Rewilding at the Knepp Estate

Podcast transcript

Now, I've wanted to visit Knepp ever since I read Isabella Tree's inspirational book Wilding, which tells of their journey in changing the three and a half thousand acres of farmland away from intensive arable and livestock farming into one of the largest areas of wildlife-friendly land in southern England. It's a unique project and it had to overcome so many obstacles just to get going, not least the neighbouring farmers who were appalled at the idea of letting nature run riot close to their intensively managed fields.

But some 20 plus years later, Knepp is recognised as an outstanding success internationally. It's seen the return of so many rare and endangered species like turtle doves and purple emperor butterflies, Violet door beetles, nightingales, and white storks. This year they have 19 breeding pairs of white stalks, which is astonishing when you consider that the previous last recorded successful breeding of white storks in Britain was in 1416.

And you’ll hear in my conversation with Charlie Burrell, just what fascinating and impressive creatures they are as we tramp through the sodden fields on a somewhat overcast day back in early April of 2024. Charlie Burrell, I should explain, is Mr Isabella Tree - they created Knepp together - and is now chair of Rewilding Britain. Before we started our walk, I met up with Charlie in a building called the Cow Barn, which back in the day was exactly that, a barn for cows. Now, it is somewhat more hospitable, with a fire and a sofa.

Charlie: It was partially collapsed and we then redid it as a centre for the safaris.

Rob: And it's what I, I'm guessing 18th century, something like looking, looking at some of the beams and the cobbles and the various bits around it.

Charlie: You probably have a better idea than I do. But we couldn't, we couldn't work out… it had been so badly… and basically had almost gone and we sort of propped it up again and, and then put a roof on it and, and turned it into this, this little lovely shed.

Rob: And it's, you use this as a kind of sort of visitor centre when people actually come onto the estate to have a look around, don't you?

Charlie: We have guests coming here and they start from here and they may have a lecture over there and we boot them out, but they need wellingtons and a lot of people turn up with inappropriate footwear. And so we then head out and either they jump on a vehicle and go on a safari or they go walking with an ecologist, always with an ecologist. That was always the plan.

Rob: And, and we're talking about significant numbers of people these days, aren't we?

Charlie: I think, I think it's round about 10,000 people now come and it's a, it's a short season. So we start sort of end of April, usually Easter weekend. This Easter is very early. So we didn't do that and it finishes the end of October.

Rob: Have you have you been surprised at the fact that this has become the place that it is because it wasn't the intention when you started out, what 20 years ago, was it?

Rob: I mean, the interesting… for me, whenever I travel anywhere in the world, what I'm really interested in doing is learning about the ecology of where I am. So, a sort of deep dive into the ecology of the region that you're in, I thought was always going to be very attractive. So having done the sort of, you know, the rewilding project started in 2001. So 23 years later you know it, it is now pretty famous and people want to come and see it. And I guess, that deep dive with an ecologist going out and, and experiencing your own countryside - because most of them are English, coming - actually is a wonderful thing to do, you know. So it's a lovely experience and it's a lovely thing to understand, you know, how the purple Emperor works and what is, you know, what's its life cycle and so on. So all of that type of thing, it's lovely.

Rob: And in terms of, you know that that journey over the last 20-odd years, because lots of people listening to this will have read Wilding and they'll know that you had kind of battles with the neighbours who were deeply concerned about what you were doing and worried that they would their land was going to be covered in thistles or whatever. Have you mended those fences? Is it good relationships with the neighbours these days?

Charlie: I think we're all now on a journey. I think… we've got a farm cluster group forming around this area. And I think there's 43 farmers that have joined that farm cluster group and we're part of it. So conversations are being had and you know, ‘what is the future for land management’ and ‘what are we all going to do’. And so that's become, you know, we've all got different ways to think about what we do with our land and how we manage it, but we're all coming together in a common feeling of good. We've got to work out where nature sits within our landscape, where farming sits, where productivity sits, and so on. So I think that's been, it's been very interesting, the 20  years of what we were doing and what other people were doing and the coming together.

Rob: And where do you, where do you sit on it now in terms of the that that balance between productivity and managing the land for nature?

