“What we want are live cows – you can see the evidence here,” says Holly Purdey, pointing to the bug holes. In 2018, she took over the 81-hectare (200-acre) Horner Farm in Exmoor National Park, calling for beef and lamb production while restoring nature to land she says has been “destroyed” by intensive farming.
In a field of knee-deep grass, her shorthorn cattle shelter from the sun by tall hedges. Water bugs also feed on dung, he says, and eat the larvae of face flies, which can plague red and white cattle and are usually fought with pesticides. “I think it’s incredible that we have a natural predator for flies,” says Purdey.
The field hums with the sound of crickets and grasshoppers, and swallows swoop down to scoop up insects. “When the cattle walk around, they kick up the insects,” he says.
Exmoor National Park, like all of England’s national parks, has failed to protect nature since it was established 75 years ago. Only 15% of Exmoor’s Sites of Special Scientific Interest are in a favorable condition.
One reason is that most of the national park’s land is privately owned by farmers who have adopted intensification of fertilizers and pesticides in recent decades, decimating wildlife. Parks own a small proportion of land and have few powers beyond planning control.
But Purdey tries to reconcile agriculture and fauna. In her field there are also beehives, newly planted apple and pear trees, willow for the production of winter fodder for sheep and a mobile trailer for chickens. The trailer is moved every day or two, so the chicken droppings help restore calcium in the depleted soil.
Monitoring of grasslands, butterflies, bats and reptiles shows that nature is recovering on the farm. “We can produce food in harmony with nature – I can see it,” he says. “And building a farm more in tune with nature is more resilient to climate change.”
Purdey, who grew up on a farm before training in conservation and working for the Somerset wildlife trust, also restores wildflower meadows. More diverse pastures are good for nature and livestock, he says: “They’ll have better guts and can self-medicate, for example with a ladder that’s anti-inflammatory.”
Farmers in national parks, where the land is generally poorer for food production, have historically received fewer subsidies than those outside. However, a new focus on using public money for public goods is beginning to shift this. Being in the national park gave Purdey access to Farming in Protected Land (FiPL) grants that partially paid for her work in nature.
“I and [my husband] Mark said at various times that we had to give it up because of the financial struggle of raising a young family while also trying to build something from the ground up,” says Purdey. But her enthusiasm soon returns: “The farm is slowly blooming – it took time and trust in nature to do that.”
Creating more forests is an important part of the restoration of nature in national parks. In Exmoor, forest cover increased by around 1% to 14% from 2015 to 2020. But Graeme McVittie, the park’s chief forest officer, is working hard to speed this up, with research suggesting up to half the park could be reforested.
At Burridge Woods, near Dulverton, he says: “30 years ago it was absolutely overgrown with rhododendron – people even used to see it on bus tours.” The noxious invasive species has been relentlessly felled and today the trees that can grow in its wake are an oasis for flycatchers. Bechstein’s bats and tiger cranes.
Challenges persist from other invasive species such as cherry laurel and buddleia, as well as ash dieback and gray squirrel damage. “They remove the bark to get to the sweet juice,” says McVittie. He hopes pine martens can be re-introduced to combat tree rodents.
In the heart of Exmoor, in the village of Simonsbath, a 20-year project is underway to restore 300 hectares of temperate rainforest dotted with mosses, lichens and ferns. “It’s a hyperoceanic climate—that means it rains a lot,” says McVittie.
A 6-hectare forest was planted over the winter: a mixture of oak, ash, birch, hazel and hawthorn. “I’m really glad they’re doing so well,” he says, surveying the oak leaves protruding from the biodegradable tube that protects the sapling from deer. “This place has been deforested for centuries and without help the native species will never find their way back.”
Closer to the coast, another site, Hawkcombe Forest, provides the best wooded site in the country for the heathland butterfly, which was reintroduced in 2014. The shady slopes are dotted with the delicate yellow trumpets of crested cowslip, a plant that the butterflies feed on.
Oak forests have been mined for hundreds of years for the production of charcoal and tanbark, for tanning leather. Today, careful tillage continues to create the light and shade needed for its biodiversity, and McVittie dreams of one day grazing animals.
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“You could actually see bison and some longhorn cattle here, thrashing around and making a mess, for the first time in 1,000 years,” he says, adding that the animals have been fenced out of the valleys to protect new trees and fenced off. moorland, which means no new trees are growing: “We have to mix it up a bit.”
At West Ilkerton Farm, a windswept 102-hectare site on a hill 1,000 feet above the Bristol Channel, traditional livestock are playing their part in the shift to a more natural landscape.
“These are proper Neolithic beasts,” says Sarah Eveleigh, as the farmer’s stocky Exmoor rams crowd around her with heavy, billowing horns. “They are very traditional breeds, very suitable for the area and the breed line has been on this farm for over 100 years. We’ve had a lot of heavy rain and wind and snow too, so the restored hedgerows give them really nice cover,” he says, and for the Devon red ruby cattle.
“But we’re actually a lot less stocked than we used to be,” he says, with half the sheep and a third the cattle. “When I was young, most of the valleys were grazed. But we let them come out naturally like a forest. All these trees have grown in my lifetime.” FiPL grants also partially funded the wildlife site fencing and wildlife walk.
“We’re trying to find a really good middle ground between supporting nature and producing food while still having a profitable business,” says Everleigh. “Nowadays, cattle breeding is not generally a profitable business.”
Everleigh walks down a lane lined with earth and stone walls with treetops unique to the western landscape where canopies arch overhead. “This is one of my favorite parts of the farm – it’s like a natural church.”
In another field are Exmoor ponies that have been brought in from the common moor to graze. “Sheep, cattle and ponies graze a bit differently,” says Everleigh. “So they complement each other. Up on the moor the ponies are doing a really good job. They keep patches of land quite open and create a really nice variety of grass heights for different invertebrates and birds.”
The new management agreement for the 364-hectare moorland common is working, he says: “The estate has just collapsed and has just been completely overtaken by rodents and bracken. It’s a really beautiful heather up there now.’
Exmoor is one of the few National Parks to have a Nature Restoration Plan, including ambitious and detailed restoration targets for 2030, as well as one that will ensure at least 75% of the park is ‘nature rich’ by 2050.
Everleigh, the fourth generation to work on her farm, says, “There seems to be an ‘us and them’ between conservationists and farmers,” she says. “But farmers are conservationists, we know how the soil works, so we have to constantly consult each other.
“We will have to think differently than we have always managed. But the government must recognize what we are already doing for the countryside.”
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