By Sophy Robinson
Sophy is a former trustee of Humanists UK and she has worked for many years as a performance coach in large global corporate and UK public sector organisations. In this article, she asks whether ambitious rewilding schemes are just a diversion for wealthy landowners who can turn their acres from less profitable farms to investing in ecotourism, with rewilding as the badge of honour.
Rewilding is all the rage these days. Anyone with a garden lawn is encouraged to abandon the mower – to let the grass grow long, sow it with a variety of seeds and welcome the weeds! Formal garden beds can be allowed to run wild too, to allow insects and grubs to flourish and to provide habitats for birds and endangered creatures such as hedgehogs. We should embrace decay: “It is part of the natural cycle of returning nutrients to the ground, so try not to tidy up too much,” exhorts the website of “Rewilding Britain”, which sets out ten ways to help nature recover. We should leave dead branches, piles of leaves, and logs to rot. And if you have space, plant more native trees (such as silver birch, elderberry, rowan and crab apple) to sequester carbon and encourage diversity around your property. This accords with Humanist UK’s values which say we should be “accepting that human beings are part of a wider natural world which must be treated sustainably for the sake of current and future generations”.
This article explores the topic of “rewilding” which, according to ChatGPT, is “a conservation strategy that aims to restore natural processes and species to landscapes that have been degraded by humans. The goal is to create more biodiverse habitats by allowing nature to take care of itself.” But beyond our gardens, what about all the farmland in the UK? Should it be devoted to maximising food production so that we increase our self-sufficiency, and reduce the need to import food from overseas? Or should we modify the industrial approach to land management of the last few centuries and focus on nature and biodiversity?
As explored in my other article in this issue of Humanistically Speaking, many enlightened farmers have been changing their methods and “Regenerative Agriculture” is being introduced. But some landowners have gone a step further, and have rewilded most of their land. The Knepp Estate in Sussex is a high-profile example. Charlie Burrell and his wife Isabella Tree decided to largely abandon traditional farming and restore nature on their land. They published a book about their experiences in 2018 called Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, and in 2023 a film called Wilding was released. I saw the film, and went to visit the place last summer.
I should declare a professional interest here as a former grassland farmer in the New Forest, and I currently sit on the grant panel of a government-funded initiative called “Farming in Protected Landscapes” (FIPL). We fund ecologically-enhancing projects on New Forest farms, some of which involve aspects of rewilding. So I was very curious to see what is being done with the land (3,500 acres vs the 50 acres I managed) and what food is being produced. I also wanted to get some insights into how all this is funded.
The Knepp website sets out the context: “The land at Knepp is not conducive to modern intensive farming. 320 metres of heavy Low Weald clay over a bedrock of limestone, the soil is like concrete in summer and unfathomable porridge in winter. For 17 years after taking over the 3,500-acre estate from his grandparents in 1983, Charlie Burrell did his utmost to make Knepp Home Farm profitable but it was impossible to compete with larger, industrialised farms on better soils.”
In February 2000, they needed to clear their debts, so they decided to sell the dairy herds and farm machinery, and put the arable out to contract. Meanwhile, they learnt about a new approach to grazing animals promoted by Dutch ecologist Dr Frans Vera and, after visiting Oostvaardersplassen In the Netherlands, an area of wet, low-lying land which had been left to rewild itself, decided to change the way they farmed at Knepp.
The website describes how they started with a park restoration project, funded under a government stewardship scheme, which “provided a chance to look at the land in an entirely different way and suggested the possibility of rolling out nature conservation across the whole Estate”. This is described as “a ‘process-led’, non-goal-orientated project where, as far as possible, nature takes the driving seat”. It took another eight years for the government to fully recognise and fund the approach. And now, 23 years since they started to rewild the land, they claim: “It is now a leading light in the conservation movement, an experiment that has produced astonishing wildlife successes in a relatively short space of time and offers solutions for some of our most pressing problems – such as soil restoration, flood mitigation, water and air purification, pollinating insects, and carbon sequestration.”
I visited Knepp with a friend in June last year. We looked at the website and decided that rather than book one of the many official tours on offer, we would simply turn up and wander around. There are four themes: Visit, Stay, Eat and Shop, with a wilding kitchen and shop; accommodation in cabins and a camp site; safari tours; wild range meat to purchase; and rewilding. And this is the way that Knepp has pivoted to make it financially viable. It does get grants for various land, tree and water-based nature projects, but basically it is a wildlife theme and holiday home/camping park, with café facilities and a retail outlet. Safaris run from dawn to dusk (including wild horses, longhorn cattle, beavers, nightingales, white stork, butterflies, moths and bats) costing £70-175 per person depending on the theme and duration. A tour of the rewilded garden is £45. A stay in one of two cabins for two people out of season (say February or October) costs £600-800 for 3/4 nights. It is fully booked from April to September this year. A long weekend campsite spot for four people in April costs £300, with firewood, kindling, charcoal and breakfast baskets available to purchase. You can “glamp” in a treehouse in August for around £600. There are also shepherds huts, bell tents and yurts.
