A topic charged with emotion

The debate around land use, especially rewilding and farming, is a deeply emotive and often polarising one. This is understandable, given that there is so much at stake. It is a minefield of perceived trade-offs, losses and gains, pitting one person's values against another's. At Tir Natur, a recently formed, Welsh rewilding charity, we always try to tread this minefield with sensitivity and respect to all involved.

On the one hand, wildlife numbers in Cymru are in freefall and the climate emergency grows ever more threatening. This triggers feelings of anxiety, fear and especially guilt. It compels us to act, to demand more from ourselves, our governments and our land managers. Producing food, especially for its own sake, is no longer enough, as it has been for the past few decades. There is now a desperation from communities across the country to recover the bio-abundance that previous generations enjoyed and that future generations can be accustomed to. 

This desperation is generated by a collective understanding, across society, that time is running out. Emotion is charged.

Here in Cymru, a country whose cultural connection to the landscape is as profound as any other, farmers may well fear that in pursuit of more nature, a price must be paid; a terror that the balance is shifting. As recent protests demonstrate, our farmers feel that they will have to pay that price.

There is a fear that the pursuit of nature recovery and climate mitigation will undermine food production, which for so long has been paramount to a farmers’ sense of pride. There is a fear that the pursuit will impact the agricultural economy in Cymru and, by extension, rural communities and the Welsh language. There is a fear that the pursuit will mean a shift in the aesthetic of the landscape, which has been shaped and sculpted by generations of agricultural activity.

There is a fear that more wild means less Welsh. Given that the Welsh word for culture, ‘diwylliant’ literally translates to ‘un - wild’, the basis for this fear runs deep. Emotion is charged.

However, in the whirlwind of emotion, as everyone defends their beliefs, trenches get dug and nuance is often lost. This is no more true than of the debate in Cymru around rewilding and farming.

By its broadest definition, rewilding looks to restore ecosystems to the point where nature can be self-governing. Admittedly, this does seem to present an antithesis to farm activity or food production. However, scratch beneath the surface and this is evidently not the case. In fact, rewilding provides us with solutions to the very problems it is sometimes accused of creating.

Rewilding in the UK context

Large, grazing animals are the primary pillar of ecosystem restoration. In the UK, the wild herbivores of our past are becoming more and more known to us as the rewilding narrative has become mainstream. They are the Auroch (Wild Cow), Tarpan (Wild Horse), Wild Boar, Red & Roe Deer, Elk and Bison. These animals were not merely products of the ecosystem; they shaped and determined it. Through their grazing, browsing and general disturbance in the landscape, they created the myriad of niches and microhabitats that other species need to thrive. Along with the Beaver, they simply cause chaos; absolute ecological chaos in the landscape, which is precisely what nature needs and precisely what nature has lost.

These ‘ecosystem regulators’ create balance and abundance and, without them, nature is simply less diverse and ecosystems become dominated by a handful of species. They allow nature to determine outcomes and reduce the need for costly management. Rewilding, therefore, looks to create grazing systems that mimic what wild herds once did.

The Auroch and Tarpan are extinct and other species require a licence to release them. In the UK, as elsewhere, traditional, native breeds of cattle and ponies are used in rewilding as proxies for those animals. In Cymru, this provides an opportunity to recover populations of cultural breeds such as Welsh Black, White Park and Vaynol cattle, as well as Welsh Mountain and Carneddau Ponies.

Furthermore, pigs are used to replicate the impacts of the Wild Boar, a species once common in Cymru, but that has now been confined to myth and legend. When reading about the Twrch Trwyth, the magical Wild Boar of the Mabinogion, most probably don’t consider its profound impact on ecosystem function. In our acidic uplands, bracken monocultures often dominate, or threaten to do so, much to the detriment of farming and nature. This is, in part due to the impact of intensive sheep grazing, which prohibits other plants from competing with, or shading out the bracken, which they leave well alone. However, it is also down to the absence of Wild Boar, or, in our more traditional, mixed farming systems, pigs. They would have rootled around and consumed bracken rhizomes (underground network of stems and energy reserve), which provided a significant source of carbohydrates. In doing so, they would also till the earth and release dormant seed banks to the light, kickstarting natural regeneration.

Aside from Bison reintroductions in Kent, the grazing system laid out here has come to define rewilding efforts in the UK. Introduce low numbers of these animals (typically between 0.1 - 0.4 LU/ha/yr), let them roam free, and witness nature rebound. It is also a system that is much more akin to how farming used to be in Cymru, when extensive, mixed grazing systems were the norm and sheep to cattle ratios were significantly lower. Ancient breeds of cattle were favoured, along with pigs, in landscapes that were much more on the spectrum of complex wood pasture, rather than the tight, compact grasslands that currently characterise our countryside. For anyone wanting to learn more about the natural and cultural history of land in Cymru, I recommend Carwyn Graves’ recent book, ‘Tir - A Story of the Welsh Landscape’.

