The re wilding of productive farm land.

Whitewavemark2

This is the second year. I do not care what other countries do.

I just know that if we continue to kill pollinators at the rate we are losing the bees and others, there will be no sugar beet or anything else.

It is madness.

I hope it is a temporary, emergency authorisation.

I do not care what other countries do.
I do, but unfortunately:

Eight EU countries are likely to have exported banned neonicotinoid pesticides since the ban – Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, Greece, Austria, Denmark and Hungary – plus the UK.

Litterpicker I like those phrases 'restorative' and 'regenerative'. I have read James Rebank's journalism, although not his books. Before that I had decided to buy only 'Pasture for Life' beef (and lamb if possible). This is beef raised much in the way it is at Knepp Farm, animals grazed on unimproved pasture and fed home grown hay and sileage in winter. No soya, maize, or other crops cattle would not normally eat.

This means emissions both direct and through growing and transporting fodder crops are drastically reduced, as are medical interventions because the cattle are inherently healthier and James Rebank argues that with right land managment cattle can help sequester carbon onto the soi, to balanace any emissions they produce.

This is the second year. I do not care what other countries do.

I just know that if we continue to kill pollinators at the rate we are losing the bees and others, there will be no sugar beet or anything else.

It is madness.

Whitewavemark2

I see that the government has chosen to allow insecticide on sugar beet that will destroy the bees.

Clever move?

Misleading.

This is an emergency authorisation.
Other countries in the EU used these pesticides too as an emergency measure.
www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/neonicotinoids-efsa-assesses-emergency-uses-sugar-beet-202021

We and the EU could, of course, ban sugar production in the UK and Europe and import it all - from countries growing sugar cane which allow these pesticides to be used as a matter of routine.

MOnica a term I see used increasingly is “regenerative farming”. I have also seen the similar “restorative farming”.

I have read articles and seen television programmes about farmers who are practising the type of farming you describe as “integrated”, where the aim is to produce food from crops and from humanely and sustainably raised livestock. James Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd, is one of the best known proponents in the UK, but I know there are many farmers who work in this way.

Someone with a better brain than me, needs to work out how our taxes can support farmers and other landowners/managers to produce food and recreate our native wildlife habitats in a way that provides a decent income for them and healthy, affordable food for everyone. Short-termism and greed are the great enemies of both.

As an aside, one of the beavers at Knepp escaped into the local Adur river. He was later caught and brought back to Knepp.

He died of a bacterial disease caught from Adur pollution.

I see that the government has chosen to allow insecticide on sugar beet that will destroy the bees.

Clever move?

I think the problem is that maintaining land for nature is seen as something 'other' that has nothing to do with growing crops. In fact it is integral to good farming. As we now know many insects and plants make a contribution to the success of our agriculture. We all know how bees, esential for pollination have seen their numbers fall drastically. Cows grazing wildflower rich meadows self heal by choosing what plants to eat when they are sick.

We have got to get rid of the term 'rewilding', stop paying farmers specifically for maintaining wild habitats, woodland etc, as if doing this is a quite seperate from farming.

We need a term like 'integrated farming that combines growing crops and maintaining habitats, because they are of equal importance and feed into each other.

Government help and subsidies should be directed to farms that are maintaining all the land they own or rent, fields, hedges and woodland. It should be directed to smaller farms and those on marginal land, It is essential in the fight to reduce climate change and to ensure we leave the earth that feeds us in good heart for future generations.

I remember going on a butterfly ID walk a few years ago. A farmer there told us that what we see on Countryfile regarding farmers' efforts to get their land into anything like a good state for nature was misleading. A very small minority try to do this but go under or give up - mainly due to competition, unaffordability, etc.

I hope the government payments to farmers to use their land in a beneficial way to nature works this time. Set-aside failed and stewardship schemes weren't a huge deal better - I don't know the reasons they failed so badly, but the statistics on habitat loss, farm (wild) bird losses, insect loss, wild mammal near extinctions, etc, are truly worrying. More and more wildlife species are added to the red list each year. And the UK is one of the worst biodiverse countries in the world.

By that I meant the polemic on page 1!

Very, very good post Monica. Wish I'd written it myself.

We've planted wildflowers in the back third of our garden. Already we are seeing more birds and there were no berries left on the holly at Christmas.
We have red squirrels around us and on T.V. it was pointed out that reintroducing pine martens to some areas is detrimental to them as they make good easy food this was contradicted by saying they could get up into the thiner branches away from them .What are we to believe?
Farmers are being encouraged to go back to leaving some fields fallow and rotating use. Again controversy but most seem to be making it work that really give it a try.
Yes we do need more food for a growing population but we also need to conserve the land and use less fertilisers that wash into the rivers and kill the fish.
The farmers who give these ideas a try should be helped with grants and big organisations like the National trust should set an example.

As pointed out to me by a neighbour, who is a bit of an expert, some wildflowers like richer, ploughed land eg poppies and corn flowers. Others prefer poor soil and ours is definitely poor in that area.