During our three-hour walk we veered slightly off the official mapped paths to see the castle where the Burrells live in the distance: but otherwise we saw a handful of deer, a few Exmoor ponies, and a pig snoozing and cooling off in a stream with her piglets cavorting nearby. The most interesting sight was the white storks nesting in the park’s tall trees, which would take flight outstretching their wings and legs, and circle over our heads. Otherwise we saw a lot of grass, weeds, brambles, scrub, bushes and trees on land with few contours – not, we agreed as keen walkers, the most interesting of countryside to explore. Perhaps one of the estate's safari tours is the best way to engage with the rewilding agenda. Nature left to its own devices may not create glorious vistas, and wildlife is notoriously hidden from the prying eyes of visitors. But it can also be cruel: Oostvaardersplassen (which inspired the changes at Knepp), became very controversial after hundreds of animals starved and died. Arguments still rage in the Netherlands about how to “manage” rewilding and get the right balance of habitats for birds and invertebrates, as well as for grazing animals. The dream of creating a truly “natural state” has been abandoned, and the park is now actively managed by park rangers with the term “nature development” being used instead of rewilding.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Anselm Guise is planning to rewild a portion of the 250 acres of the Gloucestershire estate he inherited. Like Knepp, it will include rare breeds of grazing animals harvested for meat. And it is reported that his plans also include earning ecotourism income from six new luxury treehouses with decks overlooking the rewilding site, with the added novelty of a floating sauna in a wild swimming pool.
According to an article in The Times last year, one quarter of Europe is fit for rewilding projects to help species from wolves and bison to beavers. While much research has focused on how to manage rewilding, less has been done on where to prioritise efforts. To identify that, two academics in Portugal and Spain drew up a list of criteria to identify how much land in Europe could be rewilded.
They estimated that the equivalent of 25 per cent of Europe’s land was suitable (117 million hectares) with the biggest potential in Scotland, Scandinavia and the Baltic states, as well as several mountainous regions in Spain and Portugal. However, in England there are only about 158 hectares in Northumberland, with no suitable land at all in Wales. Their analysis involved dividing Europe up into units of a square kilometre, and then mapping human influences in those squares. These influences included infrastructure from buildings and agriculture to roads and pylons. Land judged as suitable had to have a low level of human impact. “Many animals need huge spaces to prey and thrive – wolves, for example, need at least 10,000 hectares. But there are more opportunities than we thought originally,” said Miguel Araújo, a professor of biogeography at the National Museum of Natural Sciences, Madrid. “I was surprised by the Baltic states being so good potentially for rewilding. In Eastern Europe, the Balkans have lots of potential with rewilding. Scandinavia is by far the biggest, roughly half the area. Scotland also stands out; it has large patches: 19,245 of the country’s 78,953 hectares have potential.”
There are about 1,000 rewilding schemes in the UK, according to the charity Rewilding Britain. Projects range from Lamlash Bay on the Isle of Arran, where fishing is banned to protect maerl beds – a rare pink seaweed – to Doddington Hall near Lincoln, which is turning former farmland over to wood pasture and wetland. Charlie Burrell of Knepp has already embarked on his next scheme. He’s set up an investment vehicle called Nattergal – which is backed by environmental financier Ben Goldsmith, solar entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett, and Peter Davies of hedge fund Lansdowne Partners. in 2022, they bought the 1,525-acre productive Lincolnshire Boothby Lodge farm for nearly £14m, and will stop the conventional arable farming to make money by rewilding the land. They will generate revenue from the sales of carbon credits and new biodiversity credits awarded for the restoration of nature. Other potential revenues could come from new “biodiversity net gain” payments by house builders; funds for flood relief, improving water quality and soils, free-range meat production and ecotourism.
The Nattergal commercial model aims to return mid to high single digit financial returns to investors, so that rewilding projects like this don’t just depend on the wealthy and philanthropists. There will be some funding from the government’s post-Brexit Environmental Land Management Scheme, but income from other sources is needed. When ponds are restored, drains blocked to rewet the land, wild flowers seeded and trees planted, the plan is to introduce free-roaming cattle and ponies to graze the land – similar to the approach at Knepp. The aim is to achieve a biodiversity uplift of more than 400 per cent in terms of abundance, species diversity and rare species, with birds such as cuckoos and turtle doves thriving. Nattergal is looking for at least two more large farms in Britain. Once they have proof of concept of the investment model, they also hope to expand into Europe. And while many flock to the Knepp Estate, which gets very booked up with people keen to engage with the biodiversity uplift there, expanding the approach does remain controversial.
What’s the best way forward for British farmland? Is it there principally to produce local food for the population, albeit with less nature-destructive agricultural practices? Should we reduce our carbon footprint by being even more focused on reducing food miles, and just growing and selling seasonal produce? Or should we increasingly be stepping back and allowing nature to take over, returning fields to open pastures which only produce high-end free-range meat as food? While we might all be able to let our gardens return to nature and encourage wildlife, are these grand schemes just a diversion for wealthy landowners who can turn their acres from less profitable farms to investing in ecotourism, with rewilding as the badge of honour?
Further information
Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm by Isabella Tree published 2018 by Pan Macmillan, Picador
Wilding 2023 documentary film available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, BFI etc.
https://www.tatler.com/article/anselm-guise-rewild-elmore-court-gloucestershire
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