Returning our FARM TO NATURE | Ep 4

welcome to mapperton our family home and estate endorse it in the southwest of england julie and i took over running mapperton a few years ago from my parents the earl encounters of sandwich it's a lot of work but also a lot of fun this place is full of fascinating stories extraordinary people and endless repairs so please join our family on this journey of a lifetime as we put all our efforts into preserving this magnificent part of england's heritage [Music] so we're here in the kitchen at mappiton um i've got a nice cup of herbal tea and i'm thinking about the future of the estate and we've got five farms on the estate and they vary in terms of their productivity some are very good pasture we've got some decent arable but it's clear that not all of the land here is actually terribly good for producing food some of it might be better simply serving the purposes of wildlife and biodiversity so what we've decided to do is to take back one of the farms it's called cultly farm i'm looking at it here on the map it's about 180 acres and we're going to allow a process of natural regeneration called rewilding to take place rewilding is something that has been pioneered in sussex by charlie burrell and his wife isabella on their estate where they've had tremendous success letting the estate go back into a state of nature the key thing is to try and provide a balance between the flora and the fauna to replicate the environment that we might have seen thousands of years ago when we had grazing megafauna like aurochs and deer and wild ball all living together in balance with the vegetation because obviously these two things evolved together the plants evolved with the animals and vice versa and we've lost that and we all know the trouble that we're in in terms of the loss of biodiversity in the countryside here and this is one of the ways to restore it and we're incredibly excited about it one of the things that we all need to take stock of is that we haven't treated the countryside very well intensive farming has obviously done wonders in many respects for food production but it's rather denuded the countryside in particular the soil a lot of the nutrients that would have grown over time and been sustained through natural processes have been washed away because of the constant use of fertilizer and chemicals and plowing and i think that we all need to think differently but where we've got land like the sort of land that we've got here where the topography is up and down these dramatic beautiful coons and valleys and it's very wet you know it's not great food producing land and it's really much better suited to restoring wildlife rewilding doesn't mean that you can't build a business because actually there are lots of things that we can do we can have people coming on british wildlife safaris that's one of the things that nep has been so brilliantly successful at people coming and enjoying the extraordinary range of exciting species that we have here particularly the ones that that are returning and um and i think all of those things together mean that rewilding for cultly is absolutely the right thing to do and i can't wait i'm also particularly excited because i've got my son nesta he's 14 and he's an absolutely determined naturalist and he wants to see all of our species that have been lost returned to nature doesn't mink no way wow that is exciting and i want to do this to make sure that he and the next generation and the generations to come can really enjoy the countryside with all of the animals and the plants and the vegetation that we would have seen thousands of years ago so we have to take various steps at coltley in order to introduce this rewilding project you don't want to do it all straight away but what i thought i'd do because this is a lot of this is is quite new to me i'm learning and i've been reading various books and i've been talking to people and getting some really good advice but i thought that i would go directly to nep and talk to the experts most helpfully nepp has a consultant he's a conservationist working there called ivan de klee and one of his roles is to work with other estates to give them advice and so ivan's been to visit and he's produced this wonderful document which provides a kind of blueprint for what we might think of doing at mappington based on the experiences that they've had at net where they've had such a wonderful success restoring wildlife they've got turtle doves that have come back they've got purple emperor butterflies in profusion they've got stalks nesting uh i mean it's astonishing it felt it felt a little bit like walking into the african savannah of course these aren't african animals but there was a wildness there was a thrill to the to the natural environment so uh actually while i think about it um maybe what i'll do is give him a call and we can let him tell us the reasons that he's so excited about cultly and then we can go up and look at the land ourselves and meet the wonderful tom and sophie gregory who are our farming partners who are going to help us with this [Music] ivan incredibly good to see you you were here uh three or four months ago i think doing a wonderful report for mappington at the start of our rewilding journey you work as a conservationist at nep estate nepp has really been the pioneer of rewilding in this country as i understand it your part of your job is actually to help other estates like ours look at the opportunities for rewilding in their areas well so i'll just quickly explain what nap have been doing and why they've ended up being someone who gives advice charlie burrell the owner of nap came out of scion agricultural college with every bit of high you know modern agricultural knowledge and he went home to net to farm it and farm it intensively and to make food and to do really