Rewilding and farming are often portrayed as opposites, but how true is this in reality, and is it possible that they can work together in harmony?
Naturally it's important to specify what is meant by rewilding, but this is by no means an easy task. It is a fuzzy concept which changes depending on context, and this often makes it difficult to get a handle on the wider debate which it is at the centre of.
Springwatch presenter Chris Packham, in a video published by Rewilding Britain, describes it as "taking areas of land, and trying to bring them back into a more natural ecosystem." This might involve, he says, the reintroduction of native plant and animal species.
Rewilding Europe refer to it as a "progressive approach to conservation," which is about "letting nature take care of itself." Again, humans might need to give a helping hand, for example through species reintroduction or the removal of dams to free up rivers.
Clearly, therefore, the term leaves a lot of room to manoeuvre, though its general slipperiness hasn't stopped the rewilding movement from gathering pace in recent times. The 2013 book Feral, by The Guardian's George Monbiot, calls for a wilder Britain, and was the inspiration behind the organisation Rewilding Britain, formed two years later. The Lynx UK Trust sprang up in 2014 and aims to bring the cat back to these shores, while there are plans to bring wolves back to the Scottish Highlands.
Despite all the online traffic that rewilding now generates, however, I've found it quite difficult to determine, amid all the rhetoric and bluster, what exactly the various groups involved in the rewilding debate are trying to achieve and how rewilding might work in practice.
Will it mean allowing nature to reclaim huge swathes of land, or can farmers and the landscape coexist? After all, humans may be deeply-flawed creatures, but they are surely as much a part of the landscape of this planet as any animal.
Tim Birch, who works for the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust and is a prominent supporter of rewilding, says that in some upland areas it is best to let nature "take control." He argues that hill sheep farming - subsidised in part by the taxpayer - is uneconomic, and ultimately taxes are being spent on something which negatively impacts the environment.
"In areas like the uplands and the Peak District there are opportunities to do something quite big on a landscape scale. That would involve significantly reducing, for example, sheep numbers. Because grazing in these areas I think has had a massive impact on the landscape," he said.
However Annie Meanwell, owner of Low Borrowbridge Farm in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, takes a different stance:
"It absolutely infuriates me when people say that my farm should be given over to rewilding. I'm 48 this year - it's taken me this long to get a decent-sized farm of my own. And somehow, because we're in a National Park, people think that they have a kind of ownership over it.
"The main issue that I have with these rewilding people is that I don't think they understand at all how much farmers do for the environment," she added.
Annie addressed George Monbiot's description of a 'sheepwrecked' landscape in a 2015 article, and the public reaction to this piece has led to her giving guided tours of her farm to show people its wild areas, as well as to two books.
I interviewed the custodians of two other farms, undocumented by the mainstream media, to find out if and how rewilding and humans might live together because, unless we all convert to veganism as George Monbiot has done (nearly), then we shall still require livestock to produce food for the foreseeable future. I was also keen to know how rewilding might look on a smaller scale than at the Knepp Estate - a 3,500 acre project in West Sussex which, although undoubtedly a success, was blessed with ample land and finances to begin with.
Rosewood Farm
Despite nearly colliding with a tractor as I rumble down the narrow lanes which meander up to Rosewood, I arrive in one piece - though I find myself immediately instructed to drive back the way I came.
Rob Rose, the owner of the farm, quickly explains to me that he and ex-wife Natalie - the more talkative of the pair, as will be made clear by the number of quotes attributed to each - graze some land for Natural England around 8 miles away, and this is what they would like to show me. They were approached by the organisation in 2012 after word spread about the work they were doing at their small farm, situated just outside the village of Ellerton, about 10 miles South of York.
After driving to this piece of land, I immediately see the style of farming deployed by Rob and Natalie reflected in the view. Instead of the pristine and universally chomped fields which are a staple of livestock farms in the UK, there are clumps of long grass sprouting hither and thither alongside the hay, creating a patchwork landscape. It might be less aesthetically pleasing than what I've seen before, but it certainly looks more natural.
