Proposing a land swap between farmers and communes, using rules that already exist
Joost Hagedoorn · Rewilding Euskal Herria
Spend enough time in the African wilderness and you lose the ability to see Europe the way you used to. You will see the gap left by centuries of human activity and an ice age before that. Spend enough time in thriving wilderness and you learn to see what is missing.
Europe has been easy on humans. Mild winters and reliable rain. Deep soils and a long growing season. These conditions are so favourable that we converted nearly all of it.
We were not the first to empty it. Ice ages pushed life south, often and relentlessly, and Europe’s mountains run from east to west, so retreating species hit a wall and died against it. In East Asia the ranges run north to south, and the same species simply moved down and came back. That is why a Chinese temperate forest holds several times the tree genera of a European one.
So Europe started poor, and then we farmed it for ten thousand years on top of that. What it looked like before is an open question with many unknowns, and for today’s problems it barely matters. We are not going to recreate the Pleistocene. We need a continent that is healthy, productive and alive.
What rewilding actually means
Rewilding gives space to natural processes rather than to constant human intervention. It replaces mowing, planting, dredging and predator control with a system that increasingly does these things itself.
Grazers mow. Plants and trees do the planting. Dredging is replaced by rivers that are allowed to move, wetlands that appear where water wants to sit, and beavers that build better than we do. Predators are regulated by scarcity and competition rather than by us.
The point is not to remove people. It is to stop paying, forever, for work the land will do for free.
The beaver does more for a valley’s water than any budget we could raise
So why isn’t it happening?
I set up a rewilding initiative in the Basque Country, and I expected the hard part to be ecological.
Most people would call this place wild already. It is green in every direction, steep, wet, forested to the ridgelines. But green is not the same as functioning.
Much of the forest is managed. Much of the grass is farmed. Rivers are dammed. Most large herbivores are livestock.
Wilderness is in the margins here. It is not the main flavour.
Finding landscapes in need of restoration was easy. Finding land we could actually work on is the whole job. Land here is split across hundreds of small holdings. Communal land is committed to grazing rights and forestry contracts. The parcels that matter most ecologically are almost never the parcels anyone is free to offer.
That is not a Basque problem. Across Europe there is no shortage of degraded land in need of repair. Every hectare belongs to someone with a reason to keep it exactly as it is. Which means the question is not where Europe should be rewilded. It is what would make it worthwhile for someone to take part.
The hillside
First, one thing you need to know about how European farming works.
A large part of a farmer’s income does not come from selling anything. It comes from the Common Agricultural Policy, the EU’s farm support system and the single biggest item in its budget, at around a third of all European spending. Most of that money is paid per hectare. Not per tonne of food, not per animal sold. Per hectare of land held in agricultural use.
Picture a farmer with a steep hillside at the back of his land. Bracken and gorse. It grows almost nothing he can sell. He does not go up there much.
But as long as it stays registered as farmland, it earns him a payment. So he keeps it registered and does the minimum to keep it that way. Occasional mowing, maybe burning, a few animals brought up for a while. It is not really farming. It is paperwork with a view.
Land like this is everywhere in Europe. The steepest, thinnest, wettest, stoniest ground, held nominally in production because abandonment would end the payment attached to it. The European Commission’s own modelling puts around eleven percent of EU farmland at high risk of abandonment, and expects 5.6 million hectares to go out of use by 2030.
Most of it has not gone yet. The payment is worth more than the effort of keeping it, so the farmer keeps it, and the hillside stays in the register while nothing much happens on it.
And this is where every well-meaning proposal dies. If he lets that hillside go, the land no longer qualifies and the payment ends. The offer we have been making is: give up real money, and receive nothing in return. Of course he says no.
Such a farmer is not an obstacle to nature restoration. We built this system ourselves. He is not weighing nature against food. He is weighing a payment against nothing.
Gorse on a Basque hillside
The trade
Now look at the other side of the valley.
The commune owns land too. Around here a great deal of it, held collectively for centuries. And in many places nobody grazes it enough anymore. Young farmers left. Flocks shrank. The hillsides are filling with gorse. Gorse burns. And every summer the commune worries a little bit more.
The trade writes itself. The farmer gains grazing rights on the communal land. A parcel of his own is allowed to become woodland again.
The farmer comes out ahead: better grass, easier ground. The commune comes out ahead: its scrub gets eaten and the fire risk drops, without paying a contractor. The hillside comes out ahead too: it becomes woodland, it holds water instead of shedding it downhill, and the soil starts building again instead of washing away.
No land is bought. Nobody is forced. No new subsidy is needed.
Three rules
Count grass, not hectares.
