It must be frustrating for Jake Fiennes that reviews of his book will, as this one does, inevitably start with mention of his more celebrated siblings. Jacob Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes is one of six children – his older brother is the actor Ralph and his twin brother is Joseph. A more relevant familial connection might be made with his cousin, the writer William Fiennes. Jake shares with the author of The Snow Geese and The Music Room an almost preternatural ability to summon nature on the page, to interweave human and animal life in a landscape with elegance and compassion. Land Healer is a deeply felt, often very moving book about farming; it is also a celebration of the British landscape and a record of Fiennes’s strange, itinerant life.
I first came across him a decade ago, while researching a piece for the Guardian’s Country Diary. He was at the time a gamekeeper known for his radical ideas about ecology and biodiversity. Since then, he has become conservation manager at the vast and beautiful Holkham estate in north Norfolk, where his ideas about sustainable agriculture and landscape management have been put into practice on a massive scale.
Like Wilding, Isabella Tree’s bestselling book about turning the Knepp estate in Sussex (where Fiennes himself worked) from an overfarmed wasteland into an environment rich in biodiversity, Land Healer is at its core a plea to farmers and policymakers to embrace practices that encourage the return of nature to our countryside. Tree’s book had an extraordinary impact on a local and national level, from community rewilding projects to the recently announced government plans to rewild 741,000 acres of habitat in England. Land Healer, which is both practical and ambitious in spirit, could make an equally significant mark on the national conversation about agriculture.
The book intercuts persuasive passages extolling the virtues of what Fiennes calls “regenerative farming” with more personal chapters telling of his childhood in a family that was posh but near-penniless, moving from home to home as his parents sought to make money from restoring crumbling houses. Fiennes was a sickly child, profoundly dyslexic and rather in the shadow of his more luminous twin. It was in nature that he found himself, first at home and then, after a brief foray into the nightclub scene, at Knepp and Raveningham, where he became gamekeeper. At the heart of Land Healer sits Great Farm, a mixed agricultural plot on the Holkham estate. This is where Fiennes’s vision has been implemented most fully and where, already – he only arrived at Holkham in 2018 – his work is bearing fruit.
The “small tweaks” Fiennes recommends as part of the mantra of regenerative farming are not on their own immediately thrilling – letting hedges grow out, not ploughing to the edge of a field, disturbing the soil as little as possible, using “cover crops” in winter. In combination, though, they are revolutionary, because they can start to reverse the terrible damage done to the countryside by industrial agriculture. Farmers are not the problem here, Fiennes tells us again and again, they are part of the solution. What he wants is a wholesale change from “Taliban-style farming”, which “kills everything that it doesn’t want”, to farming that embraces the idea that “wildlife is just like the other products on the farm: it needs to be ‘grown’ efficiently and with direction”. In this hopeful, intelligent, important book, Fiennes shows that, if approached correctly, wildlife-friendly farming can deliver a rural landscape that is both more biodiverse, more beautiful and more productive.
Land Healer: How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside by Jake Fiennes is published by Ebury (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