The scene has been created by what Rob and Natalie call 'high intensity, low frequency' farming, developed from the 'mob stocking' system used by Joel Salatin in America. Instead of remaining in one place, the cows are herded into new paddocks - created using movable electric fences - every few days, so that they are continually grazing a different part of the landscape. This gives already-grazed land time to recuperate and, according to Natalie, creates a haven for wildlife:
"Grassland is a natural habitat. With rewilding there's kind of a worship of a woodland habitat. But nature creates these niches, and grassland is a legitimate niche.
"People see it as 'just grass,' as if there's one type of grass, and a handful of things might live in it. It's absolutely bursting with species though. Once you go out there and look - there's so many birds, flowers, insects, plants and everything," she says.
Indeed, across the course of a couple of hours I myself see, in no particular order: herons, a hare, a buzzard and a pair of deer. Rob and Natalie tell me the farm gets a variety of other wildlife too, ranging from barn owls to snipe and curlews.
The pair try to make the farm operate sustainably in other ways as well, avoiding the use of herbicides, pesticides and synthetic fertilisers, and only operating small tractors to reduce their carbon footprint.
"I'd defy anyone in this country to find a food production system that is better for the environment," says Natalie.
She feels that the techniques used at Rosewood make it a kind of halfway-house between two extremes: intensive farming at one end and "purist, humans may have no input" rewilding at the other.
"We should probably get away from binaries like that, and try and meet in the middle. It's a really mushy, cliched message. But I think the word is contact zones. Find that contact zone where farming and rewilding can meet in the middle, and that will probably please most parties," says Natalie.
Asked if Rosewood Farm is itself a "contact zone", she answers with a resounding yes.
Favouring environmentally-friendly methods instead of squeezing every last drop they can from the land, however, has had knock-on effects for Rob and Natalie financially.
According to the latter, they "get by" but no more. She adds: "If you want a lavish lifestyle - and by lavish I mean cinema, restaurants, a nice new car, that kind of thing - forget this.
"If you stick to the limits of what the land will naturally provide, you're going to have a lesser amount of product, and that's just the way it is."
The high cost of rural housing has also proven to be prohibitively expensive, with Rob currently living in a small cabin which he built at Rosewood to serve as an office. Natalie occupies a static caravan - bought off ebay - on-site with their six year-old daughter Ann, and has been looking for another job to supplement her income in recent months.
The pair claim they have also been affected by a general move towards eating less meat, with Rob saying they are "getting more customers, but their overall spend is less."
Natalie adds: "Our customers are typically the customers that care about where their food comes from, and they are the ones that are most vulnerable to messages in the media. And at the moment unfortunately things seem to have come down that meat is bad, no matter how it's produced.
"The customers that don't care are still buying the same intensive meat they always have. But our customers are cutting down. They see our product as a luxury, a dirty little secret kind of thing.
"We like to say instead of eat less meat, eat whatever you like, but look at how it's produced."
In the video below Tim Birch (Derbyshire Wildlife Trust) and Natalie discuss rewilding in the context of farming, and the future of the British countryside:
Village Farm
My interview with Rebecca Hosking came about because of the hashtag #agriwilding, which I encountered on Twitter while searching for farms practising rewilding on a smaller scale than the Knepp Estate. Keen to know more, I chased up a lead who pointed me in the direction of Village Farm.
It turns out that the terms #agriwilding and #farmingwithnature were coined by Rebecca and best-friend Tim Green, who together ran Village Farm in Exeter, Devon from 2013 until last year, when Tim was tragically killed in a tractor accident.
The two met while working for the BBC and travelled the world together filming for Sir David Attenborough. However, Rebecca said she became disillusioned with the work, which she felt didn't give an honest depiction of nature, and recalls driving through acres of palm oil plantations only to end up filming in a pocket of rainforest "the size of a football field."
"We [me and Tim] just thought we can't carry on making these lies anymore for the BBC, we actually need to do some good," she said.
