The palette of land management skills extends beyond shades of green. Broad strokes of business acumen, scientific expertise and collaborative effort are essential for an accurate portrayal. Joshua Davis brings this vision to life.
England, and indeed, the UK, has ambitious plans to restore nature. Yet, there is a problem hiding beneath the targets, funding schemes, and maps of proposed local nature recovery networks.
We are asking people to manage land in fundamentally different ways without having built the knowledge, skills, and competencies that would enable them to do so. There is a danger, however, in framing this simply as a “green skills” challenge. Innovation is not a standardised technical upgrade to be directed from Westminster: what is viable in an upland farm in Cumbria may make little sense on the flat expanses of Lincolnshire; or the rolling landscapes of South Wales.
Restoring ecological systems therefore requires farmers, foresters, conservationists, advisers, businesses, communities and government agencies to work together across whole landscapes.
Nature recovery increasingly means working beyond the individual field, farm or nature reserve. Rivers flow across ownership boundaries. Wildlife moves between habitats. Carbon, water, soils, food production, and livelihoods interact. Restoring ecological systems therefore requires farmers, foresters, conservationists, advisers, businesses, communities and government agencies to work together across whole landscapes. That requires more than teaching farmers and land managers additional environmental techniques.
My doctoral research suggests we need to rethink what we mean by land-based skills altogether. This particular study presents findings from 25 semi-structured interviews with key actors, including farmers, land managers, and broader intermediaries (delivery partners, bridging organisations, and extension/advisory services) across England and Wales. It asks: (1) What transformative (high-level) and instrumental (functional) skills underpin landscape-scale nature recovery? and (2) how are these skills acquired and developed in practice?
The capabilities required fall broadly into five connected areas: systems thinking; lifelong learning; collaboration; entrepreneurship; and the ability to combine different forms of technical and practical knowledge. The problem is that the institutions supporting land management remain poorly configured to develop them.
Nature doesn’t recognise the farm boundary
For much of the last century, land management expertise has been divided and siloed.
Agronomists advise on crops. Foresters manage trees. Ecologists study habitats and species. Farm business advisers concentrate on yield and profitability. Government schemes fund particular interventions. Nature refuses to behave so conveniently.
Managing soil differently can affect water quality downstream. Planting trees alters habitats, carbon storage, flood flows and agricultural production. Changing grazing affects vegetation, wildlife and farm economics. One interviewee simply put: “you can’t squeeze nature into a five-metre strip.”
Landscape-scale nature recovery requires people who can see relationships rather than isolated components. In the research, 96% of participants raised complexity and problem-solving, 92% discussed navigating trade-offs and priorities, and 84 per cent referred to recognising interdependencies.
This is systems thinking in-situ. Yet, it does not mean finding a theoretical solution that optimises everything.
You cannot train once for a 40-year career.
There will be conflicts. Producing food, restoring biodiversity, managing water and storing carbon cannot always be maximised simultaneously. What matters is developing the ability to understand those interactions and make intelligent decisions in particular places.
And place matters enormously. A technique that succeeds on one farm may fail on another because the soil, hydrology, ecology, business model or neighbouring land uses are different.
The new land manager therefore needs to continually interpret a changing landscape: one they are often uniquely placed to understand and act within.
You cannot train once for a 40-year career. According to one interviewee: “We all need to keep on learning as we go: because there’s new knowledge, new circumstances, new contexts. They always say [that] you can tell the age of someone by looking at the bookcase behind them…”
That has profound implications for education.
The traditional model assumes people obtain qualifications, enter an occupation, and periodically update their technical knowledge.
Nature recovery demands something more fluid.
Knowledge is changing rapidly. Climate conditions are changing. Environmental markets are emerging. Technologies are developing. Agricultural policies are being rewritten. And, useful knowledge is generated through experimentation on the land and through conversation, rather than solely in classrooms.
Farmers repeatedly learn from other farmers. The interviews highlighted the importance of formal qualifications, but equally of self-curated learning journeys: of peer networks, practical experience, farmer-led trials and communities of practice.
At the same time, access to these opportunities is highly unequal. Those already connected to networks can discover new projects, advice and funding, while others struggle even to know where to begin. Digitalisation can deepen this divide rather than eliminate it.
Restoring a river catchment, creating connected habitats mosaics, or reducing flood risk across a landscape requires cooperation.
So we need an education system that recognises lifelong- and life-wide learning. Colleges and universities remain important, but qualifications cannot be the whole infrastructure. Regional demonstration projects, advisory services, farmer clusters, mentoring and peer-to-peer learning need to become part of the skills system; rather than peripheral additions to it.
