You can have biodiversity – and quality meat
REWILDING need not mean the cessation of farming and the surrender of farmland to wilderness – not when hardy native breeds of livestock can be used as modern day equivalents of the wild grazing animals of old.
Conventional rewilding seeks to remove or reduce human intervention in a landscape in order to restore damaged ecosystems. But a new project involving English and French researchers has argued for ‘agricultural rewilding’ as a way of achieving ecological benefits such as habitat restoration, tree planting, and natural flood management, while still allowing for human management of land –and a farming livelihood.
In a paper presented to the European Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics, the University of Exeter’s Virginia Thomas, and Aymeric Mondière, Michael Corson, and Hayo van der Werf from the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, maintain that, with the right breeds, ecosystem benefits can go hand in hand with the production of high-value meat.
Dr Thomas said: “Agricultural rewilding offers the potential for win-win scenarios in which biodiversity is increased and ecosystems are restored along with active human intervention in landscapes and the provision of livelihoods which are financially and environmentally sustainable.
“Agricultural rewilding can potentially have biodiversity benefits over those of conventional rewilding since it can create and maintain habitats which may be lost in ‘hands-off’ rewilding practices and whose loss would pose a threat to habitat-specialist species.
“Domestic livestock can be present in the landscape, restoring biodiversity and regenerating ecosystem function, while still contributing to agricultural production where their lives are lived to high welfare and environmental standards and their deaths provide highquality meat.”