Will British Farming Pay the Price for Rewilding? (Your Radical Questions with Derek Gow)

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1:22Hello, I'm John Byrne Murdoch and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where we put your questions to one of our guests. This is your chance to engage directly with the radical people we have on this podcast and ask them about their ideas for the future. I've still got Derek Gow with me, the British farmer, conservationist, author and rewilder. Derek's long been an outspoken advocate of large-scale species reintroductions and on his farm in Devon he breeds animals which were once native to Britain like wild boar, beavers, water vole and even wild cats with the hope that one day these species will roam free again.

1:56We talked about all that and more in our latest episode, so if you haven't heard that conversation yet, please do go back and listen. But now, Derek is here to answer the radical questions that you've sent in. So Derek, thanks again for being here. Thank you for having me. Our first question is from Matthew, who sent us this voice note. Hi Derek, I'm a deer stalker, and I manage deer partly because if I didn't, the woodland regeneration you're describing simply wouldn't happen. Britain has more deer now than at any point in a thousand years, and no links or walls to check them. So doesn't rewilding actually depend on more human intervention, not less?

2:35The places most of us think of as wild, the highlands, the lakes, the national parks, are wild because keepers, stalkers and rangers work them year-round to keep them that way, isn't the honest picture that wilderness in Britain is something people maintain, not something we step back from? Derek, any thoughts on that one? Yeah, I mean, it's quite simply, of course we need to manage deer, and we're not managing deer very well. So, I mean, if you look at the landscapes he portrays where deer are, red deer in particular, are commonly kept in very high numbers to ensure that stalking as a sport is practiced because it's so economically valuable for the estates, then in their own right, commonly these environments retain very many more deer than the land can sustain.

3:24And you can't get woodland regeneration because things like red deer are there in such high numbers that at the end of it all the trees can't grow. So that's part of the story too. It's not as simplistic as the question suggests. Added to that, you then come down to the lowlands of England and you go over to Lincolnshire and you see those fallow deer existing in numbers that is virtually reminiscent of, you know, things like wildebeest migration. So they're crossing, you know, things like motorways, you know, in their hundreds, if not their thousands, to stop the flow of traffic. I can't remember the exact figures, but I'm pretty sure when I did the book on the Shadow Wolf that, you know, you're looking at some of the 200 deaths a year and or life changing injuries and road accidents with deer in Britain every year.

4:08and then there's an estimated 74 ,000 other collisions with deer every year. It is a huge problem. We definitely need to kill more deer and we need to kill more deer probably not just in a jolly hockey sticks type way where we go out and black them with a rifle on top of a mountain but we maybe start to think about feeding them into corrals in the winter time in numbers and then running them up races and bolt gunning them. At the end of it all, we're not on top of the deer situation in Britain at all and that again boils down to government. You know, it's a national problem It's not going away both from an environmental point of view and from a human damage point of view.

4:42And really, it's probably high time we actually got to the stage as a professional guild of people employed by government just to kill deer, regardless of sporting interests, which you'd set to one side. But the other point that Matthew is making with regard to management, if you look at countries like the Netherlands, well, the Netherlands are a much more developed environment than Britain. There are wolves in the Netherlands. And the wolves came naturally. There was never this idea that anybody other than a very obscure project in Georgia many decades ago, the wolves within Europe have been reintroduced as nonsense.

5:13The wolves have basically come from the east with the protection that was accorded them under the terms of the Bern Convention. Wolves play a role in deer control by moving deer. They create a situation whereby the deer can't languish at ease in the richer environments where they just like to bum about scoffing trees and shrubs. and because the wolves are there these animals have to be aware of the fact that predators are there and move move move to avoid them but the principal impact of wolves on things that deer populations is is the impact they have on the old animals which are lame or ill or whatever else and in the numbers of young animals they catch and kill wolves don't really regulate deer populations the guard links they have the same effect on making game animals move in different ways through the environment, their impact is pretty much the same as the wolf.

6:06And so Matthew unpacks a bit in a follow-up question, and he points to examples of countries like Romania and Sweden, where after supporting the growth of species like brown bears and wolves, they've now had to sometimes cull the bears and wolves themselves. So again, you know, the argument is more, the question is, aren't you, at each stage that you introduce a new species, you're just introducing another piece of nature that needs to be managed by humans again to stop things getting out of here. If you look at Scandinavia, the reason those wolves are controlled in Scandinavia are because of the rampant farmers' lobby, which absolutely hates them.

