Essay · Land use
Paying farmers to farm less was never going to bring nature back at scale. An integrated landscape asks conservation for something harder.
By Caroline Grindrod · 11 min read · November 2026
Making room for nature. Nature-friendly farming. Say the phrases slowly and the assumption is sitting in the grammar. Farming occupies the room, so nature needs some of it handed back. Farming is the thing that has to be made friendly, which implies that left to itself it would not be.
A great deal of conservation's work with farmers rests on that assumption. Identify the farming that does harm, pay the farmer to do less of it, and turn the space that frees up into habitat. Somewhere along the way, production and fertility became dirty words. Production means pressure. Fertility means a bag of fertiliser. Both mean less nature.
The words went bad for real reasons. Some farming has damaged nature badly, and some still does. But not all farming, and that distinction has mattered less to the sector than it should, because the belief that farming is inherently harmful has quietly set the ceiling on what conservation can achieve with farmers at all.
Paying someone to do less of something is a shallow point of intervention. It changes what happens on a field for as long as the agreement runs. It does not change why the farmer farms. Occasionally a farmer comes to love nature through a scheme, and those are good stories. Most remain farmers, because that is who they are: they want to produce healthy food for the nation, and they take pride in their stock and in the system that grows it. When the payment ends, or the scheme changes shape, the field goes back to high output, because high output is the only way they know to survive and nothing about their understanding of their own ground has changed. The nature on that farm was paid for. It was never part of the farm.
What conservation is for
None of this makes conservation the wrong job. It makes it an incomplete one.
Its flaw is that it tries to hold nature in a state, and nature does not want to be held. It is complex, evolving and always in succession, and when we try to keep it still the results are usually poor. Over the decades the work narrowed to habitat management and species, managed site by site, as though each habitat were a self-contained unit. Nature does not work like that. A species needs a range of habitats and successional stages across its life cycle, connected across a landscape so that populations mix and gene pools stay healthy. Treat that as a machine you can keep at a setting and it stops doing what it does.
And still, when a rare species is under threat, it has to be protected. If we did regenerative grazing everywhere, or rewilding everywhere, we could lose some of them. That is the part of conservation nothing else replaces, and it stays.
Grazing has a place in it, but as a tool in service of the habitat or the species, with stocking far below anything a production system would carry, regenerative or otherwise. People point out that conservation grazing still produces meat, and it does — a small fraction of what the same ground would produce in a well-planned regenerative grazing system. It should not be mistaken for food production.
The productive engine
Then there is the ground we have already modified: land farmed for generations, drained, improved and grazed, whose natural function was altered long ago. On most farms it is the largest share and the place with the most room to do better. It is where the principles of regenerative grazing apply, as grassland or as agroforestry, and its purpose is production. This is the farm's engine.
What it runs on is solar income — money earned from what the land grows on inputs that renew themselves: sunshine, rainfall, and organic matter in soils that are building rather than degrading. Grants and scheme payments are a different kind of money, answerable to the next policy review. Solar income is the most reliable way there is to fund nature restoration, because it does not end when the funding round does.
Fertility here is not a bag of nitrogen. It is soil gaining organic matter year on year and growing large volumes of diverse, nutrient-dense biomass — enough to feed the stock and to buffer the extremes now arriving, from a changing climate to supply chains breaking on the other side of the world.
The usual objection is that regenerative systems produce less. The comparison is loaded. A conventional system buys in feed, and every tonne of it is acreage somewhere else: ghost acres, land the farm runs on but does not own. Output per hectare looks high because the farm's true carrying capacity is hidden. A regenerative system matches stock to what the farm itself grows, so a straight comparison flatters the system that imports its land.
Even on a straight comparison, regenerative output can be high. A four-year trial at Rothamsted Research's North Wyke site in Devon compared cell grazing with set stocking on the same ground; by the third year the cell-grazed paddocks were carrying twice the cattle per hectare and producing 140 per cent more liveweight. That was lowland ryegrass pasture rather than hill ground. It matches what I have seen on grassland over nearly thirty years in environmental land management, fifteen of them in regenerative agriculture.
