Inside The Farm That Stopped Farming.

In this one we're exploring a farm that's being given back to nature, from free-roaming pigs to tiny forests, fallen trees, fake beaver dams and much, much more. Tom and Chloe will be our guides around 80 acres of Welsh countryside, known as the Grange Project. Here, this landscape isn't just transforming for nature, but this project is working to find ways to help people thrive too. This video is sponsored by Surfshark. More on them shortly. Wow, that might have just been one of the coziest sleeps I've had in a while. This bed is insanely comfortable. And no, I didn't sleep in my clothes, I was very warm in here, had the wood fire going. So this cabin, it's off grid, it's situated in the far corner of the Grange Project which we're looking out over here. We're going to learn about this one today. That overturning of earth which you're seeing there, that is a subtle foreshadowing for the animals which we might see today. Drop down in the comments now if you think you know what they might be. They've been incredibly busy everywhere. Morning, I'm good. Slept very well. So this is Tom, there he is, and this is the hub. This lovely building behind here. And what are you up to now? Track maintenance, all those lovely jobs that need to get done that you didn't know, but then they do. Yeah, I bet they pile up. Otherwise my postman gets upset with me. So I alluded to the signs of these guys, and you can hear them now, and here they are. Hello ladies. Come on in. Right, in we get. They are a pair of dominatrix, I'd say. They definitely own the place. What's the sole aim of having them on here then? Oh, there's not just one aim, but I mean, they are our ecosystem engineers, so they are here converting what was kind of hay meadows, essentially, or kind of grassland into something else. They're changing that ecosystem by roostling. Having a good itch on my leg there, is that because I've got bony knees? There you go, look at that. They are beasts. They've been so busy. I mean, like now in the daylight, because we arrived yesterday and I was walking through to the cabin, which is over there, like now you can just see the evidence of them everywhere. And they, but they're more than just that now, they've got a great engagement factor. When people see them and come and meet them, they just, they bring the project to life. They're a real tangible kind of example of just having animals on the land that you can actually touch and feel, which I think really works nicely. But they are not pets, although they look like they are wonderful pets right now, but I'm pretty convinced if you lay down for 10 minutes and didn't move, they might try and eat you. Yeah, let's, let's, let's not try that. You. Go on. Step over, like Dominic. Yeah, yeah. Step over. What, like on top of me? Yeah. Well, like ride, ride the... Yeah, it's kind of like that. I think that's what they kind of like. Is that what you want? You want some closeness? Yeah. Okay. All right. There you go, she's happy now. It's my first, it's my first time riding a pig. It does feel quite appropriate though to ride a, ride a pig through a rewilding project. I actually first found out about the Grange Project while researching flooding in Wales. I discovered their podcast online and I went down a bit of a rabbit hole and that's kind of how all Leave Curious videos start. And because I'm constantly researching projects like this, whether if I'm in an Airbnb or a cafe or like now in my van on the side of the road, it's really important to me that I have a secure and reliable internet connection. And that's why I'm using Surfshark. It's a VPN which encrypts your connection and protects your data when using public wifi. Our livelihoods, especially mine, is wrapped up in the internet. So we must make sure that we are protecting our information and our data. But another cool feature is that you can change your virtual locations. So if I'm traveling and I need to access content or services from back home, all I have to do is just switch locations inside the app. And likewise, if I need to access content from other places while I'm in the UK, I can do that too. And since I'll be traveling a whole lot more this year, hopefully into Europe and beyond, having that security and that flexibility is really important. So if you don't have a VPN and you want to try this out, you want to support the channel, just head to surfshark.com forward slash leave curious, or just use the code leave curious at checkout to get four months extra on your Surfshark VPN. There's also a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can try it risk free. Thank you to Surfshark for sponsoring this video. Now let's get back to the story. Before we had the pigs, my solution was to walk around with a pickaxe and just create my own routines because that's better than nothing like a crazy man who's just had enough with his land. You know what? And our neighbors didn't, didn't question it. No, no, no. They come. How far are they? They're very far. Are they? Yeah. They go for it. Never