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farm making a steady loss. ‘I took over
running the estate aged 21, and we
started to commercialise our farming
operations using sprays, chemicals and
fertilisers, just like everyone else,’ he
explains. ‘But the difficulty with the land
here, is that it’s 320 metres of Weald clay,
and this clay cap sits over a bedrock of
limestone, so it’s difficult farming land.’
However, investments in bigger
and better machinery, the amalgamation
of dairies, and diversification into ice cream
and yogurt were not enough to stop
Knepp sinking. ‘Seventeen years later,
we had an overdraft of one and a half million
and our backs were absolutely against the
wall, even with subsidies,’ says Tree.
The turning point came in 2000
when Burrell, who had always cultivated
an interest in conservation, learned of the
work of Dutch ecologist Frans Vera, after his
book,
Grazing Ecology and Forest History
,
was translated into English. Vera decried the
dangers of intensive farming, urging against
the ‘millions of small rectangular pieces,
each fashioned by the plough and the spade,’
like the ones that scar Britain’s topography.
Temperate zone Europe, he argues, would
not have been a closed canopy forest, but
would have looked a lot more like Africa
– a complex habitat of savannahs, tree
groves, and wood pastures inhabited by
huge herds of roaming animals.
Herbivores such as aurochs, tarpan,
bison, elk, wild boar, beavers, roe deer and
red deer would have governed our ecology,
so in order to recover biodiversity, Vera
suggests animals similar to these (as most
of the originals are now extinct) can
be reintroduced into the landscape.
This, and the notion that ‘natural processes’
should dictate the lay of the land, is the idea
behind rewilding. Burrell was convinced
by Vera saying, ‘we have forgotten what
our landscape looked like before human
intervention,’ and thought this was
something they could rectify at Knepp.
Almost 20 years on, Knepp is now an
open terrain, home to hundreds of free-
roaming herbivores, and it is bringing in
more revenue than anything Burrell and
Tree could have hoped to make under
intensive farming. They have waved goodbye
to farm machinery, dairy cows and 250
miles of fences, and welcomed proxies for
the animals that would have roamed before
us: English Longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies,
Tamworth pigs, as well as red deer, roe deer
and fallow deer. These animals drive habitat
regeneration, and, as a result, Knepp has
become a hotspot for all sorts of weird
and wonderful species including nesting
Peregrine falcons, nightingales,
