What is the aim of the OFC?

At the start of the year, farmers in the UK are assessing how they will approach the next 12 months. What really gives Oxford an edge is its timing. It is always in the first week in January, so farmers celebrate New Year, come straight to Oxford and then go straight back to work.

We hope that Oxford gives them a bit of inspiration at just the right time. We aim to kickstart their year - it is an opportunity to sit and listen and take the time out to discover how you can take your business to a different dimension.

Farmers are very good businessmen, but they need inspiration in order to add value and learn how to do things differently. They can learn from hearing case studies of other businesses, see how theirs stand up in comparison and how they can add value to what they do.

Can you tell FPJ readers what the 2009 event will entail?

The theme for 2009, ‘The Future of Farming is in your Hands’, will explore how British farmers and growers can respond to global market forces, might profit from consumer choice and how differing approaches to food and rural policy will continue to shape agriculture post-devolution. We want to take the delegates through a funnel almost - starting with a global perspective, a European outlook through a multinational business to a national one and then down to case studies of smaller businesses. We have three agriculture ministers speaking, including DEFRA secretary of state Hilary Benn.

ágúst Gudmundsson, chief executive at Iceland-based Bakkavör, is representing the multinational business. Bakkavör is a leading international food manufacturing company specialising in fresh prepared foods and produce. ágúst will talk about the impact of the changes in the global food market on agricultural and food businesses.

Both ágúst and I sit on the Rabobank Agricultural Advisory Board. It was there that I heard him stand up and talk about his business and I was amazed - how can there be a business of this size and capacity operating in the UK and much of the farming industry not really know about it? I feel that every farmer in the country needs to know what ágúst and his brother have done with their business. It is an absolutely incredible story - they marched into a mature market and revolutionised it. Why did it take an Icelandic business to come to the UK and show us how to provide the link between retailers and growers?

Bakkavör is now a global farming company with firms doing everything from ready meals to bagged salads. Few farmers in the meat or arable sectors have ever heard of them - but in the produce industry, very few companies do not supply them somewhere along the way.

Now there is the added dimension of how the financial crisis has affected the banking sector in Iceland for ágúst to talk about.

Charles Wilson, ceo of Booker, is going to address the conference, as well as LEAF farmers Rob Addicott and Jeremy Padfield, who will discuss how they have engaged with the local community surrounding their Somerset farms to improve the understanding and support for British farming. Rob and Jeremy farm in partnership and also supply food products to local schools via the Bath District Farmers buying and marketing group.

We are already ahead of where we were on bookings at this time last year, so if anyone in the fresh produce industry wants to hear ágúst speak, they need to book their place now.

What are the biggest challenges farmers are facing today?

Keeping prices as low as possible while input costs go up. Retailers are under pressure and this will inevitably put pressure on the supply chain. But in this economic climate, we all know that shoppers need a break too.

The EU is relaxing its rules on the shape and uniformity of certain fresh fruits and vegetables so now we have to think about what we can do with that. Wasting food is the worst thing we do in the developed world and the new marketing standards should go some way to helping stop that.

In the last two years, the weather has been disastrous for the fresh produce sector, not just from the point of view of growing but also consumer demand - when it is cold and wet, they eat fewer salads and summer fruits. I am really hoping for a reasonable summer in 2009 - while growers are learning to cope with the variable climate in terms of their growing technique, it is consumers’ lack of demand we really need to worry about.

Seasonal labour is also a massive issue. A lot of farmers just want to get on with marketing their product but you have to look out for politics all the time. While trade associations and lobby groups like the National Farmers’ Union are important, the government needs concrete examples from farming businesses of how a lack of seasonal labour has affected them. It is much more convincing.

What do you see as opportunities for growth for British farming?

Using the whole crop. The EU has redressed that a bit with its relaxation of the marketing standards, but there are plenty of willing retailers still looking for more ideas about how to make use of the whole crop.

We must also keep spreading the season in the UK and protect more and more of our crops from the weather.

Something I am tremendously excited about at the moment is the prospect of constructing greenhouses heated by waste heat from power generation or anaerobic digestion.

What is your key agenda for 2009?

Reducing waste - not just of food, but also how we do business and harnessing energy usage.

There are still a lot of efficiencies to be found in the supply chain - suppliers, farmers and retailers need to adopt a partnership approach and trust each other. They need to pool ideas to get prices down and find a collaborative approach. The supply chain must work together.

Lots of businesses waste money waiting for orders - packers go to huge lengths to deliver the exact order 100 per cent of the time, but frequently estimate the order and then have people waiting for it to arrive to top up the estimate and get it perfect. We need to get everybody together to try and reduce the cost of all this wasted time.

The Co-operative Farms is doing a lot of work with local community projects - can you tell us about some of these please?

A co-operative is different from other retailers in that a proportion of the profits are divided between members and community projects.

One of our farms started off the From Farm to Fork scheme for us, an educational project that involves youngsters coming to the farm, understanding how things are grown, cooking food so they can see how products link to what they eat and learning about the importance of a healthy diet.

The scheme has a huge impact on the children - we always get them to eat something new and they go away with a different approach to vegetables. On our apple farm we show them how to make their own fruit juices and on our arable farm we show them how to mill flour and then make healthy pizzas with wholegrain wheat, vegetables, etc.

We now have seven farms involved in this scheme and in 2009 we will have the capacity to take 26,000 children to our farms. The next challenge is how to get the information out to even more children.

How important is sourcing British food to The

Co-operative?

The Co-operative has seen a big increase in the last few years in getting more British products on to its shelves. Apples are a clear example of this. The Co-operative Farms has two potato packhouses, one in Scotland and one in the Midlands, both of which source as near as possible to the packhouse. We grow broccoli and pumpkins on our farm in Wisbech, which we supply to Co-operative shops in the Eastern region. Our fruit farm in Herefordshire is dedicated to preserving old varieties: in 2008 we bought 1,000 heritage varieties from the Brogdale fruit collection and are raising money to buy a further 1,000. We have made cider and apple juice from apples on the farm, but they have proved so popular that they are now available nationally.

The Co-operative has 1,500 local and regional products in our stores.

As manager of the UK’s largest farming operation, what do you feel is the general consensus among the growing industry towards genetic modification?

The general feeling I get from talking to farmers, unless they are organic, is that there is a quite lot of support out there for GM. Farmers are very dependent on scientific progress - they need to increase yields, uniformity and resilience to disease, and that is all dependent on science.

We have access to the volume of food we do today because of science and a lot of farmers simply see GM as the next step.

The EU’s proposals to drastically reduce the amount of pesticides available to farmers, which would make it impossible to grow some products in this country, may force us even faster down the GM route.

The Co-operative has 3.1 million active members, however, and they are against GM, much like the general public - and we have to support and follow what our members say. Achieving acceptance of GM is a massive mountain to climb.

Personally, I believe that if GM is used to accelerate what could have been achieved naturally through plant crossing, then it should be allowed, but I think crossing species is a very concerning path to take. We need to help people understand the difference between playing with science and accelerating a natural breeding programme.

What would be your parting message for farmers and growers in the UK?

We will always need food, so stick with it. The pressure on prices is going to be phenomenal in the short term, but don’t panic - work out how you can cut waste out of your business and keep innovating.