Key theme(s):

Media Type: Book
Title: Land Healer: How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside
Author: Jake Fiennes
Year of Publication: 2022

What’s it about?

Despite the title, this book is as much memoir as manual, detailing one man’s journey from a manager of game birds (for hunting) to an expert in managing land in a nature-positive manner.

If I’m completely honest, I wasn’t really expecting this sort of book to come from a former gamekeeper. I suppose I have fallen into the trap of assuming that someone committed to supporting wildlife must be too sentimental to have ever engaged in hunting. Of course, the reality is that our decisions need to be driven both both logic and passion, if they are to be truly effective for wildlife. And it’s clear that the author has both. In fact, he devotes around a third of the book to his life story and how he came to be the Head of Conservation of the Holkham Estate, explaining how exactly both the passion and the knowledge, on which the logic is based, were developed. But it’s not a story of conversion from hunter to hippy, there’s no Damascene moment. It’s more a story of the gradual realignment of perspective, of taking the game management skills developed over a career in commercial hunting and expanding them to encompass all types of wildlife, the ones we hunt and, more importantly, the ones we depend on in so many other ways.

What’s the key message?

I can’t put it any more clearly than the author himself:

“To put it crudely, I firmly believe that the natural world is not totally fucked. We can fix it.”

There is an optimism that runs through the book about how much positive change farmers and landowners can bring about through their actions. This is underpinned by the idea that comparatively small changes (what the author calls “small tweaks”) can have disproportionately large benefits to the natural world. It’s also, indirectly, about how important loving your land is, and seeing it truly as an evolving habitat, rather than just a big pile of productive and not-so-productive soil.

You should read this book if…

…you want to know more about, or need inspiration for, nature-friendly land management…

This is probably the ideal book for a landowner who is feeling nature-curious, but doesn’t really know where to start. You can think of it as more a series of micro-case studies than a textbook. It explores in great detail how small, carefully judged changes have had a disproportionately large benefit to the wildlife in and around the farm. And it does a masterful job of taking really big principles and exploring what they look like in actual application, all explained with great pragmatism.

…or you need reassurance that there is real desire for change amongst farmers and landowners,

Farmers come in for a lot of slack in many sustainability debates. It’s often assumed that they are in it purely for the money. And to an extent, that must be true, they are businesses after all. But there is, I think, a growing recognition that farmers also need passion if they are going to stick it out in the long run. And something that does become clear from this book is that it takes very little to break the damns of emotion that farmers and land managers are often forced to build around their business decisions. The author, clearly, is passionate enough to have written a book about the topic, and he also includes anecdotes about how powerfully his neighbouring farmers are affected by the sight of a particular bird, one that they haven’t seen since childhood, and how that rekindles the joy of spending every day out on the land, and consequently, the desire to make a positive change on that land.

What makes the book effective?

The book’s structure and style are both its strength…

I said above that the book is as much memoir as manual, but more than anything, it feels being taken on a tour of the estate that the author manages. Although each chapter does nominally have a topic, it’s also paired with a particular area or field, usually introduced by a short, incredibly vivid, snapshot of that site at a particular time of year. It’s a very moving way of writing – you get a lyrical, tangible image of a place, layered with a potted history (sometimes dating back hundreds of years) that places it within a historical context, followed by a forensic data-based dissection of the changes the author has seen or implemented. What emerges is a sense that each field, and indeed the estate as a whole, is more of a process than a physical location. And I believe that is partly the author’s intention – it emphasises the vibrancy and ‘aliveness’ of the landscape and its constituent parts, challenging the human tendency to impose discrete boundaries between fields, habitats and even timescales – a tendency that forces us to focus on land in snapshots rather than living spaces.

You also get the feeling that the author really knows the land he manages, not just in terms of maps, elevations, soil types, hydrological features etc., but as a living entity, as something that needs to be tended to as much as managed. But this isn’t to say that the author’s view is in any way misty or romanticised. Far from it, the level of detail is impressive, and shows that the author’s knowledge of both the wildlife visitors and inhabitants of the farm and of the wider scientific and legislative context is encyclopaedic. Above all, you come away with a sense of the thoroughness of the author’s sense of place, and how that translates into a passion to be proactive in making positive changes. And make no mistake, that passion is infectious!

Is there anything that could be improved?

…and its weakness.

The challenge that comes with this way of writing is how to weave all the different sections into a cohesive narrative, and this is – in my opinion at least – not entirely successful. I found myself at times searching for some sort of connecting thread, or even simply a map of the estate that I could refer to in order to help me visualise what we were looking at. And as mentioned, there is a lot of detail, sometimes too much to internalise. I think, if I were a farmer or landowner reading this book, I would come away inspired to think about what changes I could make on my own estate, but not necessarily with any clearer idea of where to start. Perhaps that was the intention, of course. Given how closely a farmer has to know their land in order to make positive changes, and how context-dependent the judgements have to be, it would be nearly impossible to put together a one-size-fits-all manual. But taken as a whole, the book feels like a flock of geese that has taken off but not yet assembled itself into the famous arrows – there’s clearly a great deal of highly skilled activity going on there, made up of lots of moving parts, but at the moment, it remains a little chaotic and without a sense of direction. All of that aside though, if you’re looking for a book that will inspire you to fall back in love with your land, you need look no further.