Charlie: One of the things I did when- I worked with a, an artist who to visualise what the government were talking about in the 25-year environment plan and the 25-year farming plan.

And I put together - because I'm very visual, so I, I needed to have a sort of visual aid to myself to actually what they were talking about. So I took a photo, I took from the Internet, a photograph of a Cumbrian landscape. And the Cumbrian landscape was, was a very heavily farmed landscape. And then overlaid on top of that landscape layers and layers of all the things that the government was hoping that they would attract us to do in the payments for services. And so that for me, it was just a… it's, it's tweaking it, a lot of it's just tweaking what we do on the land already. I think the whole movement around regenerative agriculture is really interesting. And I wish I was farming now with those ideas in my head, because I think that's a lovely way to think about how to farm and how to be sustainable for the future.

So I think the, for me, it's just where do we make space for nature? Where do we, where do we create the core areas we know that we have to create? And when I'm talking about core areas, I'm talking about 2-5,000 hectare core areas within all our eco regions, around the land, all around our landscapes, not just uplands or coastal. We are needing to create these, these pockets of nature that that will then give us resilience into the future. So all of that, where does that fit? How does it work? And it sort of needs much more of a strategic thinking from government, just like nuclear power does or any other thing that we have to do as a society. So where does it all fit and where does it all sit? And where does the farming sit? And where does the, and where's the space for nature? So I for me, it's just a, it's a blended thinking and a strategic thinking that has to come and play in what we're going to do in the future.

Rob: So where, where does it sit? I was interested to hear you say that, you know, if you, if you were 25 and, and regenerative farming had been a thing that happened, would Knepp have happened in this way that it has? Does that kind of make sense? You know, if 20 years ago, if regenerative farming was a thing…

Charlie: So I guess it's a, well, it would have happened because we are on very poor, I mean 10 acre fields. My grandparents never scrubbed out a hedge. They didn't want to see their landscape change at all really. And so it was never modernised. So it was, there was, there was lots of drainage going on - sort of 1860s and then the 1960s - and then, well nothing else happened. And so you've got… it would have taken a lot of capital to get it into a really productive farming system, I'm guessing. So we toyed with 20 years ago, 30 years ago we toyed with - sorry 30 years ago because 20 years we've been rewilding. 30 years ago we toyed with no-till and that didn't work. But what we hadn't clocked was that actually that's just only part of the story. So all the other bits and pieces that need to go with the regenerative movement’s ideas of how to – you know, applying cover crops, and all the other things that are that are necessary, we now understand we weren't thinking about. So it would have been, it would have been more interesting rather than just reaching for the chemical, to deal with things. To actually have a much more complex and interesting farming system than just out of out of the bottle.

Rob: Right, OK. So in general terms, though, it sounds like you're kind of heartened by the arrival of regenerative farming. I mean, does it feel like a sort of get out of jail card for us?

Charlie: I think it is a partial pass. I mean, the other thing that has to change is the amount of meat we eat. I think it's 63 percent of all the grain goes into producing our pigs and our poultry and our beef and our milk. So consumption does matter, I think. Tim Benton, Professor Tim Benton gave a lecture at the Soil Association spring lecture a couple of years ago. It was just when the Ukraine-Russian war kicked off. And it was all this problem of Russia stopping grain being exported from Ukraine. And what he had calculated was that if Europeans reduce their meat consumption by 15 percent - a meal a week, didn't eat meat -that would be equivalent to all the grain imported into the EU from Russia and Ukraine.

Rob: Wow.

Charlie: So the influence that people have on what has grown where and so on is enormous. And so we've got to not just think of one silver bullet, but actually multiple, multiple things we need to do and achieve as a society to bring down the take on the planet.

Rob: And we're, I'm hoping we're going to go out for a walk and see where the where the storks are nesting in a minute. But you mentioned drainage. It's, it's been quite wet, hasn’t it How's the land coped with the weather?

Charlie: So we've had since October, since the end of October we've had over a metre of rain. It's about 3 times as much as we normally have and we haven't got crops rotting in the ground. But what we have got is grass rotting in the ground. We've had standing water on a lot of the land now for so long that you've now got the roots and the grass above the ground rotting. So it is quite - I don't know, it is what it is, but it is… this change in what's happening to our weather patterns, we’ve just gotta get used to it, I guess. But it, it is worrying.

