How This Depleted Land Was Transformed into Wilderness - Rewilding Britain

in this video we're going to see how this transformed into this of how the landscape was reborn of how biodiversity flourished of how its owners found financial stability because of this transformation this is of course the net castle estate a pioneering rebarding project here in the uk that has paid an alternative route down a wilder path that all uk farmers can follow if they wish but first let me tell the story of exactly what happened at this cloggy claggy cludgy muddy agriculturalist state because that's exactly what it was and had been ever since the war the netcast estate had been for the best part of the last century intensively managed agriculture with the dig for victory campaign during the war saying the parkland closest to the house turned for crops after the war agriculture continued at neb much like the rest of the uk meadows peatlands woodlands and hedgerows are all being cleared to facilitate more monoculture crops and at nip the story was no different by the time the now owners charlie burrell and isabella tree inherited the estate during the late 1980s there was no let up in the pressure to run a productive farm here in the uk being part of the common agricultural policy whose damaging agenda was on producing as much food as possible for the use of damaging chemicals and intensive farming techniques charlie and isabella worked tirelessly to run a productive farm at nep but they were up against a tireless foe the mud because you see the landing net just is not conducive with modern farming techniques and in the words of charlie borrow himself he says that in the summer it's like concrete in the winter it's like unfathomable porridge i've got the room of a ball that's a that's a good word and they struggled year after year through these heavy clay soils continuously modernizing and diversifying and following the best practices that all the other farms on better soils seem to be having so much success with and by the end of the 90s with debts mounting up the estate was facing financial ruin it was at this point in february of 2000 that the decision was made to sell the dairy herds and farm machinery and put the arable out to contract clearing the estate's debts and this left charlie and isabella with a blank canvas a chance to try something new but this decision wasn't without criticism with one of the neighboring landowners labeling them as unpatriotic but following this decision it enabled them to think openly and to think freely about what to do next and it led them to meeting with dr ecologist franz vera who in that same year that made this crucial decision also released his book in english grazing ecology and forest history and the premise of his thinking is that the british landscapes and european landscapes well before intensive management any kind of agriculture these landscapes would have been governed by large herbivores bison oryx and beavers creating a mosaic of open woodland with meadows grasslands and water systems flowing freely creating a truly biodiverse dynamic landscape in simple terms franz believes that if you want biodiversity to recover all you have to do is release these large animals and let them kick off their natural processes allowing them to do the work while we as the ever tinkering humans that we are we just sit back and with this newfound idea that's exactly what charlie and isabella began to do at nep although work didn't begin straight away by releasing animals they had to remove all of the land drains and around 70 miles of internal fencing and that very summer they noted the sounds of insects throughout the air and for a period of around seven years they allowed the land to just do its thing to recover by this point they had acquired funding to erect the ring fence around the estate so they could release grazing animals and this is where the magic began to happen releasing the english longhorn a proxy for the now extinct uruk however the longhorns behave and interact with the environment in the same way both browsing on trees and grazing on grass and carrying over 230 different seed species in their hooves gut and fur and ex-mon ponies at nip take the place of the extinct tarpon but they again function in the same way having a really interesting relationship with the cattle you see it's the horses which are able to eat through the much longer and coarser rougher grasses and plant life it opens up the much fresher and shorter grass lower down which the cattle love and you can also find roe fallow and red deer rubbing their horns and nibbling branches and defecating all the while creating new opportunities for life they haven't got wild boar at night but they do have tamworth picks and amazingly at net they've observed them swimming down to the bottom of the lake to retrieve mussels but also of course causing great disturbance in the soils rooting and lifting creating spaces for all of the delicate wildflowers to flourish with protein-rich seeds and it's this dynamic system of grazing disturbance and nutrient cycling of large free-roaming herbivores which has been lost from the uk but you can start to see its impacts on a very small scale at nap but what has been so crucial at neb is maintaining this perfect balance of herbivores and plant lives that has yielded this like super diverse ecosystem if you have two fewer grazers what eventually happens to the landscape is you get closed canopy woodland which actually isn't that great for biodiversity and if you have too many greys as well you get an overgrazed landscape but in maintaining the habitat to allow for areas to be at different phases of succession this has meant that nip has exploded with wildlife hundreds of new bird species have visited or taken up residence at nep you will find all five species of owl they have turtle doves which during the 1960s had a population of 125 000 which is now just down to a couple thousand but at neb they have as many as 30 or 40 individuals which is far greater than any other conservation areas in the uk they have one of the rarest species of bat the bedstein bat and if you get down on the ground and have a look you'll find countless species of dung beetle in the dung of cattle but you do have to get down and have a look at it and now they even have some nesting stores which is just amazing but crucially for the landowners nep is making money and one way is through ethical and sustainable meat production i mentioned previously that it's important to keep the right assemblages of herbivores and without natural predators they have to be culled this puts healthy and sustainable and ethical meat on the market they also receive high-level stewardship from the government for the rewarding work that they do and they also let out many of the older agricultural buildings to local businesses where they can set up and this maintains something like 200 jobs but i think most interestingly at nep is their eco-tourism business you know their wildlife safaris their tours their accommodation and this generates around 460 000 pounds a year with a 20 profit margin you know and this venture doesn't just make them money it also provides the british people with a first-hand experience of of of nature of a wilderness and you know the really remarkable thing is that all of this took place in just 20 years that's such a short time frame it's testament to wildlife you know it knows what to do all we have to do is just facilitate it and let it take the reins and it will find a way but this success story shouldn't stop at net this pioneering work and the lessons that we've learned can be applied across the uk you know obviously not every farm can be managed in this way but how many small and struggling farms out there just like net was could benefit from adopting this type of management or how many larger farms and larger land owners could just do this on a smaller proportion of their land to start an eco-tourism business that could make infinitely more money than arable land ever could and the reality is is that over 70 percent of all uk land area is under some form of agriculture so there's a huge opportunity for this and another really exciting part of this is the new elm scheme environmental land management that is going to pay landowners to effectively rewire their lands to put nature first so that we can all as a country benefit from the many services that a healthy ecosystem can provide check out the stuff that's on the screen now but in the meantime thank you so much for watching live curious

Channel: Leave Curious

Views: 102,274

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Id: -SvKQVk1LCI

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2022