6:43And they are politically powerful. So if you want them, Norway's a good example. In Sweden, they have a wolf quota, okay? So there's the number of wolves that you're allowed to have. There's the number of lynx you're allowed to have. There's the number of brown bears you're allowed to have. You have a strong farming lobby, be also extremely strong hunting lobby so if you want an example of sweden you know beneath the swedish parliament there's a gun range which the the hunting members of the parliament can go down and practice their skills at whatever recess there is when they just want to have a bit of fun so i mean norway is a better example of of of wolf butchery than than any other european country whereby they maintain that creature right on the um the knife edge of extinction and and there'll be all this fuss about the numbers of sheep they kill which is simply not reflected in reality i I mean, again, if you want, the idea that you have to kill wolves to protect sheep is patent nonsense.

7:32When you look at Britain, I mean, I think 2016 there were figures released. In 2016, domestic dogs killed 16 ,000 sheep in Britain. Getting to the point where you can actually compare, you know, wolves kill sheep. Of course they kill sheep, but there aren't very many wolves. And the sheep they take are insignificant compared to dog kills. So saying that because the Norwegians are keeping this predator on a knife edge of extinction precipice and it's a required mode of management is absolute nonsense. I should just emphasise again that much like the National Farmers Union in DEFRA, the Norwegian unions and farmers aren't in the room either.

8:11So their views, I'm sure, would differ on this. I'm sure they would. But if we can now move on to the next question which comes in from Helen who asks why does Derek think that people seem to be quite scared of the whole idea of rewilding some people that seem very very hesitant to the whole concept and hostile even to beavers water vol and stalk let alone wolves. Helen also asks given that our food security is very fragile how would you justify taking away land from conventional farming? So most of the the issues that people have with restoration of creatures like water voles or beavers or, I don't know, mole crickets comes from the fact they're just completely ignorant of what these are.

8:51And they've lived beyond a time where they were common creatures and part of a vibrant countryside to a time where the people themselves have moved away into urban centres and there's no threat from any of these things. They're just part of life. So any fear that's attached to human basins, I'm afraid, is born of ignorance. When it comes to taking land, nobody's taking land away from farmers. That's not happening. If land is being sold by a farmer or whoever owns the land and is bought for another purpose, then the owner of that land can use it for whatever they like within reason. And this has always been one of the tenets of land use is that you're going to speak to people who wish to shoot grouse and they'll tell you, well, they're going to do it on their land.

9:39It's their land. They can do what they want to do. So if it comes to something like the news about Emble Hope being bought by a company called Restore to turn it into a British Yellowstone on the border of Kielder in the north of England, well, if they own that land, why can't they do that? What's the problem with it? And this idea that this productive land, and we've got to protect it from solar panels or whatever else, if it was productive land, if it was actually making a whole lot of money doing what it did, why would somebody be selling it for solar panels? or why more commonly would they be arranging a lease with a company that owns the solar panels whereby the land is still retained by the landowner and they're paid an income year on year for the solar panels being there.

10:20The reason why they do things like this is because it's worth doing and there is no other way of making money from the land. So I really just don't understand where that argument comes from because frankly without being rude about it it makes no sense at all. I mean I would say this and this is just my read of it the question is maybe more asking why if a majority of existing farmers aren't actively seeking to do what you're doing in Devon, what would need to change to get them to do that? And if you then had the incentive changed and a lot of that conventional farmland used for rewilding and therefore the yields go down, wouldn't that threaten food security?

10:59It comes back to this scale thing again. If what you would love to happen did happen, wouldn't that cause problems? I think, again, right, but if we just take the food security bit to begin with, the food security thing is still based on this binary type explanation that Britain is an island, we need use to import, or we're importing all the stuff that we import, or a significant percentage of the food we consume is imported. That has always been that way. If you look at what we import, I mean, during the Second World War, with all your digging up the lawns of Buckingham Palace and everything else, I think our food security rose to some at 60%, 70%.

11:32And the big threat for Britain was then these U-boats and the Western approaches, you know, sinking the rice that was coming from India or the wheat that was coming from Canada or whatever else. The next war is going to be, you know, it's going to be a cyber war, OK? It's not going to be one whereby the U-boats and the Western approaches sink in our merchant marine and the rice is all going to the bottom of the English Channel. It's going to be one where they break down your systems within days of food distribution. So the food's all there, sitting rotting in warehouses or whatever else it is, but because the computer's gone down, you can't make the whole thing work.

12:04And if you think that's nuts, just think of the co-op example, whereby their computer system malfunctioned, what, a year and a half ago? That wasn't even that long ago. And they just couldn't get the food to the stores. So the idea that it's all this basic and this is what it was a century and a bit ago, it's just, again, nonsense. It's much more complicated than that. thank you Helen now this next question is from George Wallace who sent us this voice note hey good morning my name's George Wallace I've just got one question for you which is that just over 80 percent of the UK population lives in towns and cities why if at all would rewilding be important to those people thanks very much okay well if you live in a town or city and you have a river flowing through it and every year that river comes up bursts its banks washes your car away, floods your house, fills your children's school full of sewage, then how that water is managed above your settlement is of considerable concern to you.