Rob: And in terms of the, the wildlife, have you noticed it impacting… I, I guess you'll be looking at stuff this summer and seeing whether having had this incredibly wet winter and fields that have been sodden for so long, what that does to the, to the worms and the invertebrates and the bird life and everything around it.

Charlie: So we did a study in 2018 and we think Knepp is one of the highest densities of breeding songbirds in Britain. So you've got this - by the time all the British birds have started to create territories and nested, you're thinking ‘there's no more room’. And then the African birds start to arrive. So all that migration from Africa, then all those little birds then started arriving. And of course, all these birds are eating insects. And so they're coming here not only for the habitat to nest the scrubland, but they're also coming here to eat their chicks, to feed. And so you've got insects to be caught and fed to the chicks.

So if you've, if you've got a really, if you've got a really wet winter, a lot of these insects live in the ground and they all just die. They can't cope with being sodden for, you know three, four months, six months. So you have an impact. I mean, I heard on the radio this morning that they're saying that it's one of the worst years for emerging butterflies.

Wet change sometimes can mean, you know, flourishing populations or whatever, but it also can mean a declines in populations. So weather patterns really do matter.

Rob: And you're, you're as part of the project of, of Knepp, you're monitoring all of that, keeping an eye on it, seeing what the impacts are?

Charlie: Yes, we've got, we've got two full-time ecologists here at Knepp. And then we've got a team, a wonderful team that takes tourists out, and there's about 20 of those. So, and they get involved with monitoring as well. So there's a whole group of people out there looking at what Knepp, what's happening on Knepp and, and reporting back and writing lots of lovely reports.

Rob: So there's a couple of things I wanted to chat about around Biodiversity Net Gain and carbon credits in the way that that industry, different industries - say the building industry, for instance - and then other businesses that are wanting to offset their carbon footprint are using different environmental projects to, to offset those things. Where, where do you stand on all of that?

Charlie: I think it's going to be crucial. I'm slightly disheartened by Biodiversity Net Gain and the ability for developers to put a lot of their units on the developed land. You know, developments should be well designed and that should be planning policy. So space for open space and grassland and all the other things that go on in developments should be already a given. And the units that are being destroyed by a development should be then found a home elsewhere, not on development. So that that's a bit of a pity because a lot of the developments now are using the Biodiversity Net Gain units that they're having to having to find space for within their own developments. And then there's only a small amount that's actually being allocated to outside development areas. The other thing which I think is a pity is, is that we're only talking about a 10 percent uplift. If we would talk about 20 percent uplift as a minimum, then I think that would make an enormous difference also to us. So I think Biodiversity Net Gain, we'll see, but I'm hoping that it will have a real impact for a lot of our NGOs you know, the real suppliers of, of nature - things like the Kent Wildlife Trust is, you know, it should be a really important stream of revenue for nature restoration. So I'm hoping that that's gonna work. I think that the carbon and biodiversity credit voluntary market is a really interesting thing. There's a call from Cornell and the Hank Paulson and Wendy Paulson Institute that we need to find an extra 700 billion. This is the missing bit of money, 700 billion a year to halt the loss of biodiversity on the planet.

Rob: That's globally.

Charlie: That's globally. So we did the same figures, Finance Earth did the same figures for Britain, and we're looking at about 6.2 billion a year spend needed above what we're already spending. So how are we going to find that money? How are we going to attract that money from who? It's not going to be government. It's not going to be philanthropy, those are exhausted. They're not going to go anymore. They're not gonna spend any more tax money on nature, it seems. So where are we going to find that money from? So biodiversity and carbon credits and Biodiversity Net Gain, all these instruments to find new money to come to the aid of this call for stopping and starting to reverse the loss of biodiversity is important, really important.

Rob: And are you, are you more optimistic than you were 20 odd years ago?

