For most of the past 6,000 years, the land at Boothby Lodge Farm south of Grantham grew crops. More than 92% of its acres were ploughed, worked a few days a year by a contractor's machines to raise wheat and beans on poor clay soils. No one lived off the land. On a summer walk across the cracked fields, the writer following the project met no insects and no other people for two and a half hours.
In late 2021 that history began to end. Nattergal, a nature-recovery company whose name is Danish for nightingale, bought the 1,525-acre (617-hectare) farm for 13.8 million pounds and renamed it Boothby Wildland. Its plan is deliberately provocative in a county long called the bread basket of Britain: no crops, no fertiliser, no pesticide, and the deliberate breaking-up of the drains that generations of farmers installed to carry rainwater away.
Behind the venture is Sir Charlie Burrell, co-founder of Knepp in West Sussex, where he and his wife Isabella Tree turned a loss-making estate into Britain's best-known rewilding success. Knepp is now a haven for nightingales, turtle doves, white storks and purple emperor butterflies that still sells free-range produce and employs far more people than a conventional farm. At Boothby, Burrell wants to repeat that at scale, and to answer a harder question: can wildlife itself be farmed at a profit?
Making restoration a business
The economics matter because Boothby's old model was fragile. The farm cleared about 250,000 pounds a year, but half of that came from the "basic payment", a subsidy for simply owning land that the government plans to end by 2027. Under reforms shifting support toward "public money for public goods", land that delivers clean water, healthy soils and wildlife will be rewarded; bare, near-lifeless fields will not.
Nattergal intends to earn its keep from what the land can restore rather than what it can extract. According to Rewilding Britain, the site, one of the government's Landscape Recovery pilots, will see arable farming phased out over three years, at least three kilometres of streams and the River Glen returned to a more natural course, ditches blocked to rebuild wetlands, and grazing herbivores introduced around year five. Revenue is meant to come from selling ecosystem services, such as carbon and biodiversity gains, alongside camping, guided safaris and, eventually, high-quality meat, with new jobs for the local community.
Whether the numbers ultimately add up is still being tested on the ground. But the wager is clear: that the surest way to reverse nature's decline is to make its recovery worth investing in.