Ex-Minister of State for UK Trade and Investment Lord Digby Jones will be among the speakers at a regional farming conference next month.

Tickets for this year’s Sentry Farming Conference are selling fast, organisers say.

The theme of the event, at Chilford Hall, Linton, Cambridgeshire, on February 8, is The Necessity for Change

“The theme reflects widespread concern at the financial crisis, problems with the euro and questions about climate change, as well as uncertainty surrounding agriculture and the CAP,” said conference chairman David Richardson.

Also among the speakers are Joanne Denney-Finch OBE, chief executive of IGD – the food industry’s research body and hub of best practice and Tom Vosa, who joined the National Australia Bank in 2001 as an economist and is now head of market economics, Europe.

Professor Mike Hulme, professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia and Bill Clark, who was appointed director of Brooms Barn Research Centre (a sub-station of Rothamsted Research) in 2007 will be there to talk about climate change and research respectively.

Tassos Haniotis, Director of the Economic Analysis, Perspectives and Evaluations Directorate in the Directorate General for Agriculture of the European Commission, and David Richardson, senior partner of a family farming operation in Norfolk complete the line-up