[Diggers350] 2026 Land Justice gathering THIS WEEK! Fri18-Sun20 Sep, Bamford, Derbyshire

Mon Sep 14 12:48:47 BST 2026

 ----- Forwarded message ----- !LESS THAN A WEEK'S NOTICE! --------- From: Land Justice Newsletter <landjusticenewsletter at substack.com>Sent: Monday, 14 September 2026 at 09:05:46 BSTSubject: Land Justice Newsletter - Autumn 2026The first edition of the Land Justice Newsletter: the place to stay up-to-date with land news, actions, events, opportunities, and resources across the British Isles.͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     
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Land Justice Newsletter - Autumn 2026

The first edition of the Land Justice Newsletter: the place to stay up-to-date with land news, actions, events, opportunities, and resources across the British Isles. 

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Welcome to the Land Justice Newsletter
Contents

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Welcome

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Movement news

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Movement strategy

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Land justice news

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Feature

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Events, opportunities, and funding

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Offers and needs board

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Land Justice learning

Welcome

Hello and a very warm welcome to the Land Justice Newsletter. To those of you who remember our first iteration, welcome back. To the many who have subscribed over the last few years, greetings for the first time.

Land justice is shifting how we relate to land, redistributing who has access to it, and ensuring we all belong to it. The land justice movement is continually emerging. It connects people across diverse social and environmental justice intersections, including food and farming, racial justice and decolonial practice, housing justice, climate and energy, abolition, class and wealth justice, migrant and traveller rights, international solidarity and community work. People in the movement gather once a year to share, inspire, create, organise, and take action together (see the 2026 gathering below!). But we also need to connect beyond and between gatherings.

The Land Justice Newsletter will be the place to stay up-to-date with news, actions, events, opportunities, and resources across the British Isles. It will share stories by and for people and groups working on land justice, keep the movement connected and informed, and support change in how people think, talk, and act around land. It’s part of the work to build a broad and vibrant movement to change the land system.

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 Setting up camp at the Land Justice Gathering 2025
Who are we?

We are Sam, Liv, Christabel, and Ferdia. We connected at the 2025 Land Justice Gathering, at The Beeches in The Peak District. 

Sam is a freelance journalist exploring social and ecological justice, based at the Beeches. Liv has a background in community-led housing and tackling fuel poverty. Christabel works for the wonderful Shared Assets, and played a leading role in coordinating last year’s gathering. Ferdia developed and edited an earlier land justice newsletter, and is excited to be part of its evolution. 

We are a voluntary team spread across Bamford, Oxford, Sheffield, and Machynlleth. If you’d like to join us in putting the newsletter together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

What next?

Starting in autumn 2026, expect four newsletters each year coinciding with the changing of the seasons.

We’re open to including anything that people across the movement may find helpful. If you have any projects, opportunities, or ideas to include in our next newsletter (beginning of December) please share them with us at landjusticenewsletter at protonmail.com.

If you have friends or colleagues who would appreciate being kept in the loop, please spread the word or forward them the newsletter.

As the season turns, lots of things are stirring across the movement. We hope your own ideas and projects are gathering energy. We can’t wait to see the newsletter and the movement grow!
Pledge your support
Movement news

Each edition, this section will include updates from within the land justice movement.

Land Justice Gathering 2026

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 Around the campfire at the Land Justice gathering 2025
Last year’s gathering saw a move towards action and planning (including this newsletter).

The next Land Justice Gathering will take place from 18th to 20th September 2026, at The Beeches in Bamford.

We want to continue learning from and about each other and being inspired. We know there are histories yet to uncover, and that stories can take us far. We also know that when we work together we need to be strategic, to use our energies to generate power, to move in directions that create ripples and eventually make systems crumble and fall. We know we need to be bigger and more coordinated. This is an invite only event, so that there is a representative of people attending from across the movement. If you would like to join, please let us know by contacting christabel at sharedassets.org.uk. 

This year we propose three objectives:

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The main objective is to build action strategically, focusing on a collective vision and how we organise to make that happen.

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Hold learning and imagining spaces which connect to the past and present and inspire us in our work. Learning and inspiration taken from resistance, acts of solidarity, organising methods, and political demands can support us to work together. We want to hear from people from different places and times, about what has worked well and less well.

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Get to know each other even better, cook and eat together, and have fun.

Updates from last year’s working groups

Programming group

The Programming group have been meeting at least once a month to pull together objectives, focus, and a call for submissions for the gathering. Based on feedback from last year, this year there is a focus on strategy, responding to the movement strategy process for food, farming, and land (see below).

Mapping group 

The Mapping group have put together a plan to communicate with existing people and organisations using an online map, with the view to revitalising it with relevant and current information before the gathering.

Care and Accountability group

The Care and Accountability group is setting up an in-person meeting to focus on anti-oppression practice and reflect on conflict support and organising structures for the upcoming gathering. Watch this space!

Movement strategy

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 Talking strategy at the Land Justice Gathering 2025
This section will take a more strategic look at how the movement is evolving.

The Movement Strategy Process connects diverse UK organisations, projects, organisers, collaborative networks, and alliances across food, farming, and land into a more coherent and strategic movement with more collective power. The project is led by Christabel Buchanan at Shared Assets and Ali Taherzadeh, in collaboration with Paul Kahawatte and Ama Crowe at Navigate Coop.

