Rewilding versus farming: the land-use argument splitting the countryside

Britain is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world by most biodiversity measures, and it also imports close to half its food. Those two facts power an argument that has moved from ecology conferences to village halls: whether significant amounts of farmland should be returned to something wilder, and if so, whose.

The case for rewilding rests on what happens when it is tried. Large projects on former farmland have documented recoveries that surprised even their advocates: scrubland breeding rare songbirds within years, insect abundance multiplying, soils and floodplains beginning to hold water and carbon again. The flagship estates now earn from safari tourism, wild meat and paid ecosystem services, employing more people than the loss-making farming they replaced. Advocates are careful with the arithmetic: because UK farming's output is concentrated, with a large share of calories coming from the most productive arable land, taking the least productive uplands out of intensive use costs relatively little food while buying disproportionate nature.

The case against starts exactly there, because "least productive" describes someone's livelihood and often a century of family work. Upland livestock farming operates on thin margins and heavy subsidy, but it sustains communities, skills and landscapes that exist nowhere else, and hill farmers hear rewilding as a polite word for their removal. Food security has also hardened as an argument since recent supply shocks: land converted to scrub is not quickly converted back. And tenant farmers note that rewilding deals are struck by landowners, while the people who actually graze the stock carry the consequences.

Sharing, sparing and the middle ground

Academics frame the choice as land sparing versus land sharing: separate intensive food production from dedicated nature, or farm everywhere more gently. Evidence increasingly supports a blend, sparing the best nature opportunities while raising the wildlife baseline of working farms. English agricultural policy has been rebuilt around that logic, paying for environmental outcomes, hedgerows, winter cover, wader-friendly grazing, alongside a smaller scheme funding recovery of whole habitats in selected places.

What is settled is that the previous equilibrium, subsidising marginal production by the acre while nature declined on every measure, satisfied nobody and is already gone. What remains genuinely contested is pace, place and consent: whether change is done with farming communities or to them. The projects that have earned local support share a pattern, keeping people and some production on the land and letting income follow the new uses. The ones that generate the angriest meetings share a pattern too, arriving as a plan already made somewhere else.