But soon 1,525 acres of this productive Lincolnshire farmland will be teeming with wildlife, according to a new company aiming to restore biodiversity and cash in on farmland re-blooming. Conventional arable farming at the £13.75 million Boothby Lodge farm is being disrupted to return the land to nature along the lines of the derelict Knepp estate in West Sussex. “It’s incredibly exciting and has the potential to transform many people’s lives through access to a wonderful location with rich nature,” said Charlie Burrell, owner of Knepp and co-founder of Nattergal, a business that has bought Boothby. . But the Boothby Wildland project is controversial in Lincolnshire, known as the breadbasket of England. Critics say it takes land away from production to grow food, just when Britain should be producing more food. Other fears include weed seeds drifting into gardens and large herbivores wreaking havoc. A third of the arable land has been set aside in Boothby to promote wildlife. Photo: Nattergal “We’ve lived there 28 years and we like it the way it is,” said Ingoldsby resident Colin Boother who visited the farm on an open day. “We like to see the crops grow. When we import 50% of our food, it may be low-quality land, but it’s still thousands of tons of wheat and barley.” However, many locals are delighted by the potential transformation. “It’s like winning the lottery for us,” said Clive Carr, who lives in Lower Bitchfield. “It’s wonderful. I just hope to be around to see it come to full fruition.” Instead of making money from conventional farming, Nattergal – which is backed by environmental financier Ben Goldsmith, solar entrepreneur Jeremy Leggatt and Peter Davies of hedge fund Lansdowne Partners – will generate revenue from the sale of carbon credits and new biodiversity credits to be awarded for nature restoration. Other potential income streams include money from new “biodiversity net gain” payments from builders. funds for flood relief, improving water and soil quality and ecotourism such as at Knepp, which receives more than 10,000 visitors each year, many of whom pay to see wildlife such as beavers, kingfishers and purple emperor butterflies. “If we can get planning permission for low-key tourism in Boothby, we’ll have lots of jobs for local people,” Burrell said. We have had such a wonderful response from many locals. The move should encourage more wildlife such as buzzards. Photograph: Roy Waller/Alamy Kate Green, whose property adjoins the farm, said: “There is a lot of hostility to it locally. But we support it a lot. It’s like a green desert here. We don’t see birds nesting on the ground, we don’t see kestrels hovering. People see it either as continuing as we are or as total chaos – that’s the mental picture of rewilling – but it’s not like that.” Nattergal says Boothby, which is ‘Grade 3’ farmland including heavy clay soils – not more productive Grade 1 and 2 land – produced only modest yields in crops fed to livestock. According to Neil Perry, chief executive of Nattergal, the biodiversity crisis is a bigger threat to food security than the short-term problems linked to the war in Ukraine. “If biodiversity loss continues and all our pollinators disappear, we’re going to have a much bigger global food crisis in 10 or 15 years,” Perry said. “We created the company to tackle biodiversity loss. While doing this, we will also contribute to carbon sequestration, addressing the twin existential problems we have as a country – biodiversity loss and carbon emissions. The most important stories on the planet. Get all the week’s environmental news – the good, the bad and the must-haves Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our site and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. A Eurasian skyscraper in flight. Photo: John Gooday/Alamy “A lot of philanthropists are doing projects like this and there is government funding to do things like this, but that alone is not going to bring about enough change. We want to offer a business model that will attract mainstream investors.” According to Nattergal, funders will receive a mid- to high-single-digit financial return on their investment. The company says its model can work without government subsidies, but they will receive money from the government’s new Environmental Land Management (Elm) schemes. Boothby Lodge farm was purchased last year and the restoration process has begun. A third of the arable land has been put out of production. The farm’s final harvest will be in 2024, after which wildflowers and trees will begin to cover the land. Boothby Wildland will take what Burrell learned from Knepp, but speed up the restoration process with “ecological kicks”: field drains will be blocked to rewet the land, the riverbed will be raised to restore its natural floodplain and hopefully residents will help grow trees from local seed sources to be planted in the middle of treeless fields. ‘Ghost ponds’ that have been drained and plowed over the centuries will also be excavated and recreated, while wildflower seeds collected from Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust’s local nature reserves will be spread over the land. Basic research has been carried out on plants, insects, birds and soil microbes, with soil restoration an important part of the project. Even the dawn chorus has been recorded to measure how it increases in volume and variety as bird life returns. Once wildflowers and trees are established in the former crop fields, free-roaming animals such as cattle and ponies will be introduced to mimic the grazing of extinct herbivores—reintroduction tactics used so successfully at Knepp. Cattle will provide income from high quality free range meat. Biodiversity improvements will be measured in terms of abundance, species diversity and rare species, with the land likely to become a haven for birds such as cuckoos and wrens. Nattergal expects to deliver more than a 400% increase in biodiversity. The company is actively looking for at least two more large farms in Britain. Once they prove that nature restoration can make a profit for investors, they hope to expand the model to Europe. They are also looking into whether areas of the seabed could be leased to restore degraded marine life. Potential financiers, including representatives of high-net-worth musicians and large landowners, have visited the farm, but local reactions have been mixed. As a conventional farm, Boothby Lodge employed just 1.5 full-time staff, but Nattergal says Boothby Wildland will create many more jobs, including site managers, tourism jobs and scientific monitoring of biodiversity and carbon gains. Perry said: “Natural capital will be a growth industry. Our exit from the EU has given Britain the opportunity to think carefully about how we use land and create space for nature, while creating an important new knowledge economy.” Some of Nattergal’s team have worked in the solar industry and there has been speculation that the land will be used for solar farms, but Burrell said no solar would be installed on the fields. “This is about biodiversity, not about producing fuel in any form from this land,” he said. “We’re not saying ‘let’s give up food production’, but we have to think about where nature is in this. Restore nature to this land and everything else follows.”