Crucially, this more natural or wild grazing provides a model for nature recovery that is exponentially scalable. It also lays a fairly obvious platform for animal husbandry and food production…

Food and…Farming?

In years gone by, herbivore herds would have been moved through the landscape and their numbers kept in check by the presence of apex predators such as Wolves, Bears and Lynx. Although there are rumblings and campaigns to reintroduce large carnivores to the UK, notably Lynx in the Highlands of Scotland, they are not here yet and nor will they be for the foreseeable future.

In their absence, much like how Tamworth or Iron Age pigs fill the ecological niche of Wild Boar in rewilding projects, the human/farmer/stock manager assumes the role of the apex predator, harvesting the surplus of live/wildstock for food consumption and preventing overgrazing. It is a position of stewardship, a role that keeps the ecosystem in harmony. At no point are we trying to manipulate the land or live/wildstock to produce more for us. We cede control to nature, something that is certainly not in our nature to do.

Whereas there is no market for horse products in the UK, rewilding across the country is producing low quantities of high quality beef, pork and, in some cases, venison. It is not a model of food production that could be rolled out across the farmed landscape, but on marginal land that is not producing significant quantities of food, rewilding provides us with a blueprint of how to restore wild nature, at scale, within the cultural parameters that have been set over the centuries.

There is also a growing movement on rewilding sites, such as Radnorshire Wildlife Trusts’ Pentwyn, for the produce of ‘wild’ or ‘natural’ grazing to be supplemented with increased horticultural output. As well as restoring nature in Cymru, we must see a rapid expansion of market gardens and our traditional orchards, 50% of which have been lost since 1900. It is encouraging, therefore, to see support for new horticultural businesses in the latest iteration of the Sustainable Farming Scheme. Together, this food output would meet the demands of local people better, and contribute more significantly to our food security in Cymru, than lamb, for example, which makes up less than 1% of our diets and 95% of which leaves the country.

More natural grazing systems are also much more economically resilient than current practices, which invariably rely on intensive inputs, even if it is just herbicide for bracken management, fertilising marginal grassland or supplementary silage. Rewilding does not rely on any such inputs. In the winter months, livestock forage on the regenerating tree and shrub species. Being descended from their indigenous, wild ancestors, they have evolved and adapted to do so. A Welsh Black, with its long horns intact, will happily bend over certain trees to access the branches, bark and residual foliage when herbaceous plants have stopped growing. Pigs will delightedly rootle around and survive off rhizomes, roots and invertebrates. This reduces or eliminates the need for supplementary feed.

Furthermore, the wide variety of plant species that result from natural grazing allow live/wildstock to self medicate, especially on anthelmintics such as Bird’s Foot Trefoil, but also compounds like salicin, an anti-inflammatory found in the bark of Willow. This reduces the need for medication, which benefits the ecosystem, farm business and the animals themselves.

It was not so long ago that most farms in Cymru had a ‘cae’r ysbyty’ (hospital field); a medicinal meadow for sickly animals to graze. Through rewilding, the whole landscape is an effective medicine cabinet; animals graze/browse what they need, when they need it.

Therefore, by tapping into these new dimensions of forage, the system becomes more efficient and less exposed to the exogenous shocks to the economy that have blighted farmers over the past few years. No fertiliser, minimum feed, minimum medication. It also produces food that is of much greater value, both financially to the farmer and nutritionally to the consumer.

So, there you have it. Rewilding can create a new type of ‘eco-farm-system’ that is a mimicry of wild nature; a proxy approach that has food production woven into it. Whether this type of land management is a stepping-stone to even more wild and wonderful things in the future remains to be seen and might be something for future generations to argue over.

What we do know, is that rewilding, as is being practised across the UK, is utterly necessary here and now to address the nature and climate emergencies. Beyond producing food for people and wildlife, the cascading benefits of putting nature first are vast. From reanimating natural carbon cycles, to improving the health of our rivers and soils, to the profound impact on the physical and mental well-being of society, it ticks all the boxes.

In Cymru, as elsewhere, it has the capacity to sustain farm businesses and help them navigate an uncertain future, by diversifying income streams and accessing new public payments. By extension, this will also ensure the future of rural communities.

The debate will continue, but support for rewilding is widespread and growing, whereas opposition is starting to wane as the nuance that I have tried to lay out in this post reaches more ears. 

Stephen Jenkins (Tir Natur)