But regenerative grazing everywhere would fail on its own terms. The wildflowers that seed a diverse ley or a species-rich sward have to come from somewhere. So do the predatory insects that regulate pests and disease in a regenerative system, and they only persist where the habitats exist to carry their whole life cycle. The productive engine depends on the conserved ground beside it.
Letting the land surprise us
The third part is rewilding — self-willed land — and it matters at landscape scale, both for connectivity and for what emerges when we stop deciding the outcome. Leave ground to find its own way and things come back that nobody planned for, doing jobs nobody knew needed doing. On a farm in Oxfordshire, cattle egrets returned, riding the backs of the grazing cattle and picking off the insects they stirred up. I had never seen it before. In tall grass, big orb-weaver spiders have reappeared, their webs catching clegs and horseflies: pest regulation we had not thought to look for in this country, because the land has been so tightly managed for so long. Given room, the tops get wetter and the rivers run free.
None of this is truly natural, though, and we should stop calling it that. The top predators are gone, and with them much of what full function depends on. Excluding livestock, or running conservation grazing on a rewilding site, comes nowhere near what large wild herbivores would do — crashing through, trampling, dunging, tipping trees and leaving deadwood, migrating across country. It would be messy and irregular, the opposite of how protected landscapes are expected to look, and most of it cannot happen inside UK fences. Cattle standing in for aurochs and bison, and pigs for wild boar, get closer and earn their place. They are not a food system, and they will not supply what the country needs to eat.
I am all for reintroductions, in the right place and at the right time, once there is a higher baseline of functional nature to receive them. Dropping a lynx or a wolf, or another controversial ecosystem engineer, into a landscape this dysfunctional is a different matter, and it will not do what some hope. The ratios of predator to prey, the fences, the deer numbers and the domestication of animals that have lost their instincts bear no resemblance to the systems those species evolved in. Uplands locked by hysteresis into a low-function state would take hundreds of years to come back unaided, top predator or not. A reintroduction that struggles in those conditions is more likely to prove the critics right than to change their minds, and it makes the next attempt harder for everyone.
The baseline has to come first. That means rebuilding natural function, and getting the public and land managers used to living and working in a wilder cultural landscape. Then reintroductions can be planned carefully, in the places they are most likely to succeed. Getting to that baseline at any useful pace takes carefully planned human intervention that models natural function: animals managed for dunging and trampling, lime where the soil needs it, trees planted. Expecting self-willed recovery to do that at scale is kidding ourselves.
That is not a counsel of despair. For decades we have told ourselves that we do such damage the best thing is to get out of the way, and in doing so we wrote ourselves out of our own ecosystems. The work is not to leave. It is to understand ecology well enough to take our part in it properly.
Wild soils
The soil is where to start. Before the uplands of England and Scotland filled with sheep and deer, the soils on the hills looked very different. At Ardtornish Estate in Morvern, and on other estates whose records go back far enough, production in previous centuries was significantly higher than it is now, and the old game bag records describe numbers that are hard to believe possible today.
Ecologists have a name for what happened in between: trophic downgrading. Lose the animals at the top of the food web, the large herbivores and the predators that kept them moving, and the effects cascade down through every level beneath them, all the way to the soil. Each loss lowers what the land can carry, and the next loss starts from there. We have short memories for this. Each generation takes the land and the management it inherited as how things have always been, so the downgraded state comes to look normal, and what we now call natural on the hill is largely what a century and more of set stocking has left behind.
Some of the old ground survives. Frank Fraser Darling's West Highland Survey, carried out between 1944 and 1951, recorded remnant native woodlands whose soils and plants were not what the underlying geology would predict. The survey did not draw this conclusion; I do. I read those anomalies as the last of our truly wild soils.
They were fertile because the whole system kept minerals moving. Grasses co-evolved with roaming herbivores and need grazing followed by long recovery. Deciduous leaf litter returns calcium and magnesium, holding the soil at a pH where earthworms and the rest of the soil life can keep it aerated and its nutrients available. From there the minerals travel up through the whole food web. Mineral cycling is one of the most overlooked limits on biodiversity.