13:04So the idea that you take land, you restore meanders, you put pools and lagoons in, you create a water-absorbent landscape rather than a water landscape which is Teflon as far as water's concerned is of great concern to you. And also, you know, if you are in a city which is full of trees, where you have the kind any green buildings you see being developed in countries like Singapore, which have vines and creepers and lianas flowing down them where bees can live in an environment that's not toxic and produce honey in the tops of offices, then what it also offers you, and this is not rewilding, it's coming to different accommodation with nature, new nature, whatever word you wish to use, it's an accommodation which offers you a much, much healthier lifestyle and a much more vibrant living environment.

13:49So when it comes back to the rewilding thing in a town or city, well, actually, one of the projects I forgot to mention is that in the back end of this year, with the support of Sadiq Khan and London Wildlife Trust, I'm involved with a project that's going to see us attempt to reintroduce the white storks to London. And one of the things we forget about nature is it's inspirational. OK, so you go to Nepp Castle. I was there last Friday. We walk up to the stork pen, which was built to contain the birds that I imported from Poland when the project began. And as we walk up to the pen, there's just glorious tornadoes of birds rise in front of us and go whirling up into the sky.

14:25And when you follow the process up, up, up and into the blue, there's a white-tailed eagle above them, looking down at them and thinking, this could be lunch. And when you see the response that these big spectacular creatures provoke in people, it's just astounding. They just can't believe that this could be British wildlife because they're so used to it being at this awful grey rock bottom where your wildlife experience is a fox raiding your bins or rats in your attic. So the idea of bringing wildlife back to urban environments is truly spectacular, whereby in civilised cities like Strasbourg, these storks return every year to breed in the public parks and orangeries, and people put these little tiny little martingale woolen rings on trees to commemorate the stores.

15:15That's back to people developing a relationship which is ancient, deep and meaningful. And that's why and how Rewi Wilding could play a role in bringing, you know, just joy back to people who live in urban centres. I guess the question then is how do you shift that up people's priority list? Because, you know, people clearly do enjoy when they feel that they're experiencing nature. but it never seems to be something they're clamouring for from their politicians. If you look at any public consultations that are undertaken where you ask people if they want to see more nature or they want to see more world space, they all say yes.

15:50For sure. And then they're ignored. But you ask them what their 20 policy priorities are and I don't think the white stocks will be on that. So how would you change that? How would you change it? You'd change it actually by starting and then people see them and that inspires them. I mean, when the, again, I was at Neb when the first white store chick actually that was patched in Britain, flew off its nest, came down to the ground, grubbed around for a moment with its mum and dad, and then flew back to the nest. There were, it was the early stage of COVID, there were three to four hundred people standing in the field watching this happen.

16:29Some of them were weeping. And then the day after, when the story was featured in the national press, Izzy Burrell got 100 ,000 people sending a note in to say this gave them such hope why do we always assume that people want to be disconnected from nature sometimes for sure they don't know they don't understand how some of these creatures are wondrous until you see them but we should be looking at a time whereas as a developed civilization we recognise that we know now that nature has massive mental health benefits that we just do these things because people will enjoy it. It's that simple. The next question is from Jane Bonser, who writes in, Derek, if we want farmers and land managers to restore nature at scale, what should the economic model for that be?

17:20Appeals to save nature might not be enough. Farmers need to earn a living. So what should that look like? She then goes on to add, I think the economics of nature recovery are every bit as important as the ecology itself, yet they rarely seem to be part of the conversation. simply there is no way you're going to get people to do this without the public purse paying for it and you have to look at nature and consider it to be a responsibility of a civilised state and say we are the guardians of it and therefore we're going to have to spend. I mean the old farming subsidies annually came somewhere in the region of about 3.3 billion a year that were pumped into farming to just basically put money in people's pockets and to enable them to exist.

18:00At the moment there's been an announcement from Natural England that they're going to spend about 60 million on species recovery, which is a one-off type system of payments, which is principally going to focus on rare and endangered insects. So when it actually comes to basically ensuring that the things we've described, the putting in a pool complexes, the making fields round, the retention of deadwood rather than putting the whole thing up in smoke and creating more carbon in the wider environment, you're going to have to pay people for it. And that's it. There's going to have to be an acreage payment to farmers to take 10 or 15 % of their land out of production that basically rewards them well for doing it and ensures that it's worthwhile.

18:39And they can be the managers of something that might occasionally need a degree of trimming or putting cattle into it to provide a greater benefit for the creatures that remain there. That's the only way it's going to happen. There's no other... Even with regard to what we do, I mean, running our enterprise year-on-year is a wearing, draining thing. and it would be very difficult for people to replicate. So in the end, it will have to become a public support thing and a decision will have to be made by government to support it. How do the finances of your farm work? The finances of my farm work on the basis that we have a small foundation which has been hugely helpful.

