Land Healer: How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside

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A Green Drake Mayfly (Ephemera danica) sits on Jake’s hand at Warham Camp having just hatched. Right; An Early-Purple Orchid (Orchis mascula) growing at Warham Camp. Last year we raised funds to cover the cost of shooting the film. Our small team filmed on the road for 42 days, shot over 120 hours of footage, in all weathers, in 9 different English counties - Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Devon, Suffolk, Gloucestershire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire and Oxfordshire. For example we've been doing the Big Farmland Bird Survey in the last two weeks and we now have four years of data for Holkham. We have surveyed close to 50 farms of Holkham-owned land and already we can see where we are making a difference and where we are not." Exiting Europe and designing our own agricultural policy should be an exciting time – in that a field is no longer just about food production, but also how we maintain it and how we look after it, how we make it more resilient to climate change.’ But frustratingly, he says, of the second part of the transition to the new system, local nature recovery, which he thinks is more important, ‘we’re hearing nothing about’. There isn’t even a pilot planned until 2023.

It is 7am and we are driving around Holkham, North Norfolk, a 25,000-acre estate owned by the Earl of Leicester, that comprises a huge national nature reserve and thousands of acres of commercial farmland, as well as woodland, parkland, a beach and miles of salt marshes. We are thrilled to be welcoming Jake Fiennes to FarmED for the launch of 'Land Healer - How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside' in conjunction with Jaffé & Neale Bookshop & Cafe. On the top of the monument you can just see the remains of a nest. It belonged to a pair of ravens that fledged a few weeks ago. It is the first time a breeding pair have ever been recorded in Norfolk.The “small tweaks” Fiennes recommends as part of the mantra of regenerative farming are not on their own immediately thrilling – letting hedges grow out, not ploughing to the edge of a field, disturbing the soil as little as possible, using “cover crops” in winter. In combination, though, they are revolutionary, because they can start to reverse the terrible damage done to the countryside by industrial agriculture. Farmers are not the problem here, Fiennes tells us again and again, they are part of the solution. What he wants is a wholesale change from “Taliban-style farming”, which “kills everything that it doesn’t want”, to farming that embraces the idea that “wildlife is just like the other products on the farm: it needs to be ‘grown’ efficiently and with direction”. In this hopeful, intelligent, important book, Fiennes shows that, if approached correctly, wildlife-friendly farming can deliver a rural landscape that is both more biodiverse, more beautiful and more productive.

I feel the impetus for talking about these things now more than ever because of what is happening in the broader world. I’m continuing to reflect on what the 21st century brings for all of us practicing nature-based spirituality. Many of you can probably easily witness the impetus for doing land healing work in your immediate areas: a forest or tree friend being cut, spraying, pollution in the skies or waterways, the loss of species that you used to see, and so on. In this post, I’ll start with a plea, if you will, for why I think that nearly everyone practicing any kind of earth-based, druid, or nature spirituality should consider taking up land healing practices as a core spiritual practice. After that, throughout this year, I’ll be sharing posts filling in some of the gaps from my previous writing and offering deeper practices. Next week’s post will offer my revised and expanded framework for land healing practices, which include everything from physical land regeneration techniques to energetic work, witnessing work, apology, land guardianship, shifting your own practices to reduce your footprint on the earth, and self-care. The Impetus for Land Healing Practices as Spiritual Practice Inner and Outer Tools for the 21st Century. One of the core reasons to take up the path of land healing as a spiritual practice is simply that it is good work to do, offering you the opportunity to ‘do something’ and engage in positive change where, right now, the bulk of humanity is going off in a less productive direction. Land healing as a framework that I’m expressing here encompasses not only physical regeneration but also energetic work and self-care. Thus, it offers a number of tools that work together to help you bring balance and harmony to the land–and to your own inner spiritual life. And I think, given where this world is unfortunately heading, we are all going to need them to bring balance, harmony, and wisdom to our own practices and the world around us.A key part of his strategy is the transformation of dozens of fields into wetlands, where grazing by beef cattle is carefully timed to manage the habitats for ground-nesting birds. So he did. He turned up to a soundproof booth and the producer said, ‘Let’s start at 10 and break at 11 for 20 minutes, then have lunch from one to two.’ ‘No,’ said Jake, ‘We need to get this done – no breaks and we’ll stop for a 10-minute sandwich.’ Sometimes, spirit offers you a call and its a call that can’t be ignored. Part of the reason I write so much about working physically and energetically with land healing on this blog is that its clear to me now that a large part of my call is in this direction. When I was a child, it was the logging of my forest–and my eventual return to that forest years later. At my first homestead, I had to spend years working to connect with the spirits of the land and heal the land physically. When I found the current land where I live, everything was perfect about it in terms of features I wanted–except that three acres had been logged pretty heavily. I put my head and my hands and cried–how did I find a perfect piece of land that just had been logged? The spirits laughed and said, of course, Dana, it is the perfect piece of land for someone like you. And thus, the lessons of a land healer continue to spiral deeper and deeper as my own spiritual practice grows. I realize that while I’ve written a lot about land healing in my previous series in 2016 and beyond, my own understanding of these practices–for both individuals and groups–has changed a lot. I’ve been refining my thinking about these topics, especially as I keep finding myself in a teaching role to others and with my return to my ancestral lands where the healing need is very strong. Thus, I’d l like to offer a new series on Land Healing practices and go deeper than my previous coverage some years ago (all of the links to my original series can be found here).

