This article is taken from the May 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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On December 2021, a company called Nattergal, headed by Neil Perry, a former director of Barings and Solarcentury, made a successful bid for the 617-hectare Boothby Lodge Farm in south Lincolnshire. It looked a savvy purchase. The land is Grade 3, chalky till, limestone and clay.

Savills, the selling agents, highlighted the previous owner’s “exceptional soil husbandry”. Tests conducted every four years allowed for variable nutrient applications across the holding. The yields from the rotation of oilseed rape, spring barley, winter wheat, linseed and beans, are above average. Until the time of sale, the farm was in a countryside stewardship scheme: wild bird seed mixes and cover featured over part of the land; there were 12.89 hectares of permanent meadowland and semi-permanent pasture. The farm’s 21.5 hectares of woodland were well managed by a small pheasant shoot. In all, Boothby Lodge is just the “right” sort of farm to buy. Big enough to be financially viable, sufficiently fecund to be productive, justifying the price tag of £13.5 million. 

The curious thing is, Nattergal will not be farming here. Instead, they are going to shut the gate and walk away. Boothby Lodge is soon to become “Boothby Wildlands”.

This is no one-off. Sir Charlie Burrell, the non-executive chairman of Nattergal, turned his 1,400-hectare Knepp estate in West Sussex into the flagship for English rewilding. Knepp, an erstwhile mixed farm, became a place of wood pasture, free-roaming herbivores and reintroduced beavers. The enterprise now reportedly makes a 22 per cent profit margin, a figure way above anything that farming used to provide. These profits are largely thanks to Knepp’s well marketed nature tourism business — comprising “wild safaris”, camping, glamping, shop and sales of “wild meat”. 

Knepp punches above its weight for wildlife. In lush Dorset, former commercial lawyer turned green activist, Julia Davies, forked out £4 million to buy the 170 hectare Court Farm near Bere Regis for the Dorset Wildlife Trust. The dairy herd that once grazed there is no more, replaced by trees and scrub, seething with passerines. This pattern of millionaires purchasing agricultural land to “rewild” is highlighted by Will Matthews, a senior staffer at agents Knight Frank, who noted “I’ve had three A-list Hollywood film stars get in touch this year because they want to buy a farm and rewild it.” 

Unquestionably, post-1945 changes in farming practice and increased intensification have been leading factors in a near catastrophic decline in English biodiversity. Species that were commonplace in the mid-twentieth century — lapwings, house sparrows, starlings, great crested newts and dormice to name but a few — are now red-listed. If the Suffolk Wildlife Trust’s figures are accurate, my home county has lost 90 per cent of its wildflower meadows in 80 years. 

49 per cent of English woodland is unmanaged

Hedgerows that survived the post-war bulldozer have become unloved and neglected, 49 per cent of English woodland is unmanaged. Research by Dr Jill Edmondson at the University of Sheffield concluded that city allotments had healthier soil than that found in surrounding arable fields. Whilst not categorical, it indicated modern crop production was denuding the land through a combination of compaction, erosion and loss of organic matter. 

Action to combat biodiversity loss was slow to get going in England. This was not so surprising: the concerned voices of practical conservationists went largely unheard, lost amid the clamour over glitzier global matters. Holes in the ozone layer needed filling, gigatons of carbon required sequestering, Sting policed the Amazonian rain forests. Meanwhile the domestic destruction and pollution of habitats, declines in natural food sources and a growing imbalance in our ecosystems carried on apace. 

Politicians hate complicated problems, and the management of the British countryside was more problematic than most. It was generally accepted that British agriculture was in the place it was, environmentally speaking, largely due to factors out of the farmer’s own calloused hands. The EU’s common agricultural policy had for decades tacitly encouraged overproduction and environmentally damaging practices. 

The dominance of supermarkets created a spiral to the bottom in food pricing, effectively setting the market and squeezing farmers’ profit margins, with inevitable knock-on ill effects for wildlife. For farmers, it was hard to be green if the supermarkets forced them into the red. 

