namsnanny I hahe gone back and read your OP very carefully and I think part of your problem is that you do not fully understand what rewilding and its context is all about, nor I suspect do your farming friends.
Rewilding must be seen in the broader context of climate change and environmental damage done, mainly by the way many countries have farmed their land over the last 50 years, in particular in those countries who have invested heavily in industrial farming and monocultures over large areas of land. The midland plains of the United States being a classic example.
Once the plains were covered in grass and 100s of thousands of bison grazed these plains. Once settlers killed the bison, stripped the grass and turned this area into the bread bowl of the world, they soon found they had also got the dustbowl of the world and John Steinbeck's book 'the Grapes of Wrath', describes the farmers driven to destitution as the combination of drought and wind blew all the fertile soil off the farmland.
Farmland that now continues to produce wheat and corn because it is heavily spread with nitrogen fertliser. The production, transportation and use of mineral fertilizers contribute directly and indirectly to emissions of greenhouse gases,
By the 1960s, Rachel Carson warned how heavy use of pesticides was killing off insects, plants and animals species.
This continual exploitation of all kinds of soils, with man-made fertilsers and pesticides, has made it possible to clear and farm any soil, and large industrial complexes have done that: Amazonian rain forest, wetlands in south east Asia, marginal land everywhere have been ploughed up to grow monoculture crops of soya and maize. This resulted in more crops than people could eat so it was
However these crops are not suited to the digestion systems of cattle but they fattened up well on it, especially of you fed them antibiotics, which they needed anyway to deal with the side effects of their diet and, as they no longer ate grass, they could be kept in sheds and feed lots where the risk of disease. was high, so with antibiotics it was a win/win situation 'healthy' cattle that gained weight fast. The welfare of the cattle themselves were not factored in.
With global warming we are reaping the crops we also sowed. That of losing trees that helped absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the carbon dioxide produced making, transportation and using mineral fertilizers both contribute directly and indirectly to emissions of greenhouse gases. Then there all the cattle being bred to produce meat as cheaply as possible at a maximum cost to the environment, in the food needed to feed them, and the emissions they produce.
We need for our own sakes and our children and grandchildren, to replace many of these polluting and damaging agriculture practices with ones that help the land support itself, we must turn away from eating patterns this agriculture has encouraged us into: highly processed sweet foods based on corn, eating large quantities of cheaply produced poor quality beef back to an eating pattern that is sustainable in the modern world.
Which brings me to rewilding. One of the first things we can do is return marginal farmland, much of which has only been ploughed and cropped since 1939, back to what it was - mainly rough pasture, woodland, marsh and fen. We need more hedgerows to sustain wild flowers, insects and mammals, which are all part of a complex ecosystem that we are only just starting to unravel.
The problem is the word 'rewilding' is absolutely not what is happening. The owners of the Knepp estate did not just put a fence round their land with no gate and leave it to develop any kind of plants that happened to grow their. They have managed their land as carefully as any farmer, which of course they are, they have planted and nurtured and encouraged this type of ecosystem and discouraged that, chosen their cattle breeds etc with care. They are as much farmers managing their land so that it provides them with a living as Farmer Giles with a thousand acres of maize and big farm machinery.
And thatnamsnanny is how you and your farmer friends should see it, farming the landscape for the health of the planet, the animals, the people, by taking it back to the self sustaining system it always was and not one that flogs the soil to death and plunders our natural resources like gas and chemicals that kill of natural life to get bigger and bigger crops for our lifetime, to leave a legacy of a planet destroyed.
Sorry for the polemic.
