OGI Conference 2024

Our 2024 OGI Conference  will take place on Tuesday, 26 November 2024 at Killruddery, Bray, Co. Wicklow.

This year’s conference will feature:

Ben Raskin, Soil Association, Keynote speaker

John McCormick, Helen’s Bay Organic

Alice Rixon, The Veg Lady

Speakers

Ben Raskin, Soil Association
Ben Raskin has worked in the commercial growing world for nearly 30 years and has a wide range of practical horticultural experience, starting his career growing vegetables for chefs, box schemes and farm shops. He now focuses mainly on integrating trees into farming systems.

He is Head of Agroforestry for the Soil Association and keeps his hand in on the field implementing a pioneering agroforestry system on a 1500 acre farm in Wiltshire. He also works as an independent advisor, trainer and author, writing books for children and grownups, including most recently “Silvohorticuture”, “The Woodchip Handbook” and “Plant a Tree – Retree the World”.

John McCormick, Helen’s Bay Organic

John McCormick established Helen’s Bay Organic Farm in 1991. Situated on 20 acres of fields adjacent to Belfast Lough in Helen’s Bay, Co. Down, it produces over 50 varieties of organic fruit and vegetables for delivery around Belfast and beyond, with a farm shop click & collect service.

Alice Rixon, aka ’The Veg Lady’

Alice Rixon is an entrant farmer who is working to support a biodiverse community of life on and around her 7-acre vegetable farm in Chettle, Dorset (UK). Growing in polytunnels and at field scale, Alice is working to establish a resilient food system for the inhabitants of the village and surrounding areas whilst celebrating the joy of vegetables in all colours and forms. 

Inspiration to begin farming came whilst working in food factories, where she observed vast quantities of processed food get wasted because it didn’t fit supermarket specifications including raw ingredients that had been grown and shipped from all over the world. Alice decided that ‘innovation’ wasn’t the answer and that instead our solutions lay within more traditional methods of growing food and living as a community.

 Alice hopes her co-creative relationship with her landlady can inspire other landowners to think outside the box in supporting young growers to get into small-scale organic farming and build more future-proofed, localised food systems that support farmers as well as consumers.