Charlie: I was listening to a lecture and I, I was in Brussels last week and the closing speech was given by an academic from Slovenia. And he said my – and he's a scientist - and he said, “My scientific brain tells me that we're in real trouble. But my heart tells me we can come up with solutions.” And I think I'm with him on this. I feel the evidence from science is telling us a very bleak picture. We're now looking at 2.4 degree change as an inevitable, so we're looking at major change on the planet. How do we cope with it? Well, we have lots of wars and we squabble about everything and we fight, the land is fought over between people talking about food security and people talking about collapsing biodiversity, it doesn't seem that the picture is very rosy. But you have to have hope. So one hopes that we come to our senses and come together and collectively really start to sort out the real main problems and what we've actually facing

Rob: Now for an awful lot of people, Knepp is a beacon of hope because you have changed this piece of land. How, how, how big is it – 3000-odd acres?

Charlie: 3,500 acres. Yeah.

Rob: So it's changed almost beyond recognition over the last 25 years really, from how it was when it was being intensively arguably farmed to what it is now. What have been the kind of the most joyous surprises that you've had in the last few years?

Charlie: So in 2020, Neil Hume, who's a butterfly expert, spotted a large tortoise shell butterfly. And that's, that's, you know, it's common enough, you know, these, these butterflies make it back across from Europe, occasionally to our shores. So it was noted, but that was that. And then three years later, the same chap, Neil Hume, discovers that there's a breeding colony of large tortoiseshells. So this is a butterfly that's been missing from Britain for 50 years And it's made it back. And it's not only just made it back and said hi, but it's actually then started breeding. And I guess that's the excitement for me is always there's something come, something we discover, something we find that that has been missing and has been lost from this landscape and now it's back. The violet door beetle. this big fat, this big juicy fat burrower, dung beetle burrower that hadn't been seen in Sussex for fifty years… we now have that everywhere. I can show you that this afternoon, this afternoon.

I think that, that for me it's the excitement of always something new appearing and coming back to what is just a bit of heavy clay and in West Sussex underneath the Gatwick stacking system.

Rob: And I can hear quite a lot of birdsong going on just outside the barn at the moment…

Charlie: So I, you know, another two or three weeks’ time you go up for your dawn safari and you're deafened, your lungs are emptied by the noise. I, I can't tell you what it's like. I, you know, I go around Europe a lot and in the spring I go around Europe a lot. I have lots of lovely projects that I'm involved in and I don't know anywhere where the noise levels are like this.

Rob: Shall we go out and have a look at the storks?

Charlie: Yes, please. Let's go and I'll show you the storks.

Rob: So, Charlie, we're just stopped by a, a huge dead oak. And I can see that it's, it's got what, half a dozen woodpecker holes in the side of it. I mean, somebody said to me a few years ago, “There's more life in a dead oak than there is an alive one”. And I, it took me a while to believe that, but it's actually the case, isn't it?

Charlie: Well, this particular trees we know has got a, a pair of little owls in a rabbit hole underneath the tree itself.

Rob: Underneath…?

Charlie: Underneath. And it's not dead. It’s just retiring gently towards the ground. And what what this tree has also got is Phellinus robustus, which is a very, very rare bracket fungus that it's a dead wood eater. So the tree is already dying. It's got, internally, it's got some dead wood. And that particular fungus shows us that there is deadwood inside it because that's what it eats. It has to get to a certain, a certain dryness, a certain quality before it then starts to eat away at the deadwood. But it's a very rare, I mean you know, we're talking about in Europe, Britain is the hotspot for it and it gives us an idea of continuity, continuity of landscape. So this bracket fungus doesn't travel very far. It needs other big old trees that are in the same stage of decay as this one is. And then it then can transport.

Rob: OK so when you say it's rare, how rare are we talking about, this fungus here?

Charlie: I think it's something like... these three trees on Knepp represents half the population in Britain.

Rob: Ohh. Right. That is rare. Yeah.

Charlie: It's very rare.

Rob: OK that's amazing. And how - do you have any idea how old this tree would be?

Charlie: I don't know. I mean, it, it's 250/300 years old, just gauging… We, we've done quite a lot of work on age. When we had the ’87 storm, there was a lot of work that we did then because a lot of trees came down. Not many of the big old trees actually did come down, but a few did. And then we did the bit of work of, you know, counting the rings and seeing what sort of, what sort of age and size. So this I would have guessed it's sort of 250/300 years old.

