For those people who want to rid the land of livestock, I would recommend getting on a plane. 

Earlier this year, I lucked out with a window seat on a flight to Turkey.

As we flew out of Manchester, I marvelled at the wiggling patchwork of hedges and ponds, and of the diversity of landscape diversity below me.

See also: Alasdair Boden – ‘accidental’ farmers bring fresh ideas

About the author

Alasdair Boden

Having been brought up in Kendal, Alasdair Boden returned to the Lake District in 2019 when he and his wife, Heather, bought a holiday cottage business. The 37-year-old describes himself as an “accidental farmer’ having later acquired the 40ha historically connected to the enterprise.

An hour later, the plane was over Holland, where the land was a vast wasteland of right-angled fields with differing shades of well-worn browns.

Is this what those same people want? 

So, I just wanted to say well done. Forget the loud social media, forget the government and forget The Guardian.

Compared to so many countries around the world, we are doing an incredible job to preserve, repair and build on the environmental work done so far.  

My concern, though, is the balancing act. The mountains of the Lake District have been stripped of sheep to encourage more flora.

To break even, farmers are instead grazing the lower valley fields and the ones on the edge of the Lake District with a greater intensity.

The very tops of the mountains might one day be a floral meadow – however, the fields below will be biologically dead. 

But this brings me back to the likes of Holland and my flight.

What the government is doing in the UK is disincentivising food production and, instead, importing food from faraway countries – with some having questionable environmental, let alone animal welfare, policies.

The answer? Go back to the balance.  

We can’t turn the entire country into a Knepp Estate. But we can do more with hedges and edges.

In general, we’re not doing a bad job. The view from my flight was encouraging.

Every so often we hear of entire estates being planted with non-native trees, over historic wildflower meadows – and, conversely, of those that follow the yield and go full tilt posing a danger to the biology of the land.

But Britain is a bastion of farming. We should, at the very least, be proud of that.