Where We Started
The Real Farming Trust originated from the idea of ‘Enlightened Agriculture’, which, since the early 2000s, has helped to establish a new kind of farming movement in the UK.
Founded by Colin Tudge and Ruth West, pictured receiving the Derek Cooper Outstanding Achievement Award at the 2025 BBC Food and Farming Awards, the Real Farming Trust continues to support the agroecological movement through our diverse programmes of work.
Meet Our Founders
A History of Real Farming
Co-founder, Ruth West, explains how everything began with the idea of ‘Enlightened Agriculture’:
“farming expressly designed to feed people well both now and forever without wrecking the rest of the world.”
“Real Farming” means “Enlightened Agriculture” (EA):
It was adopted in place of EA as Colin and I thought it easier to remember! It was first used when we needed a name for what had become an annual fringe conference, now known as the Oxford Real Farming Conference, challenging the industrial agriculture celebrated at the Oxford Farming Conference.
“Enlightened agriculture”: the cornerstone of all our work
It is a concept and a campaign that we had been developing since the early 2000s. Two books Colin published in 2005 and 2012 – Feeding People is Easy and Good Food for Everyone Forever – introduced the need for EA, and a series of seminars we organised in Oxford looked at EA as the way forward out of the crises we are experiencing in farming. The seminars ran from 2006 – 2009 and brought together farmers, scientists, civil servants, NGO activists, and journalists. This evolved into ORFC, which, along with LEAP, became flagship programmes of the Real Farming Trust.
The Great Re-Think
As pioneering as this work was, we felt that EA taken alone did not go far enough. It didn’t explore the root causes of the crises confronting our food and farming system. For that we needed to ask the broader question: what are our underlying principles by which we should live? In The Great Re-Think, Colin argued that if we are to rescue the world we need a radical change of direction – nothing less than a Renaissance. And so, we now look towards a holistic transformation through agroecology and food sovereignty.
Selected Books by Colin Tudge
