While DEFRA develops its ‘Food 2030’ strategy to increase food production, first hand experience of what some of the Eastern Region’s farmers have in store will be revealed at the Norfolk Farming Conference on 25th February.
 
Richard Garrod, Alastair Kerr, Rob Mutimer and Ed Wharton - whose forward-looking farm businesses have been captured for the conference on short video clips by LandSkills East - will take to the stage for interactive discussions with conference chairman Guy Smith about their wide variety of production and diversification from traditional crops to bird feed, blackcurrants, beef and farm shops.
 
Guy Smith, Essex farmer and award-winning journalist, who is chairing the conference for the third year running, said:

"It seems an awful long time since we have heard politicians urging farmers to grow more.  For some of us such words are a bit like our roads of late ‘best taken with a bit of salt’.  Either way as we put a difficult decade behind us we look forward, in hope, to a new one.  
 
“At this year's Norfolk Farming Conference we have brought together those who have a bit of 2020 vision and the younger generation of farmers who will have most to win or lose from the next ten years. Just as a new decade concentrates the mind, so too does an election year and so in the afternoon we have assembled a pack, or is it a quarry, of politicians for a question time session."
 
The conference titled ‘20/20 Vision for 2010’, takes place on 25th February at the John Innes Centre, Norwich.   
 
Organised by Anglia Farmers, Norfolk County Council and Shaping Norfolk’s Future, the annual event is sponsored by Brown & Co, Lovewell Blake, Birketts LLP, NatWest and LandSkills East.  
 
More information can be found at www.norfolkfarmingconference.org <http://www.norfolkfarmingconference.org> .