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It makes your heart sing - Update on a UK rewilding programme
...What is a farm? Most of us still picture a storybook image from childhood: cows, pigs, wheat, a pond, a farmer, a family. The farm that had, until recently, operated on this site was more typical of today’s “hard-arsed” farming, as Burrell put it. Boothby Lodge Farm had been a business owned by an absentee landlord. No one lived off the land, or on it. Tenants rented the farmhouse and worked elsewhere. More than 92% of the land was ploughed field. A contract farmer simply drove in with big machines several days each year to produce wheat and beans in relatively poor clay soils. Pheasants were released on the 3% of the farm that was woodland. For a few days each winter, men would pay to shoot them...
As we walked, Burrell explained how we might reverse this, on this farm at least. In late 2021, the company he co-founded, Nattergal, had bought the farm for £13.8m. It intended to ditch 6,000 years of farming history on this land. No crops would be sown. No fertilisers or pesticides would be added to the fields. They planned to smash up the drains that had been painstakingly installed by generations of farmers to remove rainwater from their fields. The soils would spring up with weeds. Boothby Lodge Farm was to become Boothby Wildland...
On a sunny day in February [2026], a family of four arrived at Boothby in a white van driven from Scotland, keen to explore their new home. “It’s an exciting day,” said de Klee, who now looked like a young colonial explorer with his impressive new moustache. “It doesn’t get better than releasing beavers into this landscape.” Lemon put out a “quiet” Facebook post seeking beaver volunteers. “It went crazy.”...
There was the flap of a grey heron and a grey wagtail calling. A black-tailed skimmer dragonfly whizzed over the water. A great spotted woodpecker landed on a dead sycamore. The rank grass and thistles bounced with meadow grasshoppers and jinked with dozens of butterflies. It was overwhelming; movement everywhere, surround-sound buzzing, chirping, calling. To say the land was singing might be fanciful but something was happening here. Something very alive.
From The Guardian Long Read
As we walked, Burrell explained how we might reverse this, on this farm at least. In late 2021, the company he co-founded, Nattergal, had bought the farm for £13.8m. It intended to ditch 6,000 years of farming history on this land. No crops would be sown. No fertilisers or pesticides would be added to the fields. They planned to smash up the drains that had been painstakingly installed by generations of farmers to remove rainwater from their fields. The soils would spring up with weeds. Boothby Lodge Farm was to become Boothby Wildland...
On a sunny day in February [2026], a family of four arrived at Boothby in a white van driven from Scotland, keen to explore their new home. “It’s an exciting day,” said de Klee, who now looked like a young colonial explorer with his impressive new moustache. “It doesn’t get better than releasing beavers into this landscape.” Lemon put out a “quiet” Facebook post seeking beaver volunteers. “It went crazy.”...
There was the flap of a grey heron and a grey wagtail calling. A black-tailed skimmer dragonfly whizzed over the water. A great spotted woodpecker landed on a dead sycamore. The rank grass and thistles bounced with meadow grasshoppers and jinked with dozens of butterflies. It was overwhelming; movement everywhere, surround-sound buzzing, chirping, calling. To say the land was singing might be fanciful but something was happening here. Something very alive.
From The Guardian Long Read