Changing the status quo and encouraging farmers to farm with nature would require uncomfortable and costly infrastructure change, not to mention the unpalatable spectre of voters having to pay the true price for their food. Biodiversity loss was not all down to the agrarians. The construction boom since the 1980s was all too profitable for the Treasury. The new homes that sprang up around the edges of nearly every market town saw 1.9 million hectares of grassland lost, replaced by countless estates named, without a hint of irony, Fieldfare Meadow and Peewit Place. When the rewilders came on the scene, with a solution filled with exotic fauna, regenerated woods and luxury yurts — all funded by the wealthiest in society, supplemented by charitable donations — little wonder the political class lapped up the notion faster than you can say “charismatic megafauna”.

Rewilding is doubtless an ecological model that is good for nature. It is not, however, that good for people’s bellies. The Government’s “Food Security Report” of 2021 revealed that domestic production accounts for only half of the food on our plates. More than 46 per cent is imported, the majority from Europe — a hangover from the Blair and Brown governments’ obsession with Danish bacon, Ukrainian wheat and Italian prosecco. As Putin’s invasion of Ukraine highlights, our supply chains and food security remain creaky at best and are swiftly impacted by global events. 

The effects of war, Covid and Brexit combined, leading to immediate shortages of vegetable oils, fertilisers, labour and biofuels, caused costs to spiral both here and across Europe. Shutting the gate on the productive Boothby Lodge farm and rewilding it may be good for wildlife, it may even become a profitable eco-tourism business like Knepp, but such ventures are dire for our food security. The question, therefore, is how do we increase our food resilience while reversing disastrous biodiversity loss? 

The Nature Friendly Farming Network (NFFN) is a farmer-led group promoting sustainable farming in the belief that profitable farming and nature can, and do, go hand in hand. Just down the lane from me, at Lodge Farm in Westhorpe, Patrick Barker farms with his cousin Brian. Patrick is one of the leads for NFFN. The “Barker Boys” have proved the efficacy of farming with nature since they took on the 533 hectares from their fathers. 

Patrick explains that their business ethos has four pillars. “Firstly, the farm has to be profitable,” and why not? Farming is a business not a charity. “Our other core drivers are the environment, carbon and making Lodge Farm a pleasant place in which to live and work.” 

Each decision they make is led primarily with an eye on costs. Then they question whether it harms the soil or pollutes water courses. Will it denude wildlife of food or habitat? If the answer to any of these is “yes”, then they mitigate or change the plan. The farm now maximises its production in the parts of the farm that yield a cost-effective return. In the margins and uneconomic, unproductive areas, the land is managed for wildlife. 

Rewilding relies upon the belief that nature will heal itself

The word “managed” is key. Rewilding relies upon the belief that nature will heal itself. That may be true in ten, 20 or Gaia knows how many decades, but clearly British wildlife doesn’t have that luxury of time. The Barker model puts as much effort into environmental land management as it does into crop production. This management of the whole farm ecosystem may not produce the bucolic natural landscapes the philanthropic rewilders dream of, but wildlife cares little for scenery. The infield perennial wildflower strips that the Barkers sow are not the charismatic meadows of yesteryear, but the pollinators don’t complain, nor do the predatory insects that feed on the aphids that plague the crops. 

The fields are squared-off with wide floral margins, butting up to well-managed hedges filled with linnets, corn bunting and yellowhammer. Small mammals thrive, as do the barn owls and kestrels in turn. These regulated fields, meanwhile, are more cost effective. Fewer turns are made by the tractor or combine harvester, which lessens the inputs of fuel and fertiliser. Lodge Farm at Westhorpe is now part of the High Suffolk Farm Cluster, supported by Nestle Purina. The cluster joins together like-minded farmers both physically and metaphorically. 

Nearly 4,000 hectares of Mid Suffolk farmland is now being worked on the mantra of farming with nature and similar farm clusters have sprung up from Cumbria to Cornwall. The Barkers have demonstrated that the model works here. They have a profitable farm and the data sets of bird, mammal and wildflower show a year-on-year upward trend. Dormice are back in Suffolk and they are living in my laid hedges. 

The cluster model ensures nature recovery becomes landscape in scale. It also guarantees that you and I will still have British food on our plates, regardless of Russian despots or global pandemics. This does not mean that rewilding is a dead duck, but to hold it up as the panacea to nature recovery avoids the realities of food security. 

Removing Boothby Lodge from our agricultural portfolio and rewilding it throws the baby out with the bathwater. Nature doesn’t need less farming in Britain, it merely needs us to farm better.