Collaboration and partnership building
Perhaps the biggest change is that environmental land management is becoming a collective endeavour.
An individual farmer can improve a hedge or manage a field margin. Restoring a river catchment, creating connected habitats mosaics, or reducing flood risk across a landscape requires cooperation.
As one participant told me, “Landscapes aren’t competitive: they’re collaborative.”
Sounds obvious but, in practice, it is far more difficult.
Landowners have different businesses, objectives, histories, and attitudes to risk. Environmental organisations possess different professional cultures. Government agencies arrive with their own programmes and accountability requirements. Communities may have priorities of their own that differ from all of them.
Someone has to build trust between these actors, manage disagreements, and help them make collective decisions. Yet facilitation is still often regarded as an incidental soft skill rather than a core land-management capability.
Participants repeatedly stressed that effective advisory practice combined technical expertise with the ability to build trusted, sustained relationships. Farmers were particularly likely to trust other farmers, making peer networks powerful mechanisms for spreading new practices. Farmer clusters were seen as potentially transformative precisely because they created spaces in which knowledge could circulate through relationships rather than simply being transmitted downwards by experts.
If landscape recovery depends upon cooperation, then the people capable of convening and sustaining that cooperation are part of its essential infrastructure.
Nature means business
There is an ever-present, uncomfortable economic reality: farmers run businesses.
Nature recovery will not happen at scale if environmental policy simply piles additional responsibilities onto businesses already operating under financial pressure.
One interviewee captured the constraint perfectly: “you can’t go green if you’re in the red.”
The future land manager therefore needs agri-entrepreneurship skills as well as ecological ones.
This can involve developing new sources of income from tourism, carbon, biodiversity, water management or other environmental services. It requires budgeting, project management and understanding contracts, markets and risk.
But the government is simultaneously telling farmers to become more entrepreneurial while surrounding environmental activity with a maze of changing schemes, regulations and emerging markets: of “good intentions, [but] perverse outcomes”.
The task is not to replace traditional expertise but to connect different forms of knowledge and apply them in particular places.
Participants described uncertainty around public funding, biodiversity markets, nutrient neutrality and private finance. Landowners may have to make long-term investment decisions while policy operates on short political cycles. Some described the emerging environmental finance landscape as the “wild west”.
This is not simply a skills deficit amongst farmers. It is an institutional deficit. You cannot reasonably demand entrepreneurial behaviour and then make the rules governing investment sufficiently uncertain that sensible entrepreneurs hesitate to participate.
Who counts as an expert?
There is a final implication. Landscape recovery challenges traditional ideas about expertise. Scientific ecological knowledge matters as does agronomy, forestry, hydrology and (increasingly) data analysis and environmental monitoring.
Farmers may possess decades of knowledge about particular soils, fields, animals and weather patterns. Local communities hold knowledge about landscapes that formal professionals may lack. Experienced advisers understand relationships and institutional histories that cannot readily be captured in a training manual.
The task is not to replace traditional expertise but to connect different forms of knowledge and apply them in particular places.
Policy tends to talk about innovation as though it means discovering something new: a novel technique, a new technology. But much of what participants described as innovative involved recovering, recombining or reinterpreting existing knowledge: a grazing pattern remembered from a grandparent’s farm, a hedge-laying technique revived for flood management, a traditional water meadow re-read through a modern hydrological lens. Innovation, in this sense, is a form of re-learning.
As one adviser reflected, “The motivation to learn from others, and from the past: it’s almost thinking fresh by reflecting.” That requires a different knowledge infrastructure.
I describe this as an Agri-Environmental Knowledge and Innovation System (A-EKIS): a knowledge infrastructure capable of connecting farming, ecology, communities, enterprise and governance. It needs to be place-based, collaborative and capable of continual learning.
This may ultimately be the most important lesson from the research.
England does not have a shortage of people possessing the right green qualifications. There is [however] a disconnect between what we are asking people to do, and the way in which we are asking people to do it.
We cannot restore interconnected landscapes through fragmented institutions. Nor can nature recovery simply be delivered to farmers through another scheme. We need people capable of understanding systems, experimenting, building businesses and working with others (and institutions that give them the time, trust and resources to do so).
Otherwise, our ambitions for nature recovery risk remaining where they began: on paper.
This article is based on:
Davis, J. (2026). Cultivating change: Addressing shifts in knowledge and skills required for landscape-scale nature recovery. Ambio.
