And it was because of what we were doing to the soil beneath them. We suddenly realized that these beautiful old trees that we looked out on to every day were dying, beginning to die. We were endlessly plowing the endless chemical inputs with and pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, everything. Isabella Tree: They were growing very stagy and dying back, these lovely 300, 400, 500 year old oaks because of what we were doing underneath them. Isabella Tree: His ideas about free roaming animals and allowing them to drive habitat creation in the landscape, we thought might be an amazing experiment to try on our land. We met the amazing Dutch ecologist Frans Vera. And it was in the year 2000, the year after we decided to give up in hand farming and we sold our lovely dairy herds and we sold our farm machinery and cleared our debts. Isabella Tree: We wanted to do something that was going to work with the land rather than battling against it all the time. Isabella Tree: Selling wasn’t an option for us because this estate has been in the family for over 250 years. Isabella Tree: And we just could not farm this land. It’s very heavy clay like porridge in winter. It’s grade 3, grade 4 in agricultural terms. The problem we realized by 1999 was our soil. I think we were one and a half million pounds in debt by that stage. And after 17 years, our overdraft was higher than ever. Isabella Tree: We did everything a good farmer is supposed to do conventionally. With the sort of arrogance of youth, we just assumed that it was his grandparents who hadn’t been investing in infrastructure and didn’t know what the latest technologies had been making the farming business fail. It was already a failing enterprise when we took it on. We inherited three and a half thousand acres, my husband and I in West Sussex, in South East of England from his grandparents in the 1980s. Isabella Tree: The story of wilding really is our story, is the story of what happened on our estate over the last 20 years. Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm book
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