WILDING: THE RETURN OF NATURE TO A BRITISH FARM
ISABELLA TREE, PICADOR, £20 (HB)
Despite their best efforts, Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell found that their 3,500 intensively farmed acres in Sussex kept losing money. Costs were soaring; markets against them. “We had hit the buffers,” she writes. What the couple did next is an inspiring story that leading conservationists are calling a “new hope” for our countryside.
Isabella and Charlie decided their Knepp estate would be run with – not against – nature. In 2000 they sold all their equipment to embark on a ‘handsoff’ naturalistic grazing project, using free-roaming herds of Exmoor ponies, English longhorn cattle, Tamworth pigs, fallow and red deer. Fences were ripped up, drains removed, a river rewilded, all management kept to a bare minimum.
As the land was “released from its cycle of drudgery”, it became a complex wood pasture, with waist-high grasses and rooks and jackdaws riding the backs of fallow deer. Threatened species began flocking back. Knepp is Britain’s best site for purple emperor butterflies and one of only two places where nightingales are rebounding. Turtle doves purr from patches of scrub.
An unputdownable book, Wilding thrillingly proves that “post-agricultural” land can turn a profit, thanks to income from organic meat, glamping and safaris, backed by enlightened subsidies. Ben Hoare, BBC Wildlife