Farmers v rewilders - do we really need another culture war, guys?

Last week I came across two giants of my world slugging it out on the Unherd platform.

In the blue corner was John Lewis-Stempel. He wrote amongst others the exquisite Meadowland, a diary of the passing seasons in an ancient meadow on his Herefordshire farm.

In the red corner, Ben Goldsmith, environmental financier, producer and host of my go-to podcast on nature restoration.

The subject was ‘Rewilding’.

The debate ran along civilised lines until it came to what is now rapidly becoming the reductio ad Hitlerum or the ‘playing of the Nazi card’ in debates about rewilding - wolves and their re-introduction.

Many a forum would have the rule that once a Hitler comparison is made, the debate is over. And so it goes for the topic of rewilding too as once the wolf card is played by one side, everyone gets so angry that rational argument goes out the window.

All very unfortunate. And not untypical.

In 2018 Rory Stewart, ex Tory minister, former Lake District MP and now famed as a podcast co-host, went head to head with George Monbiot, Guardian journalist and author of ‘Feral’, the book that brought the rewilding movement to a wider audience ten years ago.

I found both these spectacles painful to watch. In fact I switched them off before the end.

So what’s going on here?

Why does it appear that those in the rewilding movement can’t get along with farmers?

If you believed what you saw here in these two debates then you would think there is an all-or-nothing zero-sum game being played out here.

On the one hand, farmers are trashing the environment, say some rewilders. Indeed they are the number one driver of climate change and river pollution with their methane-producing animals and chemically sterilised fields.

For many in the farming community, those in the rewilding movement are metropolitan idealists who don’t know how the countryside works and are prepared to endanger our food security for the sake of a few birds.

You may assume that I conform to the latter caricature. But it may surprise you to learn that I have a foot in both camps.

You see, I know a thing or two about farming.

No, I wasn’t brought up on a farm. I have lived nearly all my life in cities.

Nor did we go on farm holidays when I was young.

In fact, I only got into farming in my middle years.

Not in a ‘Good Life’ sort of way (a reference that only fans of 1970s British sitcoms will understand), not by growing all my own food in the allotment in an annoyingly smug way.

Let me explain. It does start with wildlife. It starts with a mouse. The Mouse, in fact.

When I worked at Disneyland Paris as UK boss, I had a Dutch counterpart by the name of Luite Moraal. We were on nodding acquaintance but we weren’t particularly close.

Five years after we had both left Disney, he rang me up out of the blue. He had invented this tent whose interior was modelled on a Dutch farm-house from the 19th century.

There was even a ‘cupboard bed’ that mimicked the way a family would sleep above their cows to keep warm from their body heat.

He had launched the concept in the Netherlands as ‘Het Betere Boerenbed’ (the Better Farmer’s Bed) and it was going really well. Urban families were flocking to these canvas farmhouses sited on actual Dutch farms for long weekends of getting ‘back to nature’.

Would I like to team up with him and launch the concept in the UK?

I had never seen anything like it. It looked kind of weird but cute at the same time. The tents had something of the ‘shabby chic’ vibe that was just taking off in the ‘noughties’.

So I said: ‘Why not?’

I found a team and some farms to site the tents on. I souped up the name to ‘Feather Down Farm Days’ and so it was that ‘glamping’ (glamorous camping) went mainstream in this country.

I got to know many farmers and landowners during the decade I worked on Feather Down.

I explored all the pockets of beautiful landscape on our crowded island and the different ways of farming them. From upland sheep farms to lowland mixed ones, country estates with deer and even beer brewed on them and dairy farms. Lots of dairy farms. Which was just as well as an astonishing number of city children, even well-off ones, didn’t seem to know where milk came from before it got to the supermarket shelf. So twice daily milking would become a spectator sport, to the bemusement of the farmers.

I got close enough to the people who worked the land to understand the economics of farming. And it was precarious to say the least. That’s why they wanted to talk to me to help them diversify their income.

As well as conventional farming, I worked with organic farmers as well as practitioners of what has now become known as ‘regenerative farming’.

At Richard’s farm in Gloucestershire, by the banks of the river Severn, the health of the soil comes first. Disturbance is kept to a minimum (the ‘no till’ principle) and fields are allowed to recover by remaining fallow for longer than modern day farming would have the patience for. The land is then more productive in terms of the crop yields, there are less outgoings on artificial fertilisers and insecticides and the wildlife is more grateful, from the earthworms and insects to the farmland birds like the yellowhammer which are in rapid decline.

After ‘Feather Down’ got sold to new owners, that wasn’t the end of my interest in farming. I became chair of London’s biggest community farm and got into milling flour at Brixton Windmill just round the corner from where I live.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that my interest and knowledge of farming goes back further than my involvement in rewilding.

And my reading pile is equally divided between the two.

So when I see my favourite rewilder and my favourite farmer tearing into each other for public entertainment, it truly pains me.

I am a pragmatist by nature. We all have to live somewhere and we all have to get fed.

I am with Caitlin Moran, the Times columnist, who when she sees another housing development go up in her patch of London, thinks:

“I might sigh as Chris Packham lists the plummeting population of tern flocks, but the flock of young people in London is also plummeting”.

The government is leading a pukka consultation exercise around our first ever land use framework. Organisations like Rewilding Britain are making data-driven submissions to back up their vision of our green and pleasant land. In particular, how to reach the magic 30% enshrined in law that must be given over to nature:

I think in maps. And I have one in my head of this island that is more geographically based. It’s based on my visits to farms for Feather Down, so is possibly a mite naive. But hell, here goes.

The eastern side, the breadbasket of our island, is dominated by conventionally, even intensively farmed arable and vegetable crops to generate the bulk of the food we eat.

There would be pockets of regenerative farming led by the likes of Sarah Langford in Suffolk (see reading pile), ploughing shallow and looking after the earth worms. Teamed up with Dominic Buscall at Wild Ken Hill on the north Norfolk coast which hosted the BBC’s ‘Springwatch’ for three years and has a mixture of everything.

The lush western side of England is where we sent most of the ‘Feather Down’ urban families for their breaks. This would be dominated by dairy and mixed farming, the more acres for organic the better.

And the middle, particularly our uplands, would allow its unproductive margins to be handed over to nature.

It might be painful for the likes of Rory Stewart but perhaps the record number of sheep in the Lake District, that graze largely thanks to public subsidy, should be cut back to allow the land to ‘scrub up’ (literally and metaphorically).

If you read the inspirational ‘English Pastoral’ by James Rebank (again, see my reading pile), it is clear that the conversion process is a painful one. But if you can sleep better at night knowing that nature is recovering on your land, that can’t be a bad thing.

Just as importantly for a family farm, you know you will be handing something on to your children that they will want to cherish rather than trash.

Sitting in the city, I can’t do much about that process but I can do something, apart from letting nature into the nooks and crannies of the neighbourhood that I have a say in.

If people like me are happy to pay more for organic food, then more farmers will line up outside the Soil Association’s doors to begin the conversion process.

If I can get hold of ‘rewilded’ meat from Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell at Knepp, then I will gladly pay a premium.

I can also get my veg box grown to organic principles on Sutton Community Farm’s land.

Not just because it’s all delicious and better for my health. But also because I will have done my little bit to nudge the market to produce a little bit more of the right stuff.