CRT staff enjoyed a trip to Wild Ken Hill in West Norfolk on Friday, the current filming location of BBC’s Springwatch.

Estate Director at Wild Ken Hill, Nick Padwick, gave our team a tour of the farm’s productive arable land, where they are introducing the use of regenerative farming techniques.

Nick also showed us the farm’s rewilding project on unproductive arable land. Here they have stopped farming and are allowing the area to rewild through natural processes. 

While we sadly didn’t spot Springwatch presenters Chris Packham or Michaela Strachan, we did meet two of the farm’s other celebrities – their Tamworth pigs. These have free range of the rewilding area along with the farm’s Exmoor ponies and Red Poll cattle, to keep vegetation under control with just the right amount of grazing and foraging.

We also looked around the farm’s beaver enclosure and spotted lots of lovely species around the site, including grey partridge, dragonflies including four-spotted chaser and black-tailed skimmer and a ruby-tailed wasp.

It was an inspiring visit. The field of regenerative agriculture is fast moving, with new ideas cropping up all of the time. It was great to see how much the methods being used on the productive farmland at Wild Ken Hill echo those used by CRT Trustee and Tenant Farmer Tim Scott on our own Lark Rise Farm in Cambridgeshire. We also have plenty of ideas to take back to our desks (and fields).

Thank you, Wild Ken Hill.