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Land Healer

Land Healer

How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Our relationship with our land is broken: we must heal it.


Jake Fiennes is on a mission to change the face of the English countryside. As Conservation Manager at Holkham in Norfolk, one of the country's largest historic country estates, his radical habitat restoration and agricultural work has nurtured its species and risen its crop yields - bringing back wetlands, hedgerows, birds and butterflies over 25,000 acres of land.

But this isn't rewilding - there is no 'wild' in Britain anymore. Mass farming, crop science and industrial chemicals have destroyed the majority of our natural landscape and wildlife over the last century. Land Healer is the story of Fiennes's ambition to bring back our flora and fauna - by reclaiming our traditions and trialling new experiments which could restore our symbiosis with our land, and save our shared future.

Following the farming year and the natural cycle of the seasons, Land Healer chronicles a life of conservation lived at the edges, and is a manifesto for rethinking our relationship with the natural world before it's too late.

'One of the motive forces behind this new way of looking at the land' - Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England

'Jake Fiennes is changing the face of farming in Britain... a revolutionising force' Isabella Tree

© Jake Fiennes 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Reviews

  • Jake Fiennes is changing the face of farming in Britain ... A revolutionising force
    Isabella Tree

About the author

Jake Fiennes

Jake Fiennes is Conservation Manager at Holkham in Norfolk, one of the country's largest historic country estates. From a thirty year career in conservation, game-keeping and land management, his advice and expertise is being sought by an increasing number of key players in the conservationist and agricultural fields - including the Ministry of Agriculture, the NFU, the Prince of Wales, the National Trust, the RSPB and Natural England, among others. Previously, he worked at the Raveningham estate, helping to kick-start their famous rewilding project. He lives in an old blacksmith's house with his partner in Norfolk.
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