A graze success

Jason Goodwin looks at the benefits of these measures and meets six farmers helping in the fight for our planet’s health

BRITISH farmers are involved in an agricultural revolution. For 70 years, we went to war with Nature to feed the nation. Spending money on a cocktail of chemicals and carbon brought bigger yields, but most of the extra profit left the farm. The suppliers of seed, pesticides, fertilisers, genetics and machinery mopped up the subsidies and the costs were borne in waves of environmental degradation.

Now, across the country, farmers and landowners are exploring new ways of producing food, allying with natural processes to reverse a catastrophic decline in wildlife and even challenges to human health. The biggest input for many farmers now is forethought: Nature is complex and diverse and so, increasingly, are the farms that work with her.

‘Why would