19:16We've got a number of absolutely brilliantly generous people that have enabled us to set off facilities to start breeding redback shrikes, which are a bird that's extinct as a breeding species in Britain, black grouse, mole crickets, a whole range of species that we know next to nothing about and we're having to learn very quickly what their breeding requirements are and their husband requirements are if at the end of the day we're going to restore them ever at all. So that's one part of it. We also run a consultancy which helps people move water vols from site to site where this endangered species exists and development is an issue.

19:49We do bits of land advisory management for people who want to change their farms. We do a whole range of different things. But the long and short of it, of course, is that it costs about£90 ,000 a month to run. We employ about 20 people, and the number of people we're employing is going up. And that kind of number of people employed, you know, if you're running a conventional farm of something like 400 or 500 acres, you'd employ one or two people if indeed employed anybody at all. So that's how we work. So it sounds like the cost of maintaining a rewilded landscape in the UK to the states would be significantly higher than the cost of the farming subsidies.

20:22The cost? No, that's my cost because we have classrooms, we have campsites, we have breeding facilities for creatures that we don't understand, that we need to basically develop a knowledge of. There's a kind of research element to it, which is expensive. When it comes to farming subsidies, well, that was, your farming budget was the 3.3 billion. I mean, if you looked at it and said, I mean, 3.3 billion to government is not a massive amount of money. Basically, what you were going to do was say, right, OK, this is a priority, but we're going to spend this on the basis that you do these things.

20:55You actually do them. You don't just get the money for doing nothing. You have to create the pool systems. You have to manage your flower-rich meadows, cut the hay at the right time, whatever else. But, of course, doing it well would mean the specialist staff, and that costs a bit of money. and you lose a bit of revenue from the land that isn't being used to do that? Honestly, no. I don't think it would require specialist staff at all. At the end of the day, farmers, there are very many intelligent people out there who would come to and understand. And the thing about farmers is they could be the best friends of nature ever if they wish to be because they're people who are used to producing something.

21:33They don't just talk about it. They actually do something. If you want a product, they will provide that product for you. And there was a study done, and I think it was in the Netherlands a number of years ago, whereby they ran this scheme whereby they paid the farmers for every wading bird nest they had in their land. So if they had 15 godwits and 20 curdlew nests or whatever else, for every single nest they produced where there were chicks and eggs, they paid them. That's the kind of model we need to develop now. And these guys will be much better than specialists and scientists and zoos at producing other life if you incentivise it correctly for them.

22:08But I mean, just on a basic level, the incentives we're talking about here is payments for stewarding the land and the wildlife. So I'm just sort of clarifying that what you said at the very start is that we would need significant state subsidy to create the economic incentives for large scale rewilding. I don't think that's controversial. I mean I wouldn't even call it rewilding it's nature gardening, it's whatever, it is for nature it's just for the recovery of nature that's not a hostile term to use Thank you to Jane for that question and we're now going to listen to a voice note question from Ellie Hello Derek, my name's Ellie I live in West London I was terrifically excited to hear that you're going to be on Radical I live in Ealing where beavers have been successfully reintroduced to the capital city thanks to the work of Ealing Wildlife Group and Sean McCormack.

23:03And my question is about allies. Who are your allies? Are they local campaigners? Are they farmers? Are there politicians on side? Who's on your side? And also, what do you think of Robert McFarlane's comments that despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline? How do you stay hopeful? thank you and good luck allies allies there are some brilliant farmers that are brilliant estate owners who are a thousand percent supportive of everything i'm trying to do there are some good people in nature conservation and it's actually nature conservation organizations but not many they're their civil service bureaucracies which are largely impervious to joy or hope when it comes to the other organisations, Wildlife Trust, I mean, of course, you have delightful people everywhere and you have delightful people in life.

24:02So you can't look at any given cadre in people and say, well, it's going to be rich in allies or rich in enemies. You just find people who support the idea of nature restoration wherever you look. And then when it comes to Robert McFarlane's work, I completely agree. At the end of the day, it's very easy to look at the grimness of everything and say it's not possible to make any kind of change or the changes that you can make in your own inadequate way are not good enough. That is not something that is going to enthuse people or inspire others to listen to or to follow the cause you project. You have to wake every morning with hope.

24:44Forget what was done yesterday and look at how you can make the best use of a day and of life to affect what change is possible. So I think those are good words. And the idea that hope is a discipline, well, yeah, that's entirely valid. There's no point in whining about things. You've got to get off your butt and make what changes you can. Well, that's a very practical call to action to end on, Derek. So perhaps a nice note for us to leave this. Well, thanks to everyone for your questions and thank you, Derek, for answering them. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure being here. That's it from me, but there'll be another episode of Radical coming very soon.

25:19Bye.

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