The first big step in this process was a 3-day Movement Strategy Gathering in March 2026. Since April 2025, we have been working with Landworkers’ Alliance, Community Supported Agriculture Network, Emergent Generation, Real Farming Trust, Solidarity Across Land Trades, Sustain, Pathways to Land, Food Ethics Council, and Social Farms and Gardens. We have now inducted 14 new organisations, bringing us to 23: Ecological Land Coop, Northern Food and Farming Network, Food Sense Wales, Organic Growers Alliance, Shared Assets, UBI4Farmers, Miknaf Ha’aretz, Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union, Nourish Scotland, Gaia Foundation, Pasture for Life, Community Land Trust Network, Open Food Network, and Better Food Traders.

Participants in this process believe that together we can shift the way we work, distribute resources, and enact strategy, both collectively and within our organisations. Over the coming years we aim to build sustainable and healthy systems for coordinating action, messaging, convening, and strategic planning. Initial coordination will support the foundations of a strong movement with a healthy working culture and a clear direction – ready for more organisations to join later.

During the initial stages we mapped the food, farm, and land ecosystem and organisational roles to understand each other better including different pathways and tactics. This will support ongoing and effective collaboration that prioritises action, organises around themes and in coalitions, avoids duplicating efforts, and addresses power and resource imbalances into the longer term.

We believe that we can break down organisational silos and deepen our commitment to a positive shared vision which engages the mainstream and gives us real power to challenge unjust systems and the narratives of the far right.

At the gathering in March, one of the strategic-action groups focussed on land as an ecological commons - more news on this as the work develops at the Land Justice Gathering!

Thanks for reading Land Justice Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.
Pledge your support
Land justice news

This section will feature some of the most important land justice news and headlines since the last newsletter. 

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 Beautiful Bamford
Pathways to Land

In the Spring, the Pathways to Land team, Jo Kamal and Nicola Scott, began delivering some of the recommendations from the initial scoping stage of their work in late 2024, to begin supporting those underrepresented in farming to access land. Partnering with Landmatch England, Pathways to Land provides bespoke support for a group of experienced BPOC growers and/or those on a low income seeking land in northwest or southwest England, to begin their land-access journeys.

So far their programme has delivered facilitated peer-learning sessions to hear about participants’ future farming plans and support needs. Experts have also delivered two online training sessions, on finding land for small-scale agroecological farms and on collectively organising and stewarding land.

“It’s been great to hear about the brilliant ideas the cohort has about their farming goals across urban, peri-urban, and rural areas,” Nicola reflects. “The Pathways to Land team look forward to meeting them at upcoming farm visits in the NW and SW!”

For more information about Pathways to Land, contact nicola at pathwaystoland.org or visit Landmatch England’s website if you’re a landseeker.

Land Registry to open up

The government has announced that the Land Registry will be opening up – something people in the land-justice movement have been pushing for for years. This is to enable the government’s new Land Use Framework for England. It’s a cause for celebration for people challenging systems of land ownership and use in the UK. Campaigner Guy Shrubsole has more to say on this here.

Launch of Land Justice Charter London

Land Justice London have spent many months developing this charter, starting with ideas from the Land Justice Fair, and then with many discussions within the Land Justice London group. You can download the charter here.

We are now beginning to gather supporters which currently include: Friends of Queen’s Market, Granville Community Kitchen, Haringey Solidarity Group, Healthy Living Platform Lambeth, Homes For All, Incredible Edible Lambeth, Just Space, London Federation of Tenants, London Mining Network, Past Tense, Rebel City, Solidarity Across Land Trades (SALT), Thames Life Community Development Trust (Barking Riverside and Thames View).

If you, or your organisation, wants to endorse this charter, contact landjusticelondon at gmail.com.

Feature

Each newsletter will include a written feature by somebody in the movement. For this edition, Rohan, an organiser from grassroots trade union Solidarity Across Land Trades, writes about the dire situation facing UK land workers – and the limited discussion of this even in alternative food spaces like the Oxford Real Farming Conference. 

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  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?

Solidarity Across Land Trades (SALT) is a grassroots trade union organising for fairer conditions, solidarity, care and justice. SALT is a collective of workers, trainees, freelancers, co-op members and volunteers who are employed by others in land-related trades fighting for better standards of pay, working conditions and cultures within our sectors, support our members with workplace issues and build community between landworkers and wider social justice movements.

Find out more about how to join here.

Events, opportunities, and funding

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Land Justice Gathering, Bamford, 18-20 September.

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Wales Real Food & Farming Conference: 18–19 November 2026.

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The National Lottery Climate Action Fund. Receive up to £7m over 5 years for collaborative food system work. If you have ideas and would like to join others to put in a bid, please contact christabel at sharedassets.org.uk as there are already conversations happening.

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Trust for London funding. Opportunities for organisations fighting for economic and social justice in London.

Offers and needs board

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This section will include a list of things people across the movement need or are offering. Think places to meet, resources, equipment, contacts, skills, or training. If you are in need of something to help you in your organisation, this is a place to reach out and ask for it!

This board is for non-commercial offers, so if there is usually a fee attached please be mindful to make the offer suitable. Your request or offer will go out to lots of amazing people across the movement!

Land Justice learning

A summary of other media worth reading, watching, or listening to around land justice.

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The new Roaming Voices podcast features stories from the UKs traveller communities.

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Common People - A Folk History of Land Rights, Enclosure and Resistance is a visual journey through the history of the enclosure of common land in England, and the stories of those who have attempted to resist.

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Recording of webinar on movement strategy - link here. Passcode: 2UZd+Zq*

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Our Land Film - autumn screenings here.

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