Rob: And there's the other thing with this tree, just looking at the branch, the, the quantity of lichen and moss that's growing off it. It's almost sort of heading towards the…

Charlie: - West coast Ireland.

Rob: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s that kind of sort of temperate rainforest look isn’t it?

Charlie: I mean that, the lichens on that on that South side are astonishing aren’t they? They’re two or three inches deep. I mean, really amazing. It is just a bit like a rainforest in Ireland

Rob: Because… So, temperate rainforest is something that is being talked about a lot at the moment. And whether or not, you know, the West Coast of Britain, actually trying to link up more landscape for that. Do you have a feeling that if you had more spaces like that, you'd actually see it much further east?

Charlie: Luckily, I think we're drier. Dry enough not to see the Atlantic, yeah, Atlantic rain rainforest here. No, I think we’re fine. I think it won't come to that. I think we, we, we know that this climatic zone - the, the planet has been divided up into climate climatic zones - this particular climatic zone that we live in is moving at about 5-7 kilometres northward every year - 150 kilometres every one degree change. And I think what we're going to get is, we're going to get that south of France feel in 20/50 years’ time.

Rob: Right OK.

Charlie: So we'll be growing lavender. Think, think of that lavender - not temperate Atlantic rainforest.

Rob: So Charlie, we've had a little yomp through the marsh to get out here and I can see that stork’s nest on top of a - I guess it's an old oak. The nest must be – what, eight foot across? It's like the size of a bathtub in the top of the tree.

Charlie: They keep on adding. Once the nest is built, the generation after generation then adds to it. So it can get enormous. I mean in parts of Spain and Portugal on some of those old churches where they've built nests, you can get three or four metre high, high nests. I mean, just, you know, tons of material. And what's really, what's lovely about the nests themselves is they, they harbour a whole load of insects as well as birds. So in, in Spain, I saw, I think we've counted three species of sparrow living in a stork’s nest underneath the storks.

Rob: Right OK so it's a high rise living for birds!

Charlie: Yes, exactly. But here, all the nests, all the 19 nests that have been built, they've all been built in the top of oak trees. So there's been one nest that was built on top of the castle and one nest on a, on a Scots pine, but otherwise all of them, all of them have been built on top of oak trees.

Rob: And is that one of the things that's been kind of a… has that been a surprise? You know, have the ecologists just looked at that and gone, “Oh, that's what storks like to do!”?

Charlie: One of the things when we were thinking about doing this project of reintroducing the white stork into Britain, we went around - as a group of us went around - and looked at projects around Europe. And so we looked at project in Spain, we looked at a project in Switzerland, we looked at a project in France and Holland. And one of the questions I always asked the people that were involved in those projects of bringing back the storks into those countries was, “What happens without humans?”. ‘Cause all we saw was stork nests on, on people's houses, on the churches, on the… people have, you know, in Poland were building poles in their gardens where they attracted storks, the storks in Romania just nest on top of electric lines. And so all you saw was human construction affording the space for the for the stork to nest on. Here, it's been, well… none of that's happened. So you've got just oak trees and that's really, and it's been really interesting for the projects that have been run around the rest of Europe to see that actually in England they've behaved completely differently.

Rob: And two other storks have just flown overhead. So there's one stork who's kind of standing guard on top of the nest there…

Charlie: And you can just see the female’s head or the male’s head. You can just see that little bump on the on the right-hand side.

Rob: So are you saying they take it in turns to sit on the eggs?

Charlie: So they… one will come back after feeding and then will prod the other one. And after a bit of prodding, the other one gets up and then the one that's just arrived then turns the eggs and then settles down on top of them. And then the other one flies away to go and do its feeding. So they're just taking it in turns. So it's a joint effort, this one.

Rob: When did you realise that you're probably more of an ecologist than a farmer? Or are you still a farmer? How do you think of yourself these days?

Charlie: I'm certainly not an ecologist. I’m really fascinated and always have been fascinated by insects, really actually. My passion was always insects. So I was, I was known at school as Bug Burrell. So it's always been there. But when I was farming here, at Knepp, it wasn't about wildlife, you know, you went to Africa, you went to Australia, you went, you went elsewhere to go and see wildlife. You didn't actually think about it. I didn't think about it at all in my own landscape. And that was a huge surprise when I started to learn more about our own ecology and what was missing and what could be possible.

