James Rebanks has had a busy morning. He’s moved his cattle — they’re on a regenerative grazing system — spoken to a fellow farmer in Ukraine about farming under siege from artillery and, in between, popped to town for water fittings.
Despite being preoccupied with midwinter Cumbrian farm life and his own writing, the author of English Pastoral has agreed to be interviewed because, he tells me, stewardship is his thing — along with “elevated ranting”.
“Stewardship is my radical politics,” he says. “At the risk of sounding defeatist, it’s about going back to basics on my own patch. Whether I live in a city and that’s my backyard, or helping my neighbours grow food. It’s about doing things right.”
And it matters that we do things right. The UK — England in particular — is relatively densely populated. Numbers from 2021 found that the country homes 276 people per square kilometre. Yet we are fortunate to have a national patchwork of green space made up of a glorious mass of farms, forests, fells, wildlife reserves, mountains, moors, parks and — of course — gardens.
The UK’s gardens make up an area bigger than all our wildlife reserves put together, a landmass that equates to about one-fifth of Wales. A significant size, if you’re into joined-up thinking.
The dismal state of the UK’s wildlife is a pretty low starting point as we enter the new year. According to the 2023 State of Nature report, one in six of our native species are at risk of being lost. The same study found the habitats our wildlife rely on to be in poor condition.
On a more optimistic note, new approaches to growing are providing an opportunity to reflect on what hasn’t been working, and what could be done differently. Regenerative practices, for instance, are on the rise. They include rotational grazing, using cover crops — where plant species are used to improve the soil in between other crops — and avoiding tilling.
Rebanks has been on his own journey to change how he farms. His first book, The Shepherd’s Life, was a “proud defence of tradition” and old ways. His second, English Pastoral, explores progressive and more unconventional practices. It’s a lesson in how to push farming forward, he says.
He describes himself as being “evangelical” about his own regenerative farming journey, but at the same time is wary of trends and not wanting to get caught up in telling other people how to do things.
“What’s really cool with the farming system is the landscape was a landscape of tiny fields with cows and sheep moving around as much as they wanted. We managed to forget all of that in the 20th century. Now our whole farm is dedicated to repairing soil, repairing biodiversity, flipping farming to using permaculture principles.”
These changes, says Rebanks, have led to quantifiable and distinct changes in the landscape: boggy fields have started draining again and there’s been a marked increase in biodiversity, thanks to better soil health.
Rebanks relays the science behind his regenerative practices with great enthusiasm, going on to tell me about optimising photosynthesis, carbon and sugars, and how he’s bringing the soil back to life using his cattle and sheep.
But none comes with financial certainties. It’s not an easy time to be a farmer — many are having to change how they do business due to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ agricultural transition plan, which sees a move away from direct payments to other kinds of funding over a seven-year period that runs until 2028.
Heather Webb, who leads the future farming division at the Duchy of Cornwall, is currently helping some 250 farmers navigate this transition. The 686-year-old Duchy estate, under the leadership of the Prince of Wales, owns 130,000 acres of land across 23 counties, mostly in the South West of England.
They are by no means the largest landowner (that title goes to the Forestry Commission, with their 2.5mn acreage) but their reach is significant in terms of relationships with independent farms, many of whom have been in the same families for generations.
“We’re keen to provide as much support as we can to enable our tenants to be the best stewards of land that they can possibly be,” says Webb, whose tenure at the Duchy was preceded by other positions working with farmers around the world, from her native Australia to Kenya to Borneo.
The policy and environmental context might differ from continent to continent, but the consistent thing is that farmers, through their management of their land and supply of food and resources, are hugely significant in how a country’s land is looked after. “The knowledge that farmers have for their little piece of the planet is astounding and it’s not written down anywhere,” Webb says.
“No farmer wants to see their land suffer and no farmer sets out to be a bad steward. Everyone is valuing the trees, the soil, the birds they see. But our tenants always say that they need to be profitable before they can be kind to nature and be good stewards,” she says. “You can’t be green if you’re in the red.”
In October last year the Duchy also launched a new mental health and wellbeing package, the current Duke of Cornwall, Prince William, being keen to lead in the agriculture sector on the topic of mental health.
For Rebanks, the pressures of the modern world have only made him double down on his philosophies on growing — and more determined to farm in the best way he can. “The crazy world we live in wants to break us into atomised individuals,” he says. “I believe my stewardship has to mean something to you, or if not you then my neighbours; we’ve got to build communities that want to plant trees together, eat food together.”