well from it and he spent a number of years intensifying getting better machinery get putting in higher inputs and really really trying to get the most out of his land that land however was on very heavy sussex clay and of all the years that he was intensifying putting all these modern practice practices to the land he only really made a profit two or three years out of those and he knew something was broken they were inspired by a dutch ecologist called franz vera about something called grazing ecology and this concept of rewilding which is the idea that large herbivores roam the land shaping the land by the way they graze and disturb and um impact their surroundings so whether you're a wild boar rootling and turning over the soil and creating bare ground or you're a deer eating browsing scrub or you're a cow grazing all of these interactions shape the land and create ecological niches for other for other species and the what's happened in the last 20 years has been the most incredible ecological recovery the the wildlife gains and the biodiversity recovery has just been extraordinary for rare species common species everything is just flooded back to the land and that's why nap has become so well known and such a leader in sort of modern conservationist this buzzword rewilding and i think um you'll be pleased with what we've done so since you gave us um that really stimulating report um we were talking about cultley which is an area of roughly 200 acres uh a form of of quite marginal productive value it's it's interesting when i took mapperton on people would always oh it's not a very productive estate and i sigh a little bit and and of course that may be true for food production but it's not true um for our own enjoyment of this beautiful landscape but also in terms of the biodiversity potential um and so um ivan just give me a sense when you when you came to cultley and and looked at the area that we were looking at what were your impressions and what were your thoughts about our opportunity well you'll remember i got very over excited very quickly because it's such a stunning such a stunning location it's up up the hill from mappington itself um and it's already because of this low production value as you as you say it's already been managed in a fairly low intensity way and the first thing you notice comparing cultly to a conventional farm is that the hedgerows already two or three times wider than they would be in a well-kept high you know high production system not only was it the staggering views looking all the way down to the sea the boggy patches which most farmers would be worried about thinking oh well i won't be able to graze there i immediately saw opportunities for wetlands and scrapes and i just thought i was i'd loved it i was absolutely blown away one of your recommendations in the report was to bring in some um low-intensity grazing with a native uh species and the terrific news is that we've got a herd of white park cattle i believe white parker are one of the oldest english native breeds and so that's the start and those cattle should be arriving within the next month or so so the journey is so exciting and the gates are all being flung open so that the cattle can can go wherever they want we have identified a tamworth crossed with a wild boar i thought that might oh wow very excited yeah yeah that would be great who's due to have piglets later this year um but one thing we're slightly worried about based on on your advice um is i think you said that that a single sal they can churn up something like 60 acres is that is that that's it that's an estimate made by charlie um they open up the sword the grass looking for grubs and roots and tubers and all tasty things on under the top layer of soil brilliant and and please come back really soon it's going to be an amazing well already is an amazing sight here we are in coltley farm yard which obviously used to be an active farm but these days the buildings are fairly redundant and falling to pieces i'm not sure you'd hold many cattle here as things stand one of the things that is really exciting for me about this project frankly is that we found both of you who share this commitment to looking at land management and farming rather differently but i'm leaving it to both of you to choose what we're bringing in so tell us something about the cattle that you've found yeah so we've uh we've recently um been down into uh down into devon to a really lovely guy who's the vice chairman of the british white park cattle society who's got a great breeding herd of white park cattle and he's really kindly allowed us to buy some of his pedigree animals to to bring back up here and what tell us about white park cattle what's so special about white park there's only 900 breeding females in in the uk and um they're all registered um to be pedigree they have to be registered with the society and they've got black noses and black around the eyes black feet and their udders as well our black and they're they've got beautiful beautiful big horns yes they kind of remind me of of texas longhorn i mean the halls just go on and on aren't they yeah which i think probably makes them a bit safer because if they come at you yeah you're not going to get gourd immediately are you no i think we did a bit of research and um we went to see this guy and when we went down there one of the first things they did was just ask was okay to go in the building and just place myself in the middle of the building see how the animals would uh react around a complete stranger just sat there and they were quite inquisitive um and just completely very docile very docile yeah and really quite friendly have they got names yeah one of them's called oona oona yeah every cow here is going to have a name yeah is that right yeah everyone will have a name and um they yeah they've