Research

Rewilding and Farming: Land-Use Priorities in the Countryside

Rewilding's core tension is not simply ecology versus food production, but a deeper dispute over whose knowledge, risk tolerance, and land rights count: Western frameworks treat farming and nature restoration as spatially separable, while evidence from China, Japan, India, and Indonesia suggests integrated agro-ecological models consistently outperform land-abandonment approaches on both biodiversity and farmer income metrics. The economic case for rewilding remains poorly evidenced — the systematic review found a "surprising paucity" of rigorous studies, Strassburg's headline extinction and carbon figures are unverified modelling outliers, and the only income data available (DEFRA's 11% farm income drop in rewilding hotspots) cannot be disaggregated by tenure, leaving the distributional impact on tenant farmers and smallholders unknown. Market-oriented, fiscal-restraint, and individual-agency perspectives are entirely absent from the source pool, meaning the long-run public cost of subsidy-dependent rewilding schemes and the viability question for farms without wealthy landowner capital remain unexamined gaps that should be resolved before treating any finding here as settled.