Estate Matters Episode 15: Molly Biddell | Engaging land managers with nature-based solutions.

Farmers must be valued for managing the landscape and protecting and enhancing nature as well as for producing food, if wildlife-depleted Britain is to improve its environment and continue to feed its population.

That’s the message from Molly Biddell, Head of Natural Capital at the Knepp Estate in Sussex, a trailblazing 3,500-acre rewilding project which abandoned traditional farming 20 years ago and has become one of the UK’s most biodiverse nature reserves.

Molly tells the latest episode of KOR Communications’ Estate Matters podcast that food production and caring for the natural world are inextricably linked – but that it will take a cultural shift in the countryside to change the way many farmers and land managers view their role.

Molly, who is also the Nature-based Solutions Manager at her family’s Hampton Estate in Surrey and describes herself as an “eco-anxious farmer”, tells podcast host Anna Byles: “For so long farmers have been celebrated and heralded for our food production because that’s what society has, since World War Two, wanted from us.

“I think we need to take a step back and say, hold on, you are as legitimate a farmer as anyone if you’re restoring a heathland or if you’re focussing on your amazing species-rich acid grassland, or whatever it is that you are doing.

“It’s a widening of the word ‘farmer’ and an understanding that you can be doing more than just producing calories. It’s just as important to be investing in the resilience of those landscapes.”

She says the key to deciding how best to manage individual areas of land should be based on their landscape – geology, soil type and hydrology. At Knepp, in the Sussex Weald, she said conventional farming proved to be financially unviable for owner Charlie Burrell and his wife, Isabella Tree, prompting their decision to rewild.

But she says diversifying the Knepp Estate business over two decades, allowing nature to recreate the wood pasture that would have existed before farming and bringing in large herbivores including Longhorn Cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs and deer, had proved transformational.

Knepp now employs more people – 120 compared to around 24 when the farm was operating – and is on a firm financial footing. Income streams include camping, wild safaris, commercial and residential property lets, wild meat sales and a café and shop. Grant support comes from the Government’s Countryside Stewardship scheme.

At Hampton, with a mixture of chalk downland and lowland heath, cattle graze unimproved pasture and beef is sold under the Pasture for Life Association accreditation. In each case the landscape dictates the business model.

Molly admits that Britain’s food production and distribution system needs reform. She says there is too much waste and consumers often lack understanding about the impact on the environment of what they put on their plates and in their shopping baskets. 

“We need to do everything we can to try to engage people,” she said. “Often people think we just need to get food tech classes back. I think it’s a bigger problem than that…It’s a very complex system but what I love about it is everyone is into it, because everyone eats at least three times a day…The power is on your plate and I think once you can connect consumers with the idea that what they put on that plate dictates what the landscape looks like that is really, really powerful.”

She says engagement to get that message across is as important as education, including through popular television programmes like Clarkson’s Farm.

Molly, who is an ambassador for Linking Farming and the Environment (LEAF), which accredits farms for the way they combine efficient food production with caring for nature, says the rural economy needs a boost to provide investment and well-paid jobs but that she is excited for the future.

“There is such potential to use the rural sector to really boost the future of what a green economy looks like…I like to get in front of kids and say: ‘you could have a career in this space,” she says.

And she concludes that rural Britain has a great future as the market for natural capital opens up in which it can produce more food, welcome more visitors, employ more people and better manage its vital eco-systems. She says: “We just need to prove the business case and make the economics stack up to do these things.”