A hectare of decent commune pasture is worth several hectares of bracken. So the exchange should be priced in feed, not surface. The farmer gives more hectares than he gets back and still ends up with more to eat, which means the commune spends less land than it gains.
Fewer hectares also means less area payment for the farmer, so the arithmetic is his to do. Better grass, easier ground, lower costs, and the support schemes that come with grazing communal land all sit on the other side of it. If it does not add up for him, he does not take the trade.
Both sides can verify the arithmetic with ordinary farming figures, making it a negotiation instead of an argument.
The new land must be CAP-eligible.
This is the rule the whole thing turns on. Remember that the payment follows the hectare, not the harvest. So the communal land he gains has to count under the same rules as the hillside he is releasing. He then claims on the new ground instead of the old, and the support stays with the farm. Without that, he is funding the restoration out of his own income, and we are back to the choice nobody would accept.
Permanent, and attached to the land.
An agreement with one farmer lasts as long as one career. The commitment has to sit on the land itself so it survives sale and inheritance. France already has the instrument: a covenant created by the 2016 biodiversity law that binds successive owners for up to ninety-nine years. Most European countries have an equivalent. Most do not use it.
Better grazing than a gorse and bracken hillside
Somebody has already done this
I should say plainly that I did not invent it. I worked backwards from a problem and found out that ranchers in the American Southwest had got there thirty years earlier.
They call it grassbanking. In the 1990s, ranchers in the New Mexico and Arizona borderlands were in drought and needed to rest their land. They organised themselves as the Malpai Borderlands Group, and a neighbour with a very large ranch made them an offer: put your own land under permanent conservation agreement and graze your cattle on mine while yours recovers. Several accepted the trade, and the exchange was priced in forage, just as above. Versions of it have run across the western United States since.
What happens to the hillside?
Nothing dramatic happens in the first year. Bracken keeps coming up, gorse keeps flowering. But without cutting and burning, the slope starts doing something it hasn’t been allowed to do in a long time.
Brambles come first. Bramble thickets create a nursery. Thorny and thick enough that deer cannot get in, so whatever seed lands inside is protected while it grows. Birds drop seeds. Jays bury acorns and forget where.
In five years there are saplings above the bracken. Birch, willow, hazel, thorn, whatever grows fastest in the soil. By ten years they are tall enough to shade the ground, and that is a turning point, because bracken needs light. As the canopy closes the bracken thins, then goes. Underneath the thorn, slower and steadier, oak is coming.
By twenty years it is a young wood. Not a plantation, so there are gaps where nothing took, wet hollows where willow dominates, dead wood left standing because nobody is clearing it. That messiness is the point. It is what makes room for bats, fungi, beetles that live in rotting wood, and the birds that need dense cover to nest in.
The water changes too. Roots and leaf litter slow the rain instead of letting it run off a bare slope. It soaks in. The stream at the bottom runs lower in winter and longer into summer. If there is water and willow, beaver will find it eventually, and one family of beaver will rearrange a valley more thoroughly than any restoration budget could. Across Europe they are coming back on their own.
Not every hillside should be let go. Some are species-rich precisely because they are open, and those want better grazing, not woodland. The choice has to be made parcel by parcel.
Then the second stage, and this is where it becomes more than just a wood.
One hillside becomes a wood. Twenty hillsides, joined up, become something that needs animals. A closed forest without large grazers turns uniform, and uniform is poor. What made these landscapes rich was never just trees. It was large animals moving through them: opening clearings, browsing back regrowth, trampling paths, wallowing, dunging, killing some saplings and letting others through. Grazing is what keeps a wood from becoming a single wall of trees.
So the animals come back. Not livestock in the productive sense, not counted in lambs sold, but grazers kept at low density and largely left alone to do what they do.
Here in the Basque Country that means Pottok, Betizu, Sasi Ardi. A small hardy pony, a half-wild mountain cattle breed, a bush sheep not productive enough for industry. Each eats differently, which is exactly why you want the diversity. These are Basque animals, shaped by these hills over centuries, and now rare or close to gone. Bringing them back is heritage work and ecological work at the same time. I never quite realised how neatly those two things line up here.
Which is the part I find hopeful. The same work is seen as rewilding by a biologist and as tradition by a farmer, and neither of them is wrong.
Oihan Berria. Bramble and thorn doing the planting
Why it grows
Do this once and you have a slightly bigger wood. Do it once and the next hillside now touches wild ground.
So after this first exchange, the next hillside changes value. Not to the farmer, who still sees the same bracken he saw last year. To everyone deciding where restoration should happen next. Yesterday it was an isolated piece not worth the paperwork. Today it extends an already wild block.
