Land Healer: How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside

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We are a small independent production team who share a passion for the natural world. We believe in the power of films and stories to change hearts and minds. Our team includes experienced documentary filmmakers, scientists, farmers, food and environmental campaigners. 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. Then we drive to the iron age hill-fort of Warham Camp, a stunning secret spot of chalk grassland that is probably Norfolk’s butterfly capital. For a decade or so, it has been the only place in the county where the chalkhill blue survives. Suddenly, last summer thousands of these butterflies danced over the fort, along with brown argus and common blue. More butterflies are a sign that millions more less-studied flying insects and pollinators will be thriving too, as well as the birds, bats and shrews that feed on them. With mud on his boots and hope in his heart, Fiennes tells a powerful and uplifting story of food, farming and living with nature.' Matthew Parris It is 7am and we are driving around Holkham, North Norfolk, a 25,000-acre estate owned by the Earl of Leicester, that comprises a huge national nature reserve and thousands of acres of commercial farmland, as well as woodland, parkland, a beach and miles of salt marshes.

Fiennes himself photographs foxgloves, counts cowslips and gets excited about dandelions. He lives for what he calls his ‘nature moments’ – when he once found himself surrounded by a cloud of painted lady butterflies, say, or the time he took a friend out at sunrise and they saw 60,000 pink-footed geese take flight, and she burst into tears. He gets up every day at first light to see what’s going down. As the author explains it, this regenerative farming approach can easily replace the EU’s Taliban farming model; in which everyone chases subsidies by spraying chemicals according to calendar, rather than need, and killing everything that doesn’t fit the plan. Inner and Outer Tools for the 21st Century. One of the core reasons to take up the path of land healing as a spiritual practice is simply that it is good work to do, offering you the opportunity to ‘do something’ and engage in positive change where, right now, the bulk of humanity is going off in a less productive direction. Land healing as a framework that I’m expressing here encompasses not only physical regeneration but also energetic work and self-care. Thus, it offers a number of tools that work together to help you bring balance and harmony to the land–and to your own inner spiritual life. And I think, given where this world is unfortunately heading, we are all going to need them to bring balance, harmony, and wisdom to our own practices and the world around us.

The Impetus for Land Healing Practices as Spiritual Practice

A powerful call to arms, this fascinating book makes a clear case to put farming at the heart of the restoration of our countryside" Unfortunately however Jake Fiennes’ book just didn’t hit the spot for me. The mix of biography, history, facts and figures and descriptive narratives feels very disjointed and somewhat arrogant. What I love about this monument is that it’s all about agriculture and food. ‘Small in size …’ refers to sheep, but to me it refers to bumble bees or butterflies or toads – and ‘Live and let live’ – that’s the biodiversity crisis. We need to share. We need to share this planet with everything that’s in it rather than trying to remove it or destroy it.’ These days, unusually, he sits on influential committees not just for the government but for the National Farmers Union and conservation charities as well, alongside pushing the whole Holkham Estate – which includes conventional arable farms as well as the vast nature reserve – in a more wildlife-friendly direction. Fiennes believes we have to involve farmers in nature restoration, not by blaming them for the damage caused – that’s driven by policy and agricultural subsidies, he says – but by enlisting them to be part of the solution.

At Raveningham they shot wild birds, rather than pheasants bred to be shot. (He had once worked as a loader at a private shoot in the Midlands, and had found himself at the end of the day looking upon a carpet of dead pheasants. ‘We had finished off more than 1,200 birds. I was dumbfounded at the spectacle, and felt uncomfortable that I had been party to the slaughter.’) This book is written by the Head of Conservation on the beautiful Holkham Estate in North Norfolk. That estate is probably best known now for two things and historically for one other. Today most visitors either head for the Neo-Palladian style Hall and its extensive parklands (with lake and deer park) or even more so for the Holkham beach with its quite stunning vistas of miles of Golden sand. Historically it is known as the home of Coke of Norfolk – agricultural reformer (partly controversially as a supporter and beneficiary of enclosure) and innovator (in areas such as the growing of grass crops and the selective breeding of sheep). We can only solve the crises of climate, extinction and human ill-health by healing our relationship with the land. Jake Fiennes shows us how in this inspiring, realistic and practical book"Heartbreaking and hopeful, this story of a farming revival has never been more important. It opened my eyes and touched my soul.'- Esther Freud An authentic, beautifully written portrait of 21st Century farming, this deeply personal account puts a powerful case: that the task of restoring our earth and ensuring a sustainable future both for our food and ourselves, lies in the hands of those who live closest to the land.

On the top of the monument you can just see the remains of a nest. It belonged to a pair of ravens that fledged a few weeks ago. It is the first time a breeding pair have ever been recorded in Norfolk. We are thrilled to be welcoming Jake Fiennes to FarmED for the launch of 'Land Healer - How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside' in conjunction with Jaffé & Neale Bookshop & Cafe. Doors open at 6.00pm for a 6.15pm start as Jake discusses his debut book with FarmED Founder, Ian Wilkinson. The discussions surrounding how farming methods can have a positive impact on our countryside, will conclude with an audience Q&A and a book signing.

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Fiennes tells some good stories and some striking ones. Finding many poisoned Brown Hares (many years ago) in a field which had recently sprayed is a story which hits home strongly, particularly because Fiennes points to the spray operator cut off from nature in his (or her) cab listening to music on headphones as being (but these are my words) as cut off from the consequences of his actions as the townie 50 miles away in a busy street. Sometimes, spirit offers you a call and its a call that can’t be ignored. Part of the reason I write so much about working physically and energetically with land healing on this blog is that its clear to me now that a large part of my call is in this direction. When I was a child, it was the logging of my forest–and my eventual return to that forest years later. At my first homestead, I had to spend years working to connect with the spirits of the land and heal the land physically. When I found the current land where I live, everything was perfect about it in terms of features I wanted–except that three acres had been logged pretty heavily. I put my head and my hands and cried–how did I find a perfect piece of land that just had been logged? The spirits laughed and said, of course, Dana, it is the perfect piece of land for someone like you. And thus, the lessons of a land healer continue to spiral deeper and deeper as my own spiritual practice grows. I realize that while I’ve written a lot about land healing in my previous series in 2016 and beyond, my own understanding of these practices–for both individuals and groups–has changed a lot. I’ve been refining my thinking about these topics, especially as I keep finding myself in a teaching role to others and with my return to my ancestral lands where the healing need is very strong. Thus, I’d l like to offer a new series on Land Healing practices and go deeper than my previous coverage some years ago (all of the links to my original series can be found here). Many years ago, the old Norfolk boys would dig foot-drains to take the water off the land," said Mr Fiennes. Land Healer: how farming can save Britain’s countryside by Jake Fiennes is published by Witness Books I do however see that within all this there are some ideas which can be taken from Fiennes’ work at Holkham. His ability to judge where small changes could lead to big differences is the one real positive which I come away with.

Callers are greeted with “Welcome to Whole Planet Healing; please say your name and location…. But only if you want to.” So if you call you can definitely remain anonymous. Sarah Langford's book on farming is really a book about healing. All of life and death is here: family, politics, nature, climate, history, humanity. Rooted is a beautifully written, powerful reminder of where we've gone wrong, what is at stake, and how we can change. I loved it.'- Christie Watson, author of The Language of Kindness

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For example we've been doing the Big Farmland Bird Survey in the last two weeks and we now have four years of data for Holkham. We have surveyed close to 50 farms of Holkham-owned land and already we can see where we are making a difference and where we are not."