Rob: And obviously you're, you're, you're quite well connected. Knepp has become, as you said, quite famous for what you do. Do you think the people at the top end of government understand what you're doing here and why it's important?

Charlie: I think the civil servants do, you know, each generation of ministers have had to relearn and think through all these, all these things again and again and again. So it's very short-termism in our politics, isn't it? So you- I think I was looking at a report saying the average for the last decade has been 18 months for a minister in role… or maybe it was less than that! I mean, you know, so it's not really time to get your head around very much. So you have to rely on your civil servants actually understanding what you’re, what the policies mean and what they're doing and, and why you why you've added this particular bit to the you know, I think it's, it's that embedded knowledge that we have in our civil servants that helps the smoothing over from transition to transition in politics.

Rob: Because you, you know, you're in that fortunate position of owning the land. You can make a decision. You've stuck to it for 25 years, whatever it is. That kind of long-term thinking is what allows storks to come back and build nests in old oak trees that don't get “managed”.

Charlie: Yes. And I think, I mean for, for our family, you know, the decision to go down this road was a financial decision. It was looking at a system that was not working. It was only working with grants or subsidies from Europe at that time. And so de-risking, for us, that was a primary purpose of what we then designed and did on our land.

Rob: Because at the time there were an awful lot of farmers and we talked, we talked about it a little bit earlier on were your neighbours were deeply upset at the fact that you were allowing thistles to grow in the field and that kind of thing. They thought it was going to ruin their crops. Yeah. That was quite a bumpy part of the journey, wasn't it, for those early years?

Charlie: Yeah, very. I mean it, it, it was actually mostly about common ragwort, I think, rather than – well, OK, bit of thistle there thrown in as well. But you know, these young landscapes that are forming, they go through this very messy period, which is, which is lots of annuals and biannuals taking over. And that included creeping thistle, included spear thistle, included your ragwort, your common ragwort. And so we had to then put in these 50-metre strips around the boundary of Knepp and stop the spread of these plants to neighbours. But a lot of the neighbours were arable and that's not part of the legislation. You don't have to worry about if it's arable. It's only if it's gonna be silage ground or hay ground or grazing ground that you have to worry about things like common ragwort, for instance.

Rob: And as we're standing here, just describe the area we're actually standing in, because this is quite, yeah, densely grown in now, isn't it?

Charlie: So each one of these fields - and you’ve still got field margins, you’ve still got hedges. We came out of arable farming over a period of six years. And every year that we dropped out of more and more land allowed different assemblage of plants to appear in those fields. So you, this one we’re standing in now, that came out of arable in 2004. And you've got a block of sallow just behind us, which is the food plant of the purple emperor butterfly. Surrounding us is white flowers. So we're early spring and this is all blackthorn. So you've got a big blackthorn grove with actually - you perhaps can't see them right now, but - in amongst this blackthorn you've got 20-foot high oak trees. So the, the thought is that in time, those oak trees will become bigger and bigger. And then they'll shade out the scrub underneath them. And then you'll have a transition from what is quite thick scrub to oak wood pasture type landscapes with these animals roaming around within them.

Rob: And the animals that you've got actually managing the landscape. So what, what's the blend that you've actually got on the land at the moment?

Charlie: So we've got old English longhorns and that's by, in terms of biomass, much, much the biggest animal we have. So there's about 400 of them. We've got about 700 deer and we got fallow deer and red deer and we have some roe deer and then we’ve got Tamworth pigs and we keep them quite low numbers. I mean about 6 or 7 breeding sows, so about 40 animals in total. And then we have about 60 Exmoor ponies. And in terms of the way that as a farm then that it works, so are the cattle actually used for, for beef? Do you end up, you know, slaughtering them or are they, are they just purely managing the land?

Charlie: So we have about 75 tonnes live weight coming off the land every year and we process that, we get it slaughtered locally, then gets processed in a unit that we've converted on the farm. So we have 3 full-time butchers and we then sell that in, in frozen form in boxes to anyone in Britain. So it gets sent out and delivered to your door. And that's now one of our major businesses that we run.