ran away from a pig. Is this like a game or, or yeah, this is a quite a nice feature. When did this, did this come down while you were here? Yeah, it did. Yeah. They came down, um, mid, mid summer. Yeah. No wind whatsoever. All right. Just, we had a, a volunteer in that cabin over there and she heard like two or three o'clock in the morning, a almighty crash. We caught it on a trail cam, the crash, and this was, was what we found in the morning. This is one of the cabins where you can stay, I stayed in one just, just over that way. You operate kind of during, during the spring and sort of summer months, right? Yeah. And beginning of autumn. Yeah. But it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's a completely movable cabin, um, built as sustainably as we possibly can. Everything was sourced secondhand. That could be sourced secondhand, including the doors, windows, frames, the installation, solar panels, the car battery, everything is, is, is secondhand and, um, we really want people to come who appreciate nature, who really get here because they want to come to the Grains Project and experience what wilder nature can and will feel like. And you get a very comfortable bed as well. Well, when you've got limited space, I mean, if you can't get a decent bed, then you've probably failed in your job. So you're letting your hedges come out and grow. Bramble's getting crazy here, which is, which is nice. Um, and throughout which kind of break up the project areas, are you, cause we're talking a bit about hedges yesterday and you were saying there will come a time cause you haven't got, I mean, you've only got the pigs at the minute, there'll come a time where you have to sort of have a bit of management, right? Again, we're learning as we go along. So I don't necessarily know the right answer, but I have been, what I've noticed is the natural regeneration is happening at a prodigious rate as you can kind of see as it's breaking out from the hedgerow here, you can see those shoots poking up and at some point in not too distant future, maybe three or four years, I think we're going to have to do something and options include get high level of grazing pressure on here to, to essentially naturally manage it. But then that will potentially adversely affect the rest of the project. So there may be another option is because we're a small project, we're not a net, we're an 80 acre site. Maybe we do bring a little mechanical management in just to scallop out the hedges every five years or so. And that will achieve a similar effect, but without adversely affecting the rest of the ecosystem. Yes. Yeah. I think elephants are off the cards. Aren't they? I've tried. Yeah. Cool. I think it goes up. Oh, what? Going straight in? Yeah. What if it goes up? Yeah. You've got daylight up there. I mean, that's very natural for these trees is they do, they do have a heart rot. I mean, yeah, that tree did have some rot in it, but these trees, they hollow out in the middle. Okay. And it's kind of, I mean, you can interpret it in many ways, but it's also, you know, it's nutrient, which goes back down into the tree. So as the tree ages, the branches come down, they support it, you know, it shuts off the limbs higher up, you know, trees are just really efficient, really efficient beings and the, you know, they're just there to photosynthesize and live as long as they can. So in front of us, you've got a quite dense planting. This is your Miyawaki forest, isn't it? It is. Yeah. So yesterday the Welsh government, um, you know, kindly kind of gave us a grant to put in this Miyawaki forest. And it is again, part of that petri dish of ideas, demonstrating different concepts as so that people can see and take ideas around from this project back to where they live. So if they're living in an urban area, a densely packed Miyawaki forest in a park or whatever might be a really cool idea for them. You've got these, uh, this kind of Island of Bramble, but you also see it in places like Knapp where you have like black thorn and things just like the scrub coming up and it's the ugly habitat, but it's very important. Oh yeah. Look, you've got some trees coming out of this one. And what's fascinating over there is once we get over there, you'll see the brush is moving away from underneath those trees to protect the trees. The trees have grown up and matured and the brush now is pushing further down the hill and just leaving these perfectly protected healthy trees. Yeah. Oh, you got a nice willow there. You want to get willow in everywhere here. That is, that is your pioneer, around your ponds, around like, oh, I mean your, I haven't seen it yet, but your stream looks, looks like it's, uh, it's actually a lot older. There's actually not a lot of willow there. Yeah. No, I was going to say, yeah, it's like, but older is still quite good. It's not as tasty to certain creatures such as beavers. I know. Yeah. Um, but still. So this is again, another example of where the community is, is helping us. So one of our community members, Phil came up with an idea for a small