Rewilding and farming: a partnership for our future

Sir,

If we want to secure a future where Britain flourishes, with nature restoration and productive agriculture working hand-in-hand, we must have more thoughtful conversations about how we manage our land and seas. 

Patrick Gilbraith’s recent essay (Telegraph print edition, 6 March) highlights genuine challenges facing our tenant farmers, including insecure contracts and the pressures of modern land ownership. These are important issues that deserve our collective attention. 

However, by positioning rewilding as a threat to these farmers, the piece overlooks the opportunities at hand. True rewilding is a strategy for ecological resilience that can, and should, exist alongside farming, to ensure our countryside remains robust and prosperous for generations to come.

Rewilding is large-scale nature restoration, to the point where nature can take care of itself – and us – again. This can help us tackle the interconnected biodiversity and climate emergencies, while creating extensive social and economic benefits for communities.

However, nature has been wrecked to such an extent in this country that rewilding cannot be simply, as Gilbraith states, ​‘stopping human interference’. Drained peatlands cannot become wet again by themselves; decimated native woodlands cannot regenerate without a seed source; soaring deer populations cannot self-regulate; nationally extinct keystone species cannot reintroduce themselves. 

Neither does rewilding necessitate ​‘taking land out of agricultural production’. As Gilbraith notes, only about 1% of Britain is currently being rewilded – and yes, we want to see that figure increased to 30% – but it is misleading to suggest that these figures are only about farmland, when in fact they are about a range of wild habitats.

The target of seeing biodiversity flourish across 30% of Britain can be achieved by restoring peatlands, native woodlands, wetlands, rivers, seas and other precious habitats – all while maintaining and benefitting productive farmland. Some forms of rewilding are also compatible with natural process-led food and timber production.

Agriculture and food production will benefit because they depend on natural processes such as the water cycle, pollination, soil formation, photosynthesis, and seed dispersal. Rewilding can help kickstart natural processes which have been disrupted or broken on a vast scale.

On land not easily traditionally managed for agriculture, perhaps because of soil quality or location, nature restoration can work well alongside food production by offering ​‘ecosystem services’ such as carbon sequestration, reduced flooding, and improved air and water quality, alongside benefits like public access to nature.

Gilbraith’s article also highlights the need for more precision in use of the term rewilding, rather than conflating it with other forms of land management that, although they may sometimes claim to be rewilding, are in fact distinct from genuine nature restoration.

Wealthy corporations pursuing carbon credits or the green gold of subsidies and grants – the subject of much of Gilbraith’s argument – are often not rewilding. At worst, they can be greenwashing. When such schemes involve planting the wrong trees in the wrong place, and when they force up land prices beyond local people’s reach – or force tenant farmers off the land – they can threaten both rewilding and communities.

Rewilding generates recovery of whole ecosystems. It works best when it is community-focused. It is creating significant increases in jobs and benefits for health. 

We need urgent and meaningful ecosystem restoration on a huge scale, carried out in ways which strengthen social justice and opportunities – including for the country’s farmers who are increasingly at the sharp end of climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse.

By helping nature bounce back in a major way – by respecting and investing in our farmers, and by moving beyond polarised debates seeking to pit nature recovery against food production – we can build a future that delivers both food security and a thriving environment. Let’s choose a path of partnership over conflict for our future. 

Yours faithfully,

Rebecca Wrigley

Founder and Chief Executive, Rewilding Britain