Diversify your income and restore nature

An interview with Wild Ken Hill landowner

Dominic Buscall, co-owner and manager of Wild Ken Hill, was looking to explore Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) as a new land diversification option for the estate.

Wild Ken Hill is a 4000-acre nature and sustainable farming project on the coast of west Norfolk that’s featured in programmes such as the BBC’s Springwatch.

Since 2022, Environment Bank’s ecologists have been working with Dominic and the team at Wild Ken Hill, creating a BNG Habitat Bank across an almost fifty-acre parcel of low-biodiversity farmland.

Since going live, Heacham Habitat Bank has been added to Natural England’s biodiversity gain sites register and Biodiversity Units from this Habitat Bank are ready for developers to purchase from Environment Bank.

What made you consider a BNG Habitat Bank for your land?

“For me, it’s about diversification and nature conservation. There’s an evolving funding landscape and we are trying to take advantage of those new opportunities.

At Wild Ken Hill, we have a project to restore nature, fight climate change, and engage people about the natural world and farming. We do that through three land use techniques: rewilding, traditional conservation, and farming an area of land regeneratively.

Historically, we’d work with the UK Government on relatively short cycles of five-to-ten-year deals through Countryside Stewardship, but I was interested in diversifying into other private income streams.”

Why did you choose to partner with Environment Bank?

“We were farming here unprofitably until we went into partnership with Environment Bank. We chose this parcel in particular because it’s some of our worst farmland.

We’re finding that the income stream that we can get through this partnership is significantly superior to our arable farming on the marginal land, which we have quite a lot of here, and it’s a known funding source over three decades.”

What have been the benefits of your BNG Habitat Bank?

“We know that we’ve doubled the plant diversity in the last three years, and that’s just one statistic – there is a plethora of evidence to show that what we’re doing on the ground is really working for nature.

Our farm has turned Net Zero and we’re also now providing a range of benefits to the local community – so lots of permissive access but also new jobs and volunteering opportunities. We do free school visits, and we work with our local mental health charity to bring their clients onto the site to benefit from spending time in nature.”

What advice would you give to others considering BNG?

“The project we’re doing with Environment Bank on Biodiversity Net Gain is exciting to me. What we’re showing is that – whether it’s through public or private funding – we can make fantastic changes to the landscape.”