mammal hotel and then just, you know, he just, he just sketched out on a notepad and he, and he worked out. So he, I just thought, well, if you want to try it, let's try it. So it's got different sizes, logs in there starting from very big all the way to very small. They've put a natural, organic, almost waterproof membrane as much as it can be over the top of that. Then we put additional brash over the top of that to make it look more natural. It's just a warm, dry spot to try and promote different kinds of small mammals. It's awesome. And it's the kind of thing you can do anywhere as well. You can do it in your garden and it's going to be valuable. Yeah. This is quite a wild little spot. So you're saying this is an area where in the past it wasn't farmed at all. Yeah, it was just too boggy. So they left it to do its thing. Yeah. And so we had a lot of naturally regenerated older, you know, you can see the kind of the black thorn, hawthorn kind of pushing in. But it's, it's quite, again, a very, very special place for us. Do you know how long this has been left without farming? I don't know exactly. My assumption is around 10, 15 years, maybe. Well, it's kind of a good example of what the rest, some other areas could look like in 15 years. Yeah. So one thing that you've done here with your stream is to, you put in how many of these leaky woody debris? Probably about 30 now, installations. And they're ranging from, as you'll see down here, essentially just putting brash into the flow to stop, to slow the flow. So when we have a high rate, a weather event or rain event, it just backs up naturally and just slows the speed of the water coming off the land. Yeah. Let's go and have a look. Yeah. Let's see what they do. Reasonably graceful. Look at that. Oh, that was not so graceful. Something's burrowing in, in these holes. You know, it could be water voles. It could be a species of vole. Other rodents as well. Literally just as I was saying it, you've got, they call them a latrine. And whether if other rodents do that, I'm not sure, but I do know for sure that water voles do, do leave their poop in piles. So Tom, when that flood came through back in November, how was this stream behaving here? Yeah. I mean, what was really interesting with it from our side was that when we, before we had the installations in, when it rained, it was like a turbine and you could, it was, it's like a train was outside the house. You could just hear the stream running, running past it and really quite rapidly, you know, because understandably the previous people on the land wanted to get the water off the land as quickly as possible so they could keep farming it as much as possible. But now we've put the leaky wood debris on, these 30 installations, and we've let the grass grow and we've done the odd scrape. I couldn't really hear it as much. And as I looked out the window at the stream, it looked busy. It was flowing quite significantly, but it was nothing like it used to be. That's the really interesting thing. When I first moved here, before I knew about leaky wood debris, I was clearing out everything from this stream because I'm just so human. I'm just so human. I want to be able to walk down this with the family without having to step over things. And the more you learn, the more you learn about the importance of just natural debris. We need that mess in our rivers. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. It's a big, it's a big learning process. And we are humans. We are different in that sense. We like stuff to be boxy, neat, tidy. Yeah. I've just met up with Chloe, who is the other half of the team here, and you're going to talk to me about this pond which you dug out. Yeah. So this is all part of our sustainable drainage system, which we put in a couple of years ago. And it was primarily to help us store some of the rainwater. You can see it's got these kind of wiggly swells that we've introduced to help sort of just protect the house from some of the water coming off the fields. But the kind of happy second order effects of the pond is that as soon as we created it, we noticed that we were getting loads of house marten nests under the eaves of the house, which is just over there. And it turns out that the mud that we basically created by digging the pond is the perfect source of kind of building materials for the house martens to then create their nests. So it was amazing. We had 11 nests under the eaves last summer, and you can just see them the whole summer going from the house to the pond, pond to the house, using the material from the pond. You do have, you've got two wonderful pigs who we've met. Yes. And you've also got six sheep. What kind of sheep are these? So they're castle milk morret sheep, which is like a conservation breed. So they're not like a commercial breed of sheep. They're more sort of designed to, well, I guess, interact in a more sustainable way with the landscape. So they, as well as grazing, they also browse. So they eat like the hedges and they're not as kind of fussy, for want of a better word, as