Food and nature, not food vs nature

Our land and seas are vital resources. From them comes climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience; nature recovery; food, timber and fibre production; clean air and water; and energy provision. They are a lynchpin of our economy, and are integral to our collective health and wellbeing. These competing demands mean we must make informed decisions about how we best use our land and seas — and the natural resources we receive from them — to achieve our long-term economic, environmental and social aims.

And yet, the narrative often positions rewilding at scale as a competitor to farming and fishing — a luxury that we can ill afford: it is ​‘taking land out of food production’[3] or an ​‘anti-fishing agenda’[4]. We now know that allowing our natural systems to decline and climate change to accelerate ​‘poses a systemic threat to UK food security, affecting domestic production, global supply chains, and population access to affordable, nutritious food’[5]. A report from the Food Standards Agency stated that ​‘urgent action is needed to enhance the resilience of food systems to short-term shocks and longer-term stresses in order to enable food security, environmental sustainability, and decent and equitable livelihoods for all’[6]. These shocks, stresses and threats include:

• Yield collapse: extreme weather cycles — including historic winter deluges and severe spring droughts — have reduced the harvest for wheat, winter and spring barley, oats and oilseed rape by 18% on the five year average[7]. Droughts are projected to reduce the proportion of UK land surface classified as ​‘high quality farmland’ from an average of 38% (1961 to 1990) to 11% by 2050[8]. 
• Soil crisis: Soil degradation is estimated to have cost England and Wales up to £1.4 billion annually in lost productivity in 2015[9]. In Scotland that figure is £125 million per year[10]. Our bare, highly managed fields are becoming structurally incapable of absorbing climate shocks.
• Pollination loss: The economic value of pollinators has been estimated as being around £500 million in the UK[11]. And yet, between 1980 and 2024, the overall distribution of 393 key pollinator species decreased by 23%, with almost all of this decline occurring after 2000[12]. Rising temperatures mean flowering times are shifting earlier, disrupting plant reproduction and directly threatening the insect workforce that underpins many crop yields.
• The marine deficit: Overfishing and the degradation of the seabed are fracturing the food webs of our seas. Over half of the fish populations vital to UK fisheries are being overfished or are in a critical state[13]. This selective overharvesting has fundamentally changed marine life; over the last 20 years alone, the average size of caught fish like cod has decreased by 48%[14]. 

This is a massive wake-up call — but it also hides a surprising truth: growing evidence suggests that we do not have to choose between a thriving planet and a resilient food system. 

At Rewilding Britain, we advocate for 30% rewilding — the mass restoration of nature until it can take care of itself, and us, again. By focusing on natural processes, like free-flowing rivers and reinstating missing species, we can replenish nature’s remarkable web of life while bringing communities together to find new ways to work, live, and prosper.

Rewilding can happen across a spectrum of approaches (see our Rewilding Journeys toolkit), depending on the extent to which nature takes the lead and guided by local community, context and culture. Some of these approaches overlap with or can sit alongside regenerative farming, fishing and aquaculture. Recent research[15], including our own analysis, suggests that, by focusing on areas of land with highest naturalness potential and least agricultural value, we can achieve this 30% target with minimal impact on our overall calorie production. This means prioritising more marginal land, uplands, and non-arable areas, where carbon storage, climate resilience, flood mitigation, water quality and biodiversity combine to offer a highly productive use of the land. 

In rewilding systems, where nature is the primary land use, there may also be opportunities to continue to produce some wild or semi-wild range meats. These use low-density, naturally grazed native breeds — such as hardy cattle and pigs — and/​or the sustainable management of deer numbers. This allows vulnerable land managers to move away from a volatile reliance on commodity food markets and can unlock additional diversified revenue streams, e.g. through nature-based enterprise, public payments and diversified products, ultimately creating more stable and resilient rural livelihoods[16].

Furthermore, because much of this transition will occur on land that already carries low livestock densities or does not produce food (such as grouse shooting estates), the impact on national herds is remarkably small. Our modelling indicates that transitioning improved pasture and intensively managed grouse and deer shooting estates into rewilding requires only an approximate 12% reduction in total cattle and a 25% reduction in sheep. As we are already eating much less of these meats — with a 30% decline in beef consumption and 55% decline in lamb consumption between 2008 and 2019[17] — this trend poses little threat to our current diets or food resilience. 