got two beer tags and their name will be on there so hopefully it'll be nice to follow we're hoping we might put some gps on them to track them down we'll have the cattle here they're what two-year-old heifers yes is that right yeah um three three two six three-year-old and are they gonna carve at some point what's that what's the plan so aim to get them in calf um for next year to carve next year and yeah and leave the followers leave the carbs with them with them and then yeah at some point have some some meat to sell to the public which is phenomenal meat um and i'm hoping having access to such a big area that they they'll be able to pick and choose what they like to eat so i think the taste will be in and another interesting thing about them is that they're not just grazers are you no they're tell about the white parks is they will browse as well they're they're just as happy browsing on bushes and shrubs and trees as they are eating grass which i think is is really going to help with the the intensity of the flavor and the sort of nutrient density the minerals they're pulling out from different um plants and shrubs and trees there's something about tom isn't there and ancient herds of cattle that sort of gets them out of bed yeah cause you get out of bed pretty early but you're probably getting out of bed even earlier to to make it here to look after these ones yeah i know this is pretty cool i think um native native cattle has always been in my family right um i think at least four generations have always been breeding native british cattle so um yeah it's definitely something like say farming's in your blood and i think it's it's a real interest i've got i have no idea why but it's there yeah [Music] okay so today we have some exciting new visitors arriving long horns 1 000 kilograms in weight and also one of england's oldest breeds of cattle these are the white park cattle now they're only a thousand of them in the uk and we have got three of them they'll be arriving here in a small paddock first as they've just spent the night in a trailer which can't be too comfortable so apparently they're a little timid and and skiddish so we don't really want them running across the whole 200 acres of coatley however later on they will be moving over there where they'll shortly be visited by town with pigs and extra ponies now i believe i can hear the sound of the car arriving so let's get down there and open the gate just got a couple of glimpses of them and their horns are definitely they're definitely very long obviously we're meant to be over at coaly farm but we're here at marsh farm why are we here instead of over there i just felt they're a little bit on edge and i didn't want to release them into the wild how long do you think that they'll be in this field just until they calm down or yeah i think we'll give them a couple days in the facilities that we've got here which will be really easy and then we can um we can wander them on down all right well i think that we should take a look at what we've got in there yeah you know all that we'll give them a minute and hopefully they'll um let's stand back they'll find their own way out oh they've got amazing horns they're really well marked they've got all the markings we want so they should be really good breeding stock they've got the black ears the black nose the black eyes the black teats they've never been in a trailer before so they're just a bit scared they're a bit nervous of us and the new surroundings yeah so we're pretty confident after a couple days in this paddock um and maybe we've got their bucket we'll shake a couple of nuts and i think they'll be right back to normal so we are currently walking up marsh farm and hoping to find the cows that we've just released when we let them go they just sprint it off so i'm not sure but let's let's continue up actually i think yes i can just about see them over the top of this next hill now i don't want to get too close to them because as tom said they're pretty skittish and timid right now so that usually means they might be quite aggressive um but i don't blame them they've been in a trailer for a whole night or something there they are look at that they're already grazing so these guys okay they can gain one kilogram of weight every day i think now they're getting near to being full grown but when they are they can be 800 kilograms for the heifers and one ton for the bulls there are pretty large species of cow [Music] but it's good to see them grazing shows that they're probably quite comfortable here [Music] and this is just the start of our rewilding journey there are lots of other things i want to do at cultley as well we've got this some this wonderful barn up in front of me which as you can see has almost completely collapsed which is very sad but uh but we're hoping to rescue it and we're hoping to convert it into a house at some point it's got probably the best views on the estate but for the time being we've got this extraordinary project of cultly which is so exciting and we're starting this process of restoring nature allowing there to be a much better balance between the flora and fauna here i can't wait to see what things are going to look like in a couple of years and please join us on this journey we're going to be making more episodes this is one of our first films but the first of many and we're delighted to share it all with you so we'll see you next time [Music] [Music] what the beavers do is i mean very very simply by impounding water by felling trees by doing the multiplicity of things they do is they kiss the earth again with life [Music] you

Channel: Mapperton Live: This (un)Aristocratic Manor Life

Views: 81,072

Keywords: chateau diaries, how to renovate a chateau

Id: _pPuouilQzw

Length: 20min 36sec (1236 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021