like more commercial breeds of sheep. And then we also only got six. So they're very low density compared to what you'd have on like a sheep farm. But they're a bit of an experiment, like everything here. It's like we're testing out. We're not quite sure what the effects will be. They probably won't be here when the wildflowers come, because we know that sheep have a penchance for wildflower buffets, and we'll just see how they go. But it's, they really, they look like the sort of sheep that should belong on a rewilding project, I reckon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can see that. These mounds are basically the spoil that came out of the pond. So it's, again, a kind of happy effect of the pond creation is that this kind of created some quite cool habitat where we see hares sometimes hiding in amongst them. You see kestrels hovering over them. They make a really good habitat for small mammals. And actually, they're also, well, the title is invertebrate mounds or beetle banks. They're great. They're a great kind of place for invertebrates to like hover or land on them to keep them warm in the, because they're south facing a lot of them. And it's just a different structure, isn't it, compared to an open field? Yeah, it makes it feel really different. Like it defields it, I think. Yeah, that's what you want to be doing. Ponds and then, yeah, and banking them. I mean, you might get something, you might get some birds in the bank here. I hope so. We put some willow there to try and stabilise the bank a bit because we're having an issue. Obviously, as soon as you expose soil, the water rushes down and then the soil then sort of leeches down into the pond. So we're trying to do some planting to kind of stabilise it a bit better. And like ponds are a bit of a, you know, everyone has an image, I guess, of like this beautiful crystal clear water. And we're definitely on a journey towards that. But we haven't done any specific planting because we're kind of interested to see what would come up naturally. And again, it's all an experiment. Yeah. Yeah. Just wait and see. Yeah. Ponds never look good when they're young, so to speak. It's going to mature. So we're approaching an area which you call the market garden. What does this serve for you as a family here? Are you able to feed yourselves? And also, from what I understand, the groups which you have come here, are you able to feed them from this area as well? Yeah. So a really important pillar of the project for us was trying to, I guess, demonstrate that you can produce food in harmony with nature while still allowing a lot of space for nature with the rewilding. So we put in this market garden, which is about two thirds of an acre. And I don't know, research suggests that you could produce 15 times more edible calories per acre in a market garden in comparison to what our previous kind of farmless role was, which was producing silage for beef cattle. So. Yeah. So you're already way ahead in terms of the production. Yeah. Per acre. Per acre. Yeah. Yeah. And we haven't quite got an 80 acre market garden. That's what I meant. Yeah. Yeah. But that would be the challenge, really, because. Well, do you want to scale this? Do you want to do more? Well. Because you need people, right? It's really labour intensive. It's a really lovely process growing and we're really lucky that we were able to start from scratch, really. We designed with permaculture principles in mind. So you'll see things like we've got agroforestry in between each bed and then the trees play a really important role in terms of providing shade in the summer for the plants that are growing and then warmth in the winter when they're a bit more established. And we also have polyculture planting. So you'll see in each bed there's like a huge diversity of different plants growing. And the idea is, again, it confuses the pests. It means you've got different nutrients being taken out of the soil and different things kind of contributing. It's more mimicking a natural system with the permaculture stuff and we use a lot of mulch. So we use both fleece and straw to help really protect the soil. Because again, in nature, you don't really get bare soil. Something comes and colonises it. So we're trying to replicate that. And we're thinking a lot about soil health and experimenting with our own compost and things like biochar and labs, which is like this kind of basically making like potions to help feed the microbes across the soil, which play a really important job. And yeah, the whole, I guess the intention of the garden is it mostly it feeds all the guests that come to the project. So whether we've got volunteers here or whether it's a community day or our corporate away days, they all get fed as much as possible from the garden. It's sort of learning about seasonality and that. And we're so kind of divorced from that now. We go to the supermarket and you get tomatoes any time of year. You get cabbage any time of year. And I guess for us, we're trying to more mimic what natural systems are possible. So