Last year I had poppies growing in random places in richer soil around the garden (some in the veggie patch, others amongst shrubs) but goodness knows where they came from.

It takes a long time, patience and hard work. I've tried to help it along with Beebombs, some successful, others not.

The space I 'rewilde' has had no feeding for at least 25 years and, when I could cut the grass, all cuttings were raked off and composted.

Then if the yellow rattle is growing successfully, it should sort the grass out, but if not and the grass continues to thrive, the soil may be too good. Did you see Monty in Croatia and those glorious flower meadows? There was a very large amount of yellow rattle.

My son has set aside an area in his garden to do just that, and after say 5 years it is beginning to pay off, but he had some failures though. He cuts it in August I think and religiously removes all the debris etc so the soil doesn’t get fed. The area he chose is in full sun with no tree shade.

Yup, got that.

Yellow rattle

Whitewavemark2' The fact that rewilding is the official term doesn't mean I have to like it, and I don't.

25 years ago, when we moved to our present house, I decided to leave an area of grass completely uncultivated, in other words to rewild it (in the full meaning of the word, just cut it once a year, in late July,as if grazed. There is an apple tree on the patch, which i wantedto be able to see and pick up windfalls - make lovely chutney.

However, even I have intervened several times, firstly when nettles threatened to overwhelm it, I pulled them out, then the buttercups were thinned and for the last few years I have snapped off the dandelion heads as the whole graden was getting infested by dandelions.

After 25 years it is now an uncuttable mess, Last year there were so many woody stemmed leaves I was unable to cut it and had to crawl round under the tree, cutting a space with hand shears in order to see the windfalls. I suspect this will do for the spring bulbs, crocus and muscari that have appeared there, I should get the wonderful flush of daisies I get in May.

But when I hear gardening experts extolling all the wonderful flowers that will appear on our lawns if we do not cut them, or cut them less, I let out a hollow laugh and say, after 25 years I am still waiting.

Re-wilding is the term being used by conservationists, ecologists and government for the Knepp project.

It may not be re-wilding in your use of the word, but as I have explained in my post re-wilding where nothing is done does not work except perhaps in the more wilder parts if the U.K. But to be more accurate re-wilding should be seen as “less control” rather than no control, and to establish an ecosystem where nature is given as much freedom as possible.

Your description of Knepp does not exactly tie in with what I have seen and experienced over the past couple of decades. They have certainly had to rethink their ideas for example the hogs have been reduced because they were causing such chaos to the land.
A member of my family has been involved with measuring the density of vegetation on the estate using laser technology (don’t ask I haven’t a clue) but I have been told that since the start of the project woodland has increased from something like 15% to over 40% providing habitat, greater biodiversity and flood mitigation, and of course removes carbon from the atmosphere.

This morning I was listening to Farming today on R4 and they were saying that fertilisers are very expensive this year and many farmers are unable to afford to buy them so are leaving areas of their land unplanted.
The farmer with his field around our house for a good number of years grew maize. It is a horrible crop - grows taller than me and fortunately we have a large garden but even so it made me feel somewhat hemmed in. I have heard via the local grapevine etc that maize needs to be fertilised more than many other crops and for more pesticides to be used. Over years it ruins the land also.
In 2018 I was diagnosed with a lymphoma cancer in my abdomen - not attached to any organ they could see, when I went into hospital to start my chemo the haematologist told me that research seemed to be showing a direct link with agricultural pesticides as there was a far greater incidence of this cancer in farming communities. He had no idea of where we lived as the hospital is 90 miles away from here - it is a research institute also. Luckily for the last few years crops such as beans, wheat and sunflowers have been grown and there is far less spraying involved.

But what is happening at Knepp is not rewilding, the name is a misnomer. Re wilding is walking away from land, not doing anything to it, and letting nature take its course, for good or ill.

Knepp, and all these other schemes involve managing the change of land from one status to another. Once farming stops, what is done to the land is controlled and planned, trees are planted, hedgerows reintroduced, some plants and species removed or controlled, water courses are managed to achieve specfically planned wetlands.

Some like Knepp are farming emterprises that need to pay its way and . At Knepp have chosen to do this in an innovative and more environmental way. they manage the land plant species they choose and eliminate those that do not contribut to the result they want. They have hedgerows and fields, both man-made features, as are coppices and the cattle they choose and the grazing pattern. It is run as a financially sound farming enterprise

Do not get me wrong I am absolutely not criticising them. I think what they are doing is wonderful and it pleases me that it is being manage by people who have clear financial as well as ecological aims.

It is the word rewilding. I think this word is to soft aand open to attack to those who disagree with it (like *namsnanny's farmer friends).

Perhaps a name like Farming for the future or Farming for the planet or Eco-friendly farrming. Something that makes clear that this is farming, but farming differently and sustainably.

Large landowners like The National Trust , The Duchy, RSBP and others are ideally placed to carry re-wilding out in relatively large areas.

