One of the first steps was to introduce herbivores to the land that could survive outside all year round without supplementary feeding and fend for themselves even in a harsh or wet winter, Tree explains. “Even our contract farmer was very willing to give up when we found an alternative,” Tree says. The Old Sussex dialect has more than 30 different words for mud, Tree points out. Related: ' Rewilding' activists aim to bring back some long-extinct beasts to EuropeĬontract farming also proved unprofitable, in part because the land sits on heavy clay, which makes farming difficult. So - to look forward to the future - we really had to think of something else - do something with the land rather than against it.” We feel we're stewards of this land and we can't just sell up and move out. For us, it really isn’t an option to sell. Charlie's ancestors have been here since the Nash castle was built 220 or so years ago. “We are part of a long tradition of the family owning this land. “It was a very, very black day,” Tree says. So, we kept buying bigger machines, throwing more pesticides, more fertilizer, more nitrates. We built bigger dairies and changed our types of cows to higher milk-yielding cows.”Įventually, it all became too overwhelming and the couple sold all their farm equipment and leased the land to a contract farmer. “But when we took over the farm, it was already losing money hand over fist. “We simply assumed that's what we would continue to do for the rest of our lives - carry on the family tradition and farm,” Tree says. It had been intensively farmed since World War II. Tree and Burrel inherited the land in the 1980s from Burrell’s grandparents. Related: A bold plan to slow the melt of Arctic permafrost could help reverse global warming “Going from intensive management, where you're really manipulating everything and tidying up and managing the land to the nth degree, to just sitting back and letting go is a massive mind swing.” “It is a very, very difficult thing to do,” Tree says.

Isabella Tree’s recent book, ' Wilding,' is the story of how the land transformed after she and Burrell made this bold and heart-wrenching decision. So they began to mull over another idea: Give the land back to nature and let it take its course. But the intensive agriculture of their predecessors grew increasingly difficult and they decided that farming was no longer a viable option. When writer Isabella Tree, and her husband, Charlie Burrell, inherited an estate in West Sussex, England, they assumed they would continue to farm, as generations of family had before them.

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