ideas that are needed to underpin Enlightened Agriculture – in agricultural practice, economics, political organisation, science, moral philosophy and metaphysics (i.e., what should we be trying to do and why?). As such, the RFT will be an advocate for change and will provide a space for people to learn, collaborate and share ideas.
- Funding and supporting real food and farming businesses that are economically sound, socially just and protect the biosphere. The RFT develops mentoring and funding programmes which support organisations that adopt agroecological methods of farming; seek to shorten existing supply chains and create local ones; increase employment and engagement, revive local economies and bring other measurable social benefits; and protect the biosphere. The RFT’s current funding initiative is the Loans for Enlightened Agriculture Programme.
- Integrating food citizenship throughout all of our areas of work. The RFT develops programmes that help enable everyone to have access to healthy, nutritious food. Its current Lottery funded Ready, Healthy, Eat Programme aims to extend the reach of community food projects into pre-prepared food, particularly looking to improve the diets of those people at greatest risk of food poverty. Working with four established local community food projects, the programme provides ready to eat meals whilst also providing skills training for people struggling to find employment.
- Promoting the importance and value of adopting agroecological approaches to food and farming in UK policy.The RFT does this as the Secretariat of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Agroecology, and by engaging with our partners on policy campaigns.
- Encouraging and supporting social enterprises and community food businesses, policy makers and campaigners to take social impact seriously. The RFT develops metrics and processes that allow the social impact and public benefit of Enlightened Agriculture to be quantified, measured and reported on. It does this through its collaborative work with the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) with which it has developed the Social Impact Toolkit in partnership with community food organisations.
- Amplifying the voices of the agroecology movement. The RFT recently set up the Agroecology Communications Network, connecting people working in communications across the food and farming movement and exploring how organisations can better support each other, sharing news and campaigns and bringing people together to work towards shared goals, to have a bigger collective impact.
For more information on our projects and programmes, resources and impact, please see our website.
