Conservation Manager at Holkham in Norfolk Jake Fiennes has ambition to bring back flora and fauna by reclaiming traditions and trialling new experiments.
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.
A well written book full of history and vision, you can't help be in awe at Fiennes enthusiasm.
A book I would highly recommend.
My thanks go to the author, publisher and Netgalley for providing the arc in return for a honest review.

An interesting and thought provoking read on farming and it's future in Britain. Jake Fiennes is an engaging writer.
5 Stars.

Land Healer is a book which should have ticked the boxes for me. Many of the non-fiction books I read are about Rewilding, Ecology and Conservation. It is a subject I am very passionate about and I enjoy fuelling that passion with ideas and knowledge.

Unfortunately however Jake Fiennes’ book just didn’t hit the spot for me. The mix of biography, history, facts and figures and descriptive narratives somehow feel slightly arrogant and very disjointed.

The book feels rushed; Holkham about which the majority of the book is written is the Estate Fiennes has been managing for just 3 years. Therefore although the numbers look encouraging I feel it is impossible to put down any increase in bird and wildlife numbers down solely to his ‘Land Healing’ over this time as on any given year numbers will fluctuate wildly depending on weather, predator/prey cycles and other changes in land use both locally and anywhere along migratory routes. It also sounds as if the Estate was already improving before his arrival on the scene.

Also considering the book title the subject of soil health seemed to be somewhat neglected ; and in fact at one point it is suggested that in order to allow space for nature we actually need to make farming even more efficient using chemicals or whatever other means necessary-without addressing how this can be done without further depleting soils and polluting water courses with run off of fertilisers etc. The narratives show a passion for his subject, but are in themselves disjointed and in places contradictory and difficult to follow. In all his title of ‘Land healer’ seems premature and conceited.

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.

Hopefully as well as continuing to make positive changes on the Holkham Estate, by writing of his experiences, Fiennes will encourage others to take time, tune in and look a bit more closely at those less ‘productive’ pockets of land so that they too may understand where there true value lies.

Jake is the Head of Conservation at the Holkham Estate in Norfolk. 25,000 acres of farming land, which he has been tweaking to make more nature friendly (his message throughout this book seems to be small changes can make big differences). This is still very much farmed land, and Jake is a land manager but by managing unproductive farm land in a different way he is bringing back nature. Farmers are not the problem he tells us, they are part of the solution. He does, however, want to end ‘the Taliban style’ of farming which kills off everything not wanted and move to a system that sees wildlife as other farm outputs, it needs to be grown efficiently and with direction.

This book sings when he talks about the wildlife on the farm; the pink footed geese which he rejoices in, the lapwings which are thriving, the hares bounding around the field and the many other species that thrive under his stewardship.

Also, dispersed throughout the books are chapters on his childhood, as one of six children, in a family that was posh but pennyless with frequent moves, a long stay in hospital and a schooling made difficult by his severe dyslexia. The children seemed to have thrived though with many of his siblings going on to have similarly successful careers (the actors Ralph and Joseph are his brothers).

This is the type of hopeful book we need at a time when the world can seem like a pretty bleak place. I am hugely looking forward to visiting Holkham myself next month and have high hopes of seeing lots of wildlife.

I've been reading a lot of nature writing/rewilding books and was most interested in this one as it was set in Norfolk in an area I am very familiar with.

Fiennes and the estate he works for are decisive figures here and this book did nothing to heal that, some of the topics covered were interesting but it all just felt a bit too smug and self congratulating, and the fact that people have to live and work in the same area as him seemed to be overlooked too much.

This is such a brilliant book! I may be biased because I am very much into the concept of rewilding but this book discusses the author's experiences working with nature and it is very much a passionate plea for us to reconnect with nature in order to increase biodiversity. And who knew that he is the brother of Joseph and Ralph Fiennes! His biography element is also really interesting. I have highlighted many chunks of text and wouldn't be surprised to see this book on the Wainwright list next year.

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).

Today though perhaps the most influential part of the Estate, which builds on Coke’s legacy, is the pioneering work (and associated campaigning) that the estate, under Fiennes leadership, is doing to practice and promote a new form of farming which actively encourages restoration of habitats (particularly wetlands, grazing meadows and hedgerows) and which sets out to create a symbiotic diversity of plants, insects and birdlife.

As the book makes clear, and alongside Fiennes friendship with Isabella Tree (who blurbs the book) this is very much not rewilding. Fiennes is still very much focused on profitable and productive arable and pastoral farming – in fact he both sees some of the practices as increasing the productivity of the land, and in other cases argues that most of the benefits are best achieved by using parcels of land which are anyway impractical or unproductive to farm (for example odd corners of fields or low quality land which in itself often allows grasses to flourish which are otherwise outcompeted). He also, particularly as a long time gamekeeper, is passionate about the role that game raring (very much not the artificial import of fledging birds from abroad) can play in his vision.

The concept is a very interesting one – the execution of the book though unfortunately falls a little short of it. The book really comes to life when Fiennes either talks about his own journey and farming experiences and even more so in the often lyrical passages where he describes days on the land through the year. Too much of the rest of the book though is occupied by a blizzard of facts and statistics which, even for me as a mathematician and statistican lost interest as he does not really assemble a coherent story about them – but (if I can be forgiven a gamekeeper pun) has something of a scattergun approach. And similarly sections on various aspects of agricultural policy and law, while clearly vital to the country’s future agriculture and the likelihood of other farmers adopting his approaches, again failed to cohere, at least for me.

So mixed feelings overall, although a book I am glad I read.

I'm not sure this book has worked out what it's meant to be. It seems to be aimed mostly at policymakers, and farmers to a slightly lesser degree - for everyone else, there are a few soaring moments like the natterjack toads, but that's sort of it.

'Land Healer' is very short, especially if you discount the passages where Fiennes recounts his early family life and how he eventually ended up in conservation and farming. In the sections aimed at policymakers, he channels Dieter Helm, absolutely packing the paragraphs with statistics including the dreaded "natural capital" ones (which seem to have had zero influence on policymakers over the many years that campaigners have experimented with them).

Readers of nature-writing are probably going to be left dissatisfied. As I mentioned, the book has a few beautiful and fascinating bits, but there were simply not enough of them to carry the narrative. I was left feeling empty in other ways too - Fiennes has a very narrow focus, and I can't help wondering how much better the book would have been if he'd gone around the country speaking to farmers working with different climates and ecosystems. I'm also astonished at how little mention of climate change there was - surely any book about the future of farming needs to address how this can be navigated?

I've given three stars because the book is earnest and contains many important points. But it didn't deliver, for me.