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| | | From Shetland to the Scilly Isles, Open Country travels the UK in search of the stories, the people and the wildlife that make our countryside such a vibrant place. Each week we visit a new area to hear how local people are growing the crops, protecting the environment, maintaining the traditions and cooking the food that makes their corner of rural Britain unique.
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|  | | Blackwater Estuary | |
Helen Mark travels to coastal Essex to meet wildlife experts who're giving farmland back to the sea; an academic with a passion for the mud and open skies; his father, a renowned landscape painter; a farmer with a down-to-earth approach to managing the land he and his family worked for more than half a century; and a man called Bird who knows his estuary and the oyster beds better than the creatures who inhabit them.
Helen begins at Abbotts Hall Farm, where the sea wall has been punctured and many acres of arable farmland given back to the sea to create salt marshes. John Hall, of the Essex Wildlife Trust calls them "England's rainforest". Essex Wildlife Trust
Not everyone is happy about this, in particular the people who farm the world-famous Colchester oysters in the creeks that run between the main estuary and the sea walls. Alan Bird is an oysterman on the Blackwater Estuary with a lyrical turn of phrase and innate understanding of how water, land, weather and wildlife work together. He says he couldn't bear it if his life's work was ruined by the experiment.
Blackwater Project
Jules Pretty, Professor of Environment and Society, Essex University, has a vision of the way the world should feed itself. He tells Helen what the mudflats, marshes and big skies of this part of the world mean to him, how they affect the way he views the world, and how he thinks people connect with their physical surroundings. His father John R Pretty is a professional watercolour painter, specialising in marine and landscapes of East Anglia and Northern France. He likes to lose himself in the landscape when he's painting and Jules has used several of his pictures in his new book.
Jules Pretty
John R Pretty
Jules Pretty's vision has been forged by study and experience of farming and land-use all over the world. But how practical is it in his home county in the 21st century? Helen takes him to a 1,300-acre arable farm inland to meet the farmer Jim Strathern, who took over from his parents in 1968 and has lived through the boom and bust years of the European Common Agricultural Policy. They discuss some of the practicalities of using this land to produce food, without abusing it to do so.
Additional information
Jules Pretty
Agri-Culture, Reconnecting People, Land and Nature
Earthscan
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Z to Z Britain
Open Country looks back 2003
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