As the author explains it, this regenerative farming approach can easily replace the EU’s Taliban farming model; in which everyone chases subsidies by spraying chemicals according to calendar, rather than need, and killing everything that doesn’t fit the plan. But at Holkham, where it had been declining steadily since 2005, its population has risen dramatically in the last three breeding seasons, from 140 breeding pairs in 2018, up to 260 in 2021.

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He had previously done a bit of lambing at the Knepp Estate in Sussex (now famous for being the pioneer of rewilding), and asked its owner, Charlie Burrell, if he could visit for a few days. He ended up staying for nearly three years, working in the woods and the plant nursery and the game department and learning how to use a chainsaw and drive a tractor. He lived with Charlie and his girlfriend Isabella Tree (who has since written the best-selling book Wilding). Burrell is still one of his closest friends. ‘Charlie gave me a wonderful opportunity – he welcomed me, housed me, and generally taught me how farming works.’ A powerful call to arms, this fascinating book makes a clear case to put farming at the heart of the restoration of our countryside" With mud on his boots and hope in his heart, Fiennes tells a powerful and uplifting story of food, farming and living with nature.' Matthew Parris There are so many reasons that I think that those practicing nature-based spirituality, like druidry, should consider integrating land healing into their regular spiritual practices. If you are already convinced that this is a good idea, then you probably want to wait for next week’s post for my revised framework. But if you are still wondering, here are my reasons why I think land healing should be a core practice for nature spirituality (And you may feel free to disagree. Nature spirituality is wide-ranging and broad, and different people have different foci. But let me do my best to convince you!) Sacred Nature

We interviewed over twenty farmers and other experts, attended farming conferences, protests, filmed with sheep, pigs, cows as well as with our unsung heroes - the microbes, fungi, dung beetles, earthworms and other critters of the soil community. Then we drive to the iron age hill-fort of Warham Camp, a stunning secret spot of chalk grassland that is probably Norfolk’s butterfly capital. For a decade or so, it has been the only place in the county where the chalkhill blue survives. Suddenly, last summer thousands of these butterflies danced over the fort, along with brown argus and common blue. More butterflies are a sign that millions more less-studied flying insects and pollinators will be thriving too, as well as the birds, bats and shrews that feed on them. Tending that which is sacred. What is nature spirituality without nature? If we are going to hold something sacred, it is right that we tend it and work to preserve it. Right now, given the state of nature, there is a lot of healing and preservation work to do. If we begin to treat the land as sacred from a perspective of daily practice, we begin putting our practices and daily life in line with our values. What I love about this monument is that it’s all about agriculture and food. ‘Small in size …’ refers to sheep, but to me it refers to bumble bees or butterflies or toads – and ‘Live and let live’ – that’s the biodiversity crisis. We need to share. We need to share this planet with everything that’s in it rather than trying to remove it or destroy it.’

Heartbreaking and hopeful, this story of a farming revival has never been more important. It opened my eyes and touched my soul.'- Esther Freud