Other regenerative practices that are providing ample space for experimentation include increasing biodiversity and replanting trees and hedgerows — features that were once seen as a nuisance are now viewed by some as useful allies thanks to their myriad environmental services.
To the seasoned gardener, many of these practices might seem familiar. No-till farming, whereby you avoid disturbing the soil’s structure, is adjacent in concept to no-dig gardening. No matter the size of the garden, field or farm, the same themes are emerging as we learn to work not just with nature but for it.
On a smaller scale, growers are launching businesses around these practices, starting with the basic foundations of healthy soil and diverse food crops. In the New Forest, the Lime Wood Hotel serves food straight from a local market garden, and the kitchen is enjoying the refreshing wave of creativity that comes from a product-led, rather than chef-led, menu.
Head chef Luke Holder goes as far as to say it’s not just about shopping local: “It’s about finding the best ingredients. We’re bringing back into consciousness the diverse vegetables and fruit that don’t really make the grade for large production.
“Kitchens have a really important role in driving this movement and keeping it financially viable,” says Holder, who works with grower Kate Forrester at Four Acre Farm in Ringwood in Hampshire. Holder’s menus are often built around WhatsApp messages from Forrester with a list of vegetables that are good that week. It’s a big shift to how things were done — and are done elsewhere.
“There’s this whole young gardening movement [whose advocates] want to take the stewardship of the land and want to make sure we aren’t piling more problems on in the future by taking charge of our soil.” One such organisation is Bristol-based Roots, set up in 2021 to circumvent the council-run allotment system and provide people without their own growing space. Forrester, along with no-dig guru Charles Dowding, is one of their star growers, teaching Roots members about different gardening practices.
Smaller than a council allotment (which are in steep decline, and have an average waiting list of three years — and that number rises to 15 if you live in the borough of Islington), Roots offers a space for the same price as a Spotify subscription. With the basic £9.99 membership package comes access to tutorials and events, and a welcome pack of seed packets and plug plants.
Roots has three golden rules for its 1,000-plus members. First, no dig — you have to replenish the soil. Then, no chemicals, including synthetic fertilisers and all the usual “-cides”. “And good vibes,” says co-founder Ed Morrison, who’s shelling beans from his own allotment when we meet for our video call. He says the communal spirit and common ground that an allotment offers make it the perfect space for big conversations about the future, on food security, climate change and so forth.
“We have people from so many different socio-economic backgrounds who come to us, and you are met with friendliness and warmth and openness.” The benefits of gardening on our mental health are well documented, but to garden together is an entirely different ball game, says Morrison.
The antithesis of good stewardship is short-termism: Roots has had to come up with new approaches to legal challenges in order to secure leases of up to 25 years on land. This takes the right landowner and a lot of creative thinking. Morrison admits that when they started the company they had no idea how complicated it would be to get it off the ground. A planning issue with North Somerset council last year cost the start-up £120,000, he says.
For most of us, the impact we can have on the land is simply about how we look after our gardens. It’s this relationship — between person and place — that psychiatrist Marchelle Farrell has explored in her book Uprooting. “As a psychotherapist I think about relationships. The relationships with our habitats must be important to the way we develop, and our relationship with our external landscape shapes our internal landscape really importantly.”
For Farrell, stewardship is more about watching your garden, knowing it and then understanding what it needs. “It comes from a place of love,” she says. “You can’t fully love something you don’t know. I spend a lot of time just wandering around staring at it, but that feels so important. That’s my way of knowing the place, an intimate knowing. It feels two-way, that the garden holds me as well.”
Someone else who advocates for the importance of our personal relationships with the landscape is Nigel Dunnett, professor of planting design and urban horticulture at the University of Sheffield. “I want the natural approach to become the mainstream, the default, not the exception,” he says. “And for that to happen, people have to love it, and want more of it. That means it has also got to be beautiful, joyful and uplifting.
“It’s all about evoking the spirit of nature rather than slavishly trying to recreate or copy something you might find in the countryside,” says Dunnett, who’s adamant about the continued importance of aesthetics in our gardens and public spaces. “I think that a more natural garden speaks forcefully to us about our deep connection to the wild, and by working exuberantly with plants we can make our own forms of enhanced nature that’s colourful, ever-changing and full of beauty and interest.”
To care for the land in an environmentally responsible way, whether you’re experimenting with new practices and approaches, or just creating a nice place to spend some time in, is to care for yourself — and for future generations. No pressure, then. And no dig, either.
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This article has been amended since publication to correct the title of James Rebanks’s second book, English Pastoral
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