In the marine environment, we know that rewilding can trigger a remarkable rebounding of marine life while actively enhancing the productivity of our fisheries. For example, since bottom-trawling was banned in the Lyme Bay Marine Protected Area there’s been a four-fold increase in the abundance and diversity of fish populations[18]. In addition, the wellbeing and livelihoods of fishers directly involved in the project have improved[19]. However, our current policies are failing our seas. We boast that 38% of the UK’s marine areas are ​‘protected’, yet the overwhelming majority still permit bottom-trawling and dredging — the most destructive fishing practices of them all. True protection, that can support small inshore fisheries and have positive ​‘spillover’ effects into the surrounding seas, is still the exception, not the rule. 

If trading food production off against nature is a false choice, it leaves us with a far more compelling question: what are the unseen levers we can pull to secure both our food supply and the living world on which it depends? 

Securing our food supply isn’t about imposing restrictions — it is about unlocking opportunity and ingenuity. Right now, we are using a staggering 85% of our agricultural land to graze livestock or grow animal feed when we know that growing plants for human consumption generates roughly 12 times more calories per hectare than producing meat[20]. A nationwide protein and calorie transition that also improves the nutritional value of our food is our chance to innovate. By focusing on optimising sustainable calorie production on our most fertile land, and through sustainable fisheries outside our Marine Protected Areas, while weaving a natural process-led approach across the rest, we can build a healthier, more resilient Britain. Crucially, this vision must be realised without inflicting further ecological damage — such as the agricultural pollution caused by intensive poultry production — or simply offshoring our ecological footprint to other nations. 

That transition is already transforming our seas. Until recently, the largest industrial fishery in the UK’s North Sea wasn’t catching food for human consumption; it was vacuuming up sandeels to be ground into fishmeal for intensively farmed livestock and salmon. This is incredibly inefficient because between 70 – 85% of the protein in wild fishmeal is entirely lost compared to being eaten directly by humans[21]. The historic 2024 ban on sandeel fishing in English and Scottish waters shows what’s possible when we prioritise ecological resilience[22]. By leaving these vital fish in the sea, we protect the marine food web and allow commercial fish populations to recover.

We are not short of options. By re-evaluating what we prioritise, incentivise, and invest in, we can unlock significant potential.

We can no longer put off these choices. If we want a secure, resilient future with nature restoration and food production working hand-in-hand, we must have more thoughtful conversations about how we balance the competing demands on our land and seas. We need to form genuine partnerships built on mutual respect — ones that move beyond polarised debates and bring food producers, rewilders, scientists, policy-makers and entrepreneurs together as allies on the same journey.

These conversations are not hypothetical; they are already happening. The members of our Rewilding Network provide many inspiring examples. We see community-led marine initiatives like the Sussex Bay project, where local fishers, scientists, and authorities collaborated to establish a nearshore trawling ban. By giving the seabed breathing space, they have triggered a spectacular rebound of native mussel beds, black bream, and kelp forests — proving that a healthy sea is the ultimate foundation of a thriving coastal economy.

Further north, projects like the Langholm Moor community buyout in Scotland show how communities can take ownership of marginal uplands to balance ecological restoration, eco-tourism and regenerative land uses. Along the southern coast of England, the Purbeck Heaths in Dorset demonstrates how rewilding at scale can thrive within a wider agricultural landscape. Here, fences have been removed to let hardy, free-roaming cattle, pigs and ponies act as ecosystem engineers across thousands of hectares, kickstarting natural processes while continuing to produce low levels of high-quality, wild-range meat. A similar approach is being used at the Knepp Estate in Sussex which now produces 75 tonnes of wild range meat a year[27]. 

Across our Rewilding Network, this ecological transition has unlocked a wealth of diversified nature-based enterprises as well as a huge increase in job numbers[28] — proving that a wilder landscape can be a prosperous one. We are also working closely with brilliant initiatives like the Nature Friendly Farming Network, whose members are demonstrating that restoring soil biology and welcoming back pollinators can protect their bottom line. Together, this is creating an interconnected, nature-rich mosaic of rewilding sites alongside high-nature-value farming — providing vital ecological corridors and stepping stones through more intensively managed land. 

These trailblazers are showing us what is possible. The choice ahead of us is clear — we just need the courage to adapt.