you're doing lots of things, lots of experiments. But at the heart of this, you're just saying is the charity which you've started, right? Yeah. So that's, we always knew we wanted to do something that engaged people here beyond just the kind of physical changes to the landscape. And because of my background as a clinical psychologist, I was always interested in how we can also address some of the other challenges we've got beyond the biodiversity crisis. So obviously we've got the mental health crisis, we've got social inequality as a crisis, and people are generally quite unhappy in our culture and society. And I was interested about how we can create a movement to change that. And I've been doing some research around this concept of nature connection, which is essentially our emotional relationship that we have with nature. And if you can help people improve that relationship, then you get really amazing benefits for their well-being, which is obviously really important because a lot of us are quite sad and anxious at the moment. But secondly, it really promotes pro-environmental behaviour, which is obviously really necessary and needed given we're in the biodiversity crisis we're in. And it also creates a sense of belonging and community, which I think is something we're really missing as a society at the moment. So the charity is called Wilder Connections. It focuses on addressing this phenomenon known as the adolescent dip, which is essentially when young people get to about 11 or 12, they start to lose their innate connection with nature and it doesn't come back until they're about 30. And obviously during that phase of life, you're making a lot of decisions about what job you want to do, your values, your habits. So what we're trying to do here is co-design some immersive nature connection programmes with young people that help promote nature connection in that particular demographic, so in the adolescent age. So we're looking at things like bushcraft, foraging, creative outlets, growing food and ecology, also kind of understanding nature and whether those can be routes to help promote nature connection. So that's my research focus at the university. And that's what we're piloting this summer. We're getting some young people here and then hopefully telling their stories through some research to help really kind of maximise the impact of the kind of physical stuff that's happening on the ground. Yeah, sounds really cool. And that's something that I've noticed. Yeah, you say kind of 11 to 30. Yeah, yeah. I see that in my friends because I've only just turned 30, so a lot of my friends are now going for walks, maybe because they've had kids and it's the thing to do. I think it makes a big difference, you start to see the world through your children's eyes and that helps promote that sense of kind of connection and wonder of nature. So you're really trying to build like a like a sense of community here, right? Is this is this with the businesses local or? Well, yeah, absolutely. We're just looking at we've got some amazing barns on the site here and before they were going to be used for quite a lot of livestock. And obviously we reduced the amount of livestock on the land now. So we've got some amazing barns that just have so much utility. If we look at it from an ecopreneur perspective, what kind of sustainable businesses can we bring onto the site, which A, can bring employment to local area, but B, how can we build a community where everybody self-promotes and promotes each other's businesses, where we all help each other to thrive and share knowledge and expertise? That sounds good to me. We also run the Wilder Away Days, which is a corporate away days here. Again, all part of that working out how we fund nature restoration on this site, but also how do we get that subtle influence? We bring them out onto site because we've got an amazing facility here in the Grange Hub, but they're now in Wilder Nature, exactly where we want them. So we can hopefully passively influence them in a positive way. You know, I know that people will come who are already interested in the environment, ecology and re-wilding, they'll come anyway. It doesn't matter if we have the space or not. But it's like, right, well, how do we get people further out from the echo chamber? And it's like, well, we've got to give them somewhere comfy to kind of base themselves. So they know that despite the go and get wet and muddy and have fun, they can always come back, reset. They can joke and have a laugh about it somewhere where they just feel comfortable. And I just hope that will inspire more people to come and then more people come. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. If you'd like to find out more about the Grange project, just head to the links in the description. And thanks again to Surfshark for sponsoring this video. Be sure to use the link to get yourself a VPN and a solid discount. On screen now is the Leave Curious Patreon and a video for you to watch next. But in the meantime, thank you so much for watching Leave Curious.