https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/29/farm-create-biggest-natural-grassland-southern-england?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
"Delighted to see the launch of our @RestoreNatureUK flagship project, the Pertwood Plain, in @guardian today. This is an exciting chance to restore at scale; reinstate lost processes and demonstrate what a true living ecosystem should and can become."
Lwr Pertwood Farm is set in rolling hills S of Salisbury Plain. This spring its owners of nearly 3,000 acres will start the transformation of some of that land into the biggest grassland rewilding project in southern England. The Pertwood Plan project is being master minded by Restore, the land management company specialising in large scale restoration and led by the naturalist Benedict Macdonald.
A strong biodiversity decline. A real bioshpere of nature. The whole of the farm will be taken into a very high nature creation exercise. We will continue to produce food but from a truly climate resilient, sustainable and by a most biodiverse landscape. A grassland very rich in insects, like beatles and grasshoppers.
There is a whole set of myths underlying that statement. Very large areas of the UK like the 8% is grouse moor and 8% that is deer estate don't produce any food at all. Look at the absurd ratios between the amount of grazing land and the amount of food that that land produces. The obvious example is the lamb that constitutes less than 1% of human diet but covers 80% of the Welsh land area. So there are vast inefficiencies in the British food system quite apart from the fact that we waste over 30% of the food that our farmers produce. So all of that must be addressed first before we believe that restoring nature is some kind of secondary or optional imperative. If we don't have a few of these biospheres in all of our counties our nature will collapse and if nature collapses farming will collapse too.
https://ben-macdonald.co.uk/restore/
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