Rob: So that that's the crucial point, isn't it? That that is actually paying for itself. It's not, it's not just a, a nice thing to do, it's actually an essential part of the business setup.

Charlie: No, for us, you know that that 10 years of “You've gotta change” - from the message from Europe – “Ten years, you’ve gotta change to what suits your land”. What we did in that 10-year period is we converted a whole lot of farm buildings into alternative uses. We, we rent out those buildings to little businesses and quite big businesses in some cases. And those businesses are now employing 200 people in their businesses. Our tourism business, our meat business, our café-restaurant, all of these things are now employing lots of people. So we've gone from 23 people when we were just farming on the estate to 80 full-time equivalents. So local employment rockets. Everything changes. When you…what's happened in agriculture is that it, you know, the big machines and all the things, the mechanisms you then have to bring your unit price down where you can sell your commodity on the world market at a profit means that it, it drives, you know, you have to mechanise. You have to mechanise the whole time. And so the reverse is true for looking after people in tourism. You've got to have lots and lots of people coming in to then take people around and show them and look after them and change their beds and all the things that have to happen or cook their food or all the things that we're doing.

Rob: So it's, yeah, it's- there are people who are concerned that by wilding, rewilding, whatever term you want to use, that that kicks people off the land and that that means that it's just left to nature to get on with it, that people get left out of the picture. What you're painting a picture of is the exact opposite of that. That actually it allows more people to live off the countryside than it could before.

Charlie: It's a completely different model and you've got to repurpose people that are, you know, supplying whatever they're supplying when you're doing a production system and you've gotta think about how you can reuse those skills they already have - the knowledge of the land, the knowledge of the countryside - and retrain them and take them on a different journey. And I think that's a really interesting part of it.

Rob: The sort of the tourism side of stuff. So the South Downs National Park is, is coming to play. And then there's the landscape scale - what's it, Wheel to Waves. So that's the name of the project isn’t it? All of that, is that all genuinely starting to come together in something that actually makes sense these days?

Charlie: It feels like it, it really does feel like an exciting journey. You know, if we had slightly more stability from government and direction of travel and they stuck to the 25-year -designing 25-year plans means that you're designing 25-year plans. You, you want to stick to those plans for at least 25 years. And you may get some of it wrong and you may have to tweak it. But the flip-flopping from one policy to another and the, and the different directions you keep on hearing about in, in the press is really depressing. Because actually what you need is you need long-term planning for both nature and farming. And we all need that. And we need to have the meddling stopped.

Rob: A slightly wry look on your face there.

Charlie: Yes. Well, it just it… it is, you know, the millions of hours that went into - from all of us - went into the discussions around the policies that have been drawn up and then signed off and gone through Parliament. We just need to stick to it.

Rob: Right OK. So as a final thought, then, I just wanted to sort of go back to the nature side of stuff - Bug Burrell!

Charlie: I wish I hadn’t told you that!

Rob: What are the things that are making you most excited this year?

Charlie: Well, on the stork story. We've got a really lovely story. We've got a stork that was born here 4 years ago. It's flown to Morocco. It then came back after 4 years. Last year, it then attempted to nest, failed and then triggered off again back to Morocco. It's then come back this spring and it's now come, it's now found its mate that it found last year, which wasn't successful. And they're building a nest and they, we've seen them mating and we hope that the eggs are being laid. And that's just a lovely story. It's a, you know, it's worked. They migrate, they come back and it's a thrill. So that's, I guess, this year is going to be, if that works and they that particular pair produce chicks that then fledge to then migrate. And yeah, that would be the real lovely moment in this year.

Rob: Fantastic. Great. Well, Charlie, it's been a real privilege to wander around and have a look at things and have a chat. Thanks.

Charlie: Lovely to show you a little bit of Knepp, yeah.

Rob: Well, what a privilege that was to get the chance to be taken for a walk through Knepp by Charlie Burrell – or, to give him his full title, Sir Charles Burrell, 10th Baronet. But he insists on Charlie. Now if you want to see the storks yourself then just search for Knepp white stork nest camera on YouTube and it'll take you straight through to the live feed and once you're there, guarantee you'll end up glued to it for ages.

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