At ORFC 2026

SALT at ORFC 2026: UK farm workers begin to re-assert control over their futures

by Rohan Rice

The UK’s Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC), which takes place annually across two days at the start of January, began life as a fringe event within the Oxford Farming Conference (OFC). This fringe event was a space for farmers concerned about the environmental impacts of industrial agriculture to gather and discuss more sustainable methods. Soon enough this fringe gathering broke off entirely to form its own conference—ORFC—that takes place simultaneously within the city of Oxford.

ORFC has ballooned dramatically in the last 17 years, now accommodating over 400 speakers on a huge range of topics in agriculture, from macro-farming concerns like ‘Natural treatments for flystrike in sheep’ to sector-wide issues, like ‘Funding small farm futures’. The conference organisers like to think of ORFC as representing the radical alternative to industrial, polluting agriculture whose body-politic gather on the other side of the city. But it’s far from what it imagines itself to be.

ORFC is to the OFC what Keir Starmer is to the Conservative Party. The alternatives on show only tinker around the edges of agribusiness farming, refusing to engage with the other side or propose a meaningful upheaval of the status quo. For farm labourers like myself, who are mostly invisible among the landowners and researchers, there is nothing radical about the conference.

The situation for farm workers in Britain is dire. LANTRA, the largest provider of land-based training in the UK and Ireland, places a farm worker’s expected salary at £14,000 to £18,000 a year – dramatically below the UK median average for 2025 of £39,039 as reported by the Office for National Statistics. Minimum wage work is the norm. Informal contracts with no pension or sick pay are standard. Abuse of every kind is common place. Modern slavery in the sector has been increasingly documented.

Until last year, the UK’s alternative agriculture sector was heavily dependant on ‘trainees’ who were paid on average £1.41 an hour, if they were paid at all: many worked for room and board in exchange for basic on-the-job training. It was only after campaigning from SALT that these traineeships were outlawed. Yet still some farms persist in offering these positions through novel loopholes.

Hardly any of this is debated at ORFC. In recent years the ‘Justice Strand’ of the conference was set up, this year’s run by SALT—who were attending the conference for the fifth time—and two other organisations, Land in Our Names and Shared Assets. The programme for this strand covered worker’s rights, disability justice (the majority of farms being the least accessibility-friendly workplaces one can imagine), and many of the systemic issues that ought to be addressed in alternative farming. The Justice Strand, however, was predominantly shoved into a separate building across the street and down a side road from the main conference that took place in the opulent, colonial grandeur of Oxford Town Hall where most delegates gathered.

A concession was made for the Justice Is Not Seasonal campaign, a high-profile labour rights abuse case of migrant workers from South America. That said, this was the only time in two days the conference heard from the migrant labour that props up British horticulture.

SALT was also invited into a discussion at the main conference about ‘Basic Income for Farmers’, but found their voices sidelined as they were at odds with a policy that doesn’t distinguish between wealthy landowners and the workers. Otherwise, the frustration of the farm workers in attendance, palpable at the Justice Strand, was kept quarantined. One delegate I spoke to, who had been working on farms in alternative agriculture for 10 years and attended the conference on and off in that time, told me that the conversations about workers’ rights had made little progress during her decade in the industry. Every year individuals came forward at the conference with stories of abuse and malpractice, often at the hands of those same well-known farmers continuously given panel positions (which as a trade union we can attest to as many workers bringing their cases to us are from the stalwarts of organic farming). Nothing would shift. The difference now is that for the first time those voices are forming collectives.

Farm labourers need to be paid significantly better. They need all the protections that workers in so-called professional industries enjoy. But this is only the start. As quickly as wages can grow, a sharp rise in inflation can wipe out that extra salary. Additional rights won at the picket line can swiftly be reversed during the next election cycle. So the core demand then becomes a redistribution of power – which in farming equates to land.

Speakers at ORFC love to talk about access to land, but to them that looks like access for a new generation of previously landless tertiary-educated middle-class growers to fulfil their homesteading fantasies. What farm workers should demand is land owned and run democratically and socialistically by the workers. Although very few landowners at ORFC would want to see that now, would they?