Nature now moves faster. A wood next door is a seed source. Birds bring in berries, acorns are carried in. Fungi are already in the soil at the boundary. Restoration next to a woodland is mostly a matter of standing back. Restoration in the middle of farmland requires planting, which is expensive.
The social aspect matters too. The neighbouring farmer has seen this happen. He knows what the paperwork looked like and whether the grazing was any good. He knows who to ask. The hardest deal in a territory is the first one.
Real growth does not come from doing more deals. Deal by deal, this stays small forever. It comes from changing one rule.
Confirm nationally that a farmer may move his support onto communal grazing land, and that land under a permanent restoration covenant is not held against him. This is an administrative decision, not a new law. It costs nothing. And it applies everywhere at once. Like the first growth in spring, change would appear everywhere simultaneously, not one by one.
After that, nobody needs to broker anything. Every commune with a fire problem and every farmer with a bad hillside already wants what the other has. They do not need to be persuaded. They need permission and a template.
Its success would also be its limit. The covenanted parcels are locked for ninety-nine years. The land around them is not, and that is where the next exchange has to come from. A corridor that works raises the value of its neighbours. A house at the edge of wild woodland is worth more than a house at the edge of a field. A gîte beside a river with beavers in it is easier to fill. The hillside slowly becomes an asset, and the grazing has to outbid that.
Which means this works best before it is famous. That is an argument for moving now, while the land is still cheap and half of Europe’s farmers are approaching retirement, and land is changing hands anyway.
Where this came from
This didn’t arrive as a theory. It came from being stuck.
Our project, Oihan Berria, covers ten communes and around ten thousand hectares of the Basque interior, just behind the coast. We spent months in maps and in the field, and the more clearly we could see what needed doing, the more obvious it became that seeing it was never the problem.
Then we noticed that roughly a third of that territory is already publicly owned. Owned by the communes, sitting in a landscape where private land is almost impossible to assemble. We had been asking how to get access to land. The better question was what we already had, and how to leverage it.
That is the thing worth taking from all of this. Public land is not just land. It is the only piece on the board anyone can still move, and moving it unfreezes private land around it.
This is not about nature for its beauty, but for its function. These hills carry more fuel than they used to. Rain runs off bare slopes and takes soil with it. Villages flood in winter and the same water is missing in August. Pollinators live in the margins we keep clearing. The farms are ageing and disappearing, and a closed farm means fewer animals on that hill, which makes all of it worse.
These are not separate problems with separate budgets. This is what a landscape does when you take its structure out. Put some of the structure back and the same land holds water, holds soil, carries less fire, feeds more species and still produces food. That is what rewilding is for. For a landscape that functions, and that we do not have to keep paying to hold together.
And beyond all that, there is the simplest reason, which does not need an economic case. We share this place. Other species have a claim.
Oihan Berria. Ten communes in the Basque interior, just behind the coast
Why this year
There is a deadline almost nobody outside the sector has noticed.
Under the EU’s nature restoration law, every member state must hand Brussels a draft national restoration plan this September, with the final version due a year later. The targets are binding. Restoration measures on a fifth of the Union’s land and sea by 2030, and on all ecosystems that need them by 2050.
Those plans are being written right now by people with legal obligations, thin budgets, and no good answer to the question of where the land comes from. Buying it is unaffordable. Regulating it away starts a fight the agricultural sector has already shown it wins.
This is a third option. It gets land without purchase, and it treats farmers as counterparties rather than opponents.
Two authors
It needs three things: marginal land held in production for the payment, public grazing land going underused, and a legal way to make the exchange permanent. Where these line up, in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Greece, Romania and most of the mountain periphery, there is a lot of land in play. Where they do not, it will not help. In the Netherlands, Denmark and much of Germany there is barely any public farmland, land is far too expensive, and what is degrading the habitats is nitrogen falling out of the sky. No land swap fixes that.
It is one piece of a puzzle. Rivers still need their barriers removed, and there are close to one million of them in Europe, most of them obsolete. Farmland still needs to stop leaking nitrogen into everything downwind and downstream. Neither of those is a land problems and no trade can solve them.
Europe was emptied by ice and by humans. The second was not a decision anybody took. It is a design flaw. A bug in the system. We have put in place laws, subsidies, ownership structures, budgets, planning, lobbies and policies, and the result is a dysfunctional landscape. People want more nature and future generations deserve functioning ecosystem services.
What is missing is a path within the current system that does not require starting a fight nobody will win. This might be one. No new money, no new law, nothing that hurts farmers. Public land, existing rules, and starting where the land is worth the least and restoration gains the most.
We are going to try it here in the Basque Country. If it works, it is for all of us.
