Farm to create biggest natural grassland in southern England

A 2,800-acre arable farm in Wiltshire is to be transformed into the biggest grassland rewilding project in southern England in a n eff ort to restore declining plants, insects and endangered species including grasshopper warblers, cuckoos and turtle doves.

- Patrick Barkham

Lower Pertwood has been a successful wildlife-friendly organic farm growing oats, barley and other crops but losses caused by volatile global food prices, escalating fertiliser and fuel costs and an increasingly unpredictable climate have led the owners to turn to farming nature instead.

The Pertwood Plain project, masterminded by Restore, a land management company specialising in large-scale restoration led by the naturalist Benedict Macdonald , will ultimately see low densities of pigs and cattle roaming free to recreate fl ower-rich chalk grassland. Alongside interventions such as adding green hay and brash piles where birds perch and excrete seeds into the soil, this will give rise to a mosaic of grass and scrubland teeming with life.

In the future, visitors could enjoy the return of extinct species such as the great bustard , which has been reintroduced on to nearby Salisbury Plain, and the red-backed shrike , which in eff ect became extinct as a breeding bird in Britain in the 1990s.