The pair duly quit filming and ended up as tenant farmers at Village Farm in 2013, where they set about harmonising agriculture and rewilding (#agriwilding):
"I've always had this thing where I hated how we grow food in one sector of the landscape and then we have wildlife in another. And then I hated how you have a nature reserve, and then you have agricultural land. And the two never intertwine," said Rebecca.
As at Rosewood, the cornerstone of their work was an incarnation of rotational grazing (holistic planned grazing) where animals are regularly moved into new paddocks using electric fences, allowing the land to recuperate - as any individual piece is only grazed three days a year.
According to Rebecca, the fences perform the job of predators, which would move and tightly-bunch herds of big herbivores (for example: wildebeest) in the wild.
"On Village Farm, and still today, I made it more fun than saying 'fences'. I called our fences wolves and bears," she said.
Of course there is far more to this kind of regenerative, environmentally-friendly agriculture than simply grazing sheep rotationally. One of the first things Rebecca and Tim did was diversify the pasture by planting wheat and wildflower seed, while they used 'depolluting' plants such as chicory to collect nutrients from lower layers of soil which hadn't been ploughed - and generally ruined - by previous farmers.
Emma Olliff, who spent a number of months working at the farm, said: "It went from being completely barren, to there being skylarks in most of the fields. We had badgers, we had foxes, we had deer everywhere."
However, in order to make Village Farm a profitable enterprise, Rebecca said she was forced to spend most of her time marketing.
The farm had a highbrow clientele which took in Claridge's, Gourmet Goat at Borough Market and Poco in Bristol and in Hackney.
"It was all about the selling. When we did mutton, I called it maritime [mutton] because it sounded much nicer.
"We were getting far more per kilo on our animals than if we sold it locally," said Rebecca.
However, despite the hard-work it took to keep Village Farm afloat, Rebecca thinks that, for financial reasons, agriwilding is still a more practical answer to environmental degradation than rewilding in its 'purest' form. Campaigners such as Tim Birch have pointed to ecotourism, such as that generated by the white-tailed eagle reintroduction in Scotland, as a potential source of income for rewilded areas, but Rebecca said:
"Not all the places that rewild are going to get the ecotourists in to see it. A big glitch in rewilding is how are you going to make that work financially. And they [pro-rewilders] never have the answers."
"Agriwilding is a friend of rewilding. The two can marry," she added.
The Future?
The above feature suggests that rewilding and farming may well have a future together, though this might not please some members of the rewilding movement - George Monbiot recently inferred that livestock farming should be got rid of altogether, and it is true that a grazing system using moveable electric fences is still, to some extent, human-controlled and 'unwild'. However, other campaigners such as Tim Birch, who himself suggests that some areas of land should be given over entirely to natural processes, take a more diplomatic stance:
"I think the rewilding movement will offer the opportunity to create new alliances with land managers and with farmers, where I think we can actually work positively and constructively with them," he said.
Besides, according to Emma Olliff (Village Farm), Monbiot's arguments are counter-productive. She said:
"I dislike his attitude towards sheep-farming, and meat as well. His attitude that it's either nature vs. farmer is incorrect in my mind. There's actually a lot that farmers can do to benefit nature.
"It would be beneficial if he started to see them [farmers] as a custodian of the land rather than the enemy. He can be very divisive."
Brexit may well be a chance to address some of the structural issues recounted by my interviewees - in particular Natalie and Rob's trouble making their style of farming work financially, and Rebecca having to appeal to a very niche market to do so.
The UK will be leaving the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which provides subsidies to farmers in its member states. The government's '25 Year Environment Plan', published in January, proposed moving to a system of payment which would reward farmers for helping to restore the environment. The potential impact of Brexit on farming is addressed in greater depth in this article.
Clearly there is a long way to go, both with Brexit and in making techniques like agriwilding more practical. However, the Environment Plan does seem to recognise that farming has a role to play in the preservation and restoration of nature. Humans and wildlife alike all occupy this beautiful planet, and there seems no reason - particularly in lieu of the farming methods discussed in this article - why they cannot share a happy, united existence.
