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https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/jul/09/it-makes-your-heart-sing-rewilding-britains-bleak-farmland>
"In the silent countryside south of Grantham, three vast steel barns rattled in
the breeze. Gathered in a loose circle beside them were 15 landowners, land
agents and a couple of young investors; all expensively dressed men, many with
a sceptical mien. It was June 2022, and Sir Charles Raymond Burrell, 10th
Baronet, was explaining how the purchase of 1,525 bleak acres (617 hectares) of
prairie fields of wheat and beans could revolutionise farming and nature
conservation, not just in South Lincolnshire but across Britain and beyond.
Burrell, known by everyone as Charlie, led the group on a walk from the barns
beside the unlovable modern farmhouse, a red-brick behemoth with small windows
like piggy eyes. We began by crossing a field of broad beans. Less than a
century ago, it had been a patchwork of 10 fields. As we walked over the hard,
cracked ground, we encountered not a single insect. Later, by a verge, a couple
of butterflies flew. As for humans, we didn’t meet a single other person in our
two-and-a-half-hour stroll across a range of footpaths and field edges. “This
is a ruined landscape,” said one of the guests, the architectural historian
Matthew Rice. “Not because of the soils. Because there are no people here. I’m
sorry there are not enough stoats but I’d like there to be some children here,
too.”
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.
Boothby Lodge Farm made £250,000 profit each year but half of this came through
the “basic payment”, a simple and generous subsidy for land owned that the
government planned to halt by 2027. Beyond that date, thanks to reforms
introduced by Michael Gove during his stint as environment secretary, farmers
would only receive “public money for public goods” – that is, if their land
provided clean water, or healthy soils, or wildlife-rich hedgerows, none of
which Boothby appeared to be doing.
Hard-arsed farming has been the main driver of Britain’s contribution to the
global extinction crisis. Over the past century, England and Wales have lost
98% of wildflower meadows. We have also destroyed half of Britain’s ancient
woodland, half of lowland ponds, 90% of freshwater wetlands and 62% of all
“farmland” wild birds.
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."
Via Susan ****
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*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