Take the parts away and the soil comes apart. Lose the large herbivores and the predators that kept the deer moving, the missing function described above, then clear the trees in a cool, wet climate, and the soil tips into an acidity most earthworms and much of the microbial life cannot tolerate. Without them, and without the aggregation built by mycorrhizal fungi, the structure collapses into acid, peat-forming processes, and the plants that thrive are those that form no mycorrhizal partnerships and carry poorer nutrition. Then the hill moved from mixed grazing, probably in the region of twenty sheep to every cow, to selective grazers set stocked across vast areas. Grazed short, grass roots no longer reach the rock beneath them, and with no microbial pathway the plant draws only on a soluble pool that is almost empty. On steep ground under heavy rain, whatever is left washes into the rivers and the sea.
Soil health and fertility have become confused terms. What we want is healthy soil that is also fertile, so that it raises primary production and feeds more energy into the whole system. Modern farming treated soil as a growing medium and added nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to it. That built a different kind of fertility, readily available and often in excess, and the excess causes problems of its own.
In a wild system, soil health and fertility would both have been abundant. Neither is now. Somewhere along the way we came to associate fertility with damage, and degraded ground with nature. Some of what is protected as poor upland habitat is the end state of the loss described above: degraded, not marginal. How fertility and rare species actually relate is more complicated than one paragraph can carry, and it needs its own piece.
The point here is simpler. Production and fertility can serve nature, mimicking the wild system that built these soils in the first place. Or they can be done badly, with nature sacrificed for output. The words are not the problem. How the work is done is.
I wrote about this at more length for Reforesting Scotland in 2020: Wilderculture: the future of food.
Every farm its own mix
There is a version of nature recovery that skips the hard part: give the land over to nature here and import the food from somewhere else. What is sometimes called first-world conservation is ghost acres at the scale of a nation. It shuffles the degradation onto other people's landscapes, many of them desertifying at speed, and it leaves us exposed. A climate shock in the regions that feed us, a broken supply chain, a war or a change of government, and the land we handed to nature gets flipped back into production in a hurry, in the most damaging way possible.
A future that holds is one where these landscapes produce food and carry nature at the same time. Integrated landscape design — our WILD approach — ties the three together: regenerative grazing and agroforestry as the productive engine, conservation protecting and restoring what is rare, rewilding where emergence and connectivity are the point. The result is a patchwork of whole landscapes with full function. Each farm finds its own mix. Some will be mostly conservation with a little production and a little rewilding. Some will be mostly rewilding with regenerative grazing woven through.
None of that works while farmers are paid to do a little nature on the side of their farming. It works when they see themselves as ecosystem engineers, part of the ecosystem that is a farm, and farm in a way that uses nature's principles as the design basis. Healthy soils grow productive grassland, productive grassland grows high output from the stock they sell, and nature's principles keep the costs down: animals selected to fit the system, and a wider range of habitats and species so that natural predators take on the problems — weeds, face flies, internal worm parasites, trace element deficiencies — the way they are handled in the wild.
A farmer who sees their system through that lens does not need paying to look after nature. It is part of what pays them.
What this asks of conservation organisations
Wilderculture now offers training for nature conservation organisations working out how to work better with their farming communities. We help work up bioregional projects, train staff, support better conversations with farmers, and train farmers alongside you through the transition, which is a deep change of mindset that needs long-term support rather than a payment and a plan.
The model puts key farmers in each region at the front: demonstrating change across different contexts and bioregions, and becoming the mentors for those who follow. Farmers lead the work alongside nature advisers, rather than advisers arriving to tell them what to do and writing the plan for them.
The courses, conversations, templates and tools for this work sit on Wilderculture Circle, our learning platform for people bringing regeneration to their own places.
Written in dialogue with Claude (Anthropic). Ideas, arguments and experience are mine; AI helped research, structure and articulate them.
Wilderculture CIC · info@wilderculture.com · wilderculture.com