Beyond Our Wildest Dreams?

Wilder farming is as close to a silver bullet for the future management of our marginal lands as we’ll find and it’s high time to embrace this new way, contends

- Ben Goldsmith

My neighbour is a lifelong beef cattle farmer. Mark Cottle and his family have farmed the land next to me for decades and there isn’t much he doesn’t know about our part of Somerset. When weaving his pale-blue tractor down the lane that runs between his farm and mine, he often stops to hop off and have a chat. This year, with the first stirrings of spring in the air as we stood surveying his fields and mine, Mark cast a distinctly critical eye over my land. ‘It’s all a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’ he suggested with a half-smile, raising an eyebrow.

Compared with his well-maintained farm next door, he’s right. His hedgerows are trimmed, box-like, to perfection annually; his well-fertilised grass mown and rolled in wide stripes, a dazzling shade of green. Mine is unkempt and it’s getting worse. We’ve sold off nearly all of the livestock: the 40 Dorset Poll sheep are gone for good and all but two of the White Park cattle, too, for a time. Our plan is to have them back in a few years’ time, once Nature has run riot.

We’ve ripped out all of our internal fencing, dug out several new ponds and filled in the artificially straightened ditch that ran deep and dark along the valley bottom, creating in its place a rewiggled, shallow stream, free to meander as it likes. Already, small patches of thorny scrub, gorse, blackthorn, dog rose, bramble and hawthorn are springing up through the sward and the wetter corners of what were once neatly enclosed fields are home to woodcock and snipe, which explode from the rushes at the slightest disturbance. All around, Mark sees intolerable species that hamper productivity—sallow, rushes, thorns—whereas I see something different: the beginnings of an exciting period of Nature recovery and, with it, an entirely different way of managing my farm.