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Dig for Victory campaign destroyed British countryside, but landowners are fighting back

Charlie and Isabella Burrell at their home Knepp Castle in Sussex - Christopher Pledger
Charlie and Isabella Burrell at their home Knepp Castle in Sussex - Christopher Pledger

The Dig for Victory campaign destroyed the British countryside, a landowner has claimed, after finally making her family farm pay by taking it back to its pre-war state.

Writer Isabella Tree and husband Sir Charles Burrell who own the 3,500 acre Knepp estate south of Horsham, in West Sussex, decided to stop fighting nature after finding themselves drowning under a £1.5 million overdraft.

Like thousands of freeholds across the country, large parts of the estate were intensively farmed to provide food during the Second World War, and carried on afterwards, even though the land was entirely unsuitable.

The mix of Low Weald clay and limestone left the soil like concrete in the summer, and an ‘unfathomable porridge’ in the winter, but since 2001, Knepp Home Farm been allowed to return to traditional scrubland where rare breeds can roam, trees can seed themselves and pollinators fly free from the threat of pesticides.

Pollinators and insects are now thriving at Knepp - Credit: Christopher Pledger
Pollinators and insects are now thriving at Knepp Credit: Christopher Pledger

Not only has it restored the fortunes of the farm which is finally turning a profit, rare species are now flourishing on the land.

Tree, who will be speaking about the rewilding project at the Tree Conference in Frome, Somerset, this weekend, urged other farms to follow suit to allow the British countryside to return to its natural state.

“Nature has an extraordinary way of bouncing back if you just let it, “ she said. “This was once a complex habitat where everything worked together but Dig for Victory completely altered the balance and the British countryside has never recovered.

“The campaign was a response to a crisis and it was never meant to be a sustainable in the long term, but farmers became hooked on subsidies.

“18 years ago when we started this project we were losing money hand over fist, so we decided to take a different approach. We sold the dairy farm and machinery to clear our debts.

“Now our oaks grow because jays plant the acorns, and they do it near thorny bushes so they can find them, but it also stops other animals eating them because its like nature’s barbed wire.

“Animals heal themselves by eating the herbs naturally growing in the fields. So we don’t need antibiotics which are also devastating for the biodiversity soil.”

Deer graze in the grounds and estate of Knepp Castle - Credit: Christopher Pledger
Deer graze in the grounds and estate of Knepp Castle Credit: Christopher Pledger

The Dig for Victory Campaign was set up in 1941 by the British Ministry of agriculture to encourage people to grow their own food in times of rationing. Open spaces and scrubland across Britain were transformed into farms.

But in 2014, the University of Sheffield calculated that Britain’s farmland has been so overworked since the Second World War that there are only 100 harvests left because of continued soil degradation.

Tree roots also suffered from ploughs, power harrows and seed drills while the green revolution of the 1970s brought a new generation of fertilizers, herbicides and fungicides which destroyed crucial microbial communities underground and decimated pollinators.

Exmoor ponies graze in the grounds of Knepp  - Credit: Christopher Pledger
Exmoor ponies graze in the grounds of Knepp Credit: Christopher Pledger

In 2002 Knepp received Countryside Stewardship funding to restore the Repton park in the middle of the Estate - 350 acres that had been under the plough since the Second World War.

Knepp’s rewilding project was hugely influenced by the Dutch ecologist Dr Frans Vera, who believed that animals should not be penned in, but were needed to create a ‘fundamental force of disturbance’ to keep the land healthy.

The land which was once farmed was allowed to revert to wood pasture and scrubland where Old English Longhorn cattle, Tamworth pigs, fallow and red deer and Exmoor ponies are allowed to roam beneath the trees, ‘trampling, puddling, rootling, rubbing, snapping branches and de-barking.’

Long horn cattle graze in the grounds and estate of Knepp  - Credit:  Christopher Pledger 
Long horn cattle graze in the grounds and estate of Knepp Credit: Christopher Pledger

The natural grazing allows nutrients and seeds to disperse over wide areas.

The farm is now selling 75 tonnes of meat a year which it believes is even better than organic and the old grain silos and outbuildings formerly used on the farm are rented out to local businesses.

It is the only place in Britain where numbers of rare turtle doves are increasing, and nightingales, peregrine falcons and purple emperor butterflies have all started to breed.

“We have 19 species of orchids popping up in the fields now,” added Tree, whose book ‘Wilding’ was Britain’s number one bestselling environmental book this year.

“Clearly, though, we can never return to what has gone before. Our world is so changed, mostly by humans, that today’s conditions are vastly different from those in recent, let alone distant, times.

“But we can use some of the drivers to kick-start more dynamic, biodiverse ecosystems.”

A spokesperson for the NFU said: "The wartime ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign played a vital role in the nation’s drive for greater self-sufficiency during a critical time for our nation's food security. Food rationing then meant that food production had to take priority.

"Contrast that with now when food production and environmental management must go hand-in-hand. What remains true is that farmers are best placed to deliver for both the environment and providing the British public with a supply of safe, traceable and affordable food.”

Suzi Martineau, founder of the Tree Conference said: “It’s worth pausing for a moment to give yourself the space to grieve for the scale of what is not there now. The incalculable numbers of fungis, microbial cultures and insect hive minds, and the knock on effects for wildlife species and tree health. 

“It is an awful error. We’ve been subsidised to make this normal since WW2 and the establishment of the EU. I feel that it’s touching into that depth that facilitates us to realise the extraordinary opportunity that awaits to work together to bring our landscapes back to thriving, bustling health.”