Knepp was the first sizeable farm in the U.K. to re-wild itself. It has deliberately pioneered a particular business model to raise income to enable this to be achieved. The intention is that Knepp will be one of U.K. wide webs that allows connectivity between all the areas.

The owners of the estate, have never made a secret of the fact that their motivation initially was primarily financial. However, it is first and foremost a conservationist project and this is born out when you roam it’s footpaths.
It is a little over 3000 acres in a densely populated area of southern England so of course the fencing and gates - are a necessity, but there are no internal fences at all and when you walk along it many footpaths you can see the cattle, hogs, and deer being free to roam.

Go this time of year and you will squelch through mud Go in spring and it is bursting with blossom, bird song and renewed life. In summer the bird song, wild flowers and insects are overwhelming. There are species of insect not seem for decades now flying there.

Visit Knepp and you can see turtle doves, listen to nightingales watch emperor butterflies, see storks. This year I saw and heard all of them.
The intention is to let the land do what it will with no planting etc. Everything growing has done so naturally. It is managed by ecologists and conservationists.

Without large predators of course the animals need to be culled in order to maintain a healthy population. Knepp has no appetite to see animals starve, nor suffer needlessly through birthing problems etc.

So whilst it may be desirable for re-wilding to take place without any management - let nature do it’s thing - in practice it won’t work in the type of lowland farm that we see here. A certain level of management is certainly desirable in the early years and ongoing in some areas. Knepp is not producing a wilderness but a viable and profitable use of land that puts back far, far more than it takes out, by re-wilding.

namsnanny I hahe gone back and read your OP very carefully and I think part of your problem is that you do not fully understand what rewilding and its context is all about, nor I suspect do your farming friends.

Rewilding must be seen in the broader context of climate change and environmental damage done, mainly by the way many countries have farmed their land over the last 50 years, in particular in those countries who have invested heavily in industrial farming and monocultures over large areas of land. The midland plains of the United States being a classic example.

Once the plains were covered in grass and 100s of thousands of bison grazed these plains. Once settlers killed the bison, stripped the grass and turned this area into the bread bowl of the world, they soon found they had also got the dustbowl of the world and John Steinbeck's book 'the Grapes of Wrath', describes the farmers driven to destitution as the combination of drought and wind blew all the fertile soil off the farmland.

Farmland that now continues to produce wheat and corn because it is heavily spread with nitrogen fertliser. The production, transportation and use of mineral fertilizers contribute directly and indirectly to emissions of greenhouse gases,

By the 1960s, Rachel Carson warned how heavy use of pesticides was killing off insects, plants and animals species.

This continual exploitation of all kinds of soils, with man-made fertilsers and pesticides, has made it possible to clear and farm any soil, and large industrial complexes have done that: Amazonian rain forest, wetlands in south east Asia, marginal land everywhere have been ploughed up to grow monoculture crops of soya and maize. This resulted in more crops than people could eat so it was

However these crops are not suited to the digestion systems of cattle but they fattened up well on it, especially of you fed them antibiotics, which they needed anyway to deal with the side effects of their diet and, as they no longer ate grass, they could be kept in sheds and feed lots where the risk of disease. was high, so with antibiotics it was a win/win situation 'healthy' cattle that gained weight fast. The welfare of the cattle themselves were not factored in.

With global warming we are reaping the crops we also sowed. That of losing trees that helped absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the carbon dioxide produced making, transportation and using mineral fertilizers both contribute directly and indirectly to emissions of greenhouse gases. Then there all the cattle being bred to produce meat as cheaply as possible at a maximum cost to the environment, in the food needed to feed them, and the emissions they produce.

We need for our own sakes and our children and grandchildren, to replace many of these polluting and damaging agriculture practices with ones that help the land support itself, we must turn away from eating patterns this agriculture has encouraged us into: highly processed sweet foods based on corn, eating large quantities of cheaply produced poor quality beef back to an eating pattern that is sustainable in the modern world.

Which brings me to rewilding. One of the first things we can do is return marginal farmland, much of which has only been ploughed and cropped since 1939, back to what it was - mainly rough pasture, woodland, marsh and fen. We need more hedgerows to sustain wild flowers, insects and mammals, which are all part of a complex ecosystem that we are only just starting to unravel.

The problem is the word 'rewilding' is absolutely not what is happening. The owners of the Knepp estate did not just put a fence round their land with no gate and leave it to develop any kind of plants that happened to grow their. They have managed their land as carefully as any farmer, which of course they are, they have planted and nurtured and encouraged this type of ecosystem and discouraged that, chosen their cattle breeds etc with care. They are as much farmers managing their land so that it provides them with a living as Farmer Giles with a thousand acres of maize and big farm machinery.

And thatnamsnanny is how you and your farmer friends should see it, farming the landscape for the health of the planet, the animals, the people, by taking it back to the self sustaining system it always was and not one that flogs the soil to death and plunders our natural resources like gas and chemicals that kill of natural life to get bigger and bigger crops for our lifetime, to leave a legacy of a planet destroyed.

Sorry for the polemic.