Sponsorship, not a stake in the land.
Around forty acres here will never be farmed again, and the work on it costs money without producing anything sellable. Sponsorship pays for that work. It buys no interest in the land, no vote and no return, and the reason for that is the same reason everything else in Plotting is shaped the way it is.
What forty acres of doing less actually costs.
Rewilding sounds like an absence of work and is not. Scrub has to be allowed to develop but not allowed to close over the whole area. Fencing has to be maintained. Non-native invasives have to be pulled. Grazing has to be managed at a low density, which means animals, which means water, handling and somebody checking them.
And then it has to be surveyed, or nobody can say whether any of it worked. Botanical transects, breeding bird surveys, invertebrate sampling, and a fixed-point photography programme. Surveys are the expensive part and the first thing to be cut, which is why so many rewilding claims are anecdotes.
Sponsorship funds the surveys first and the fencing second. That ordering is deliberate and it is stated here because it is not what most sponsors expect.
Three levels, and what each of them actually pays for.
Annual, cancellable, and with no automatic renewal.
A metre of scrub margin
£12 a year
The smallest honest unit, and the one most people start with.
- Named on the sponsor board at the gate
- The annual survey summary
- One fixed-point photograph a year
- No return, no stake, no vote
A tenth of an acre
£95 a year
Enough to pay for a share of the survey work rather than only the fencing.
- Everything above
- The full survey data, not the summary
- Two places on the annual walk over the ground
- Named in the survey report
An acre
£850 a year
Roughly what an acre of this actually costs to manage and monitor for a year.
- Everything above
- The acre named, mapped and photographed each season
- A conversation with whoever did the surveying
- Still no stake in the land whatsoever
Why it is not a land trust, and why it might be one day.
The obvious structure for this is a trust or a community benefit society that owns the land and issues withdrawable shares to members. Several of the best-known rewilding projects in Britain are structured roughly that way, and it works.
It also involves an entirely different legal machine: a registered society under the Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies Act 2014, a community share offer, an asset lock, a board with statutory duties, and share capital that is genuinely at risk. That is a serious undertaking and not something to bolt onto a farm shop website.
So this is sponsorship, which is a donation with a report attached. If the land ever moves into a trust structure, that will be a proper share offer with proper documentation, and it will say unambiguously that capital is at risk.
Where the sponsorship money goes.
| What | Share of the money | Why it is that high or low |
|---|---|---|
| Surveys and monitoring | 44% | The first thing everybody cuts, so it is funded first here |
| Fencing and water | 21% | Low-density grazing needs infrastructure whether it looks wild or not |
| Scrub and invasive management | 18% | Doing less still requires somebody with a saw |
| Fixed-point photography and reporting | 9% | Twelve posts, four visits a year, and the writing up |
| Administration | 8% | Stated rather than hidden inside the other lines |
This is a donation with a report attached
Sponsorship confers no ownership, no security, no unit, no credit and no cash return of any kind. It is not an investment, it is not tax-deductible for an individual, and it cannot be sold, transferred or redeemed. If you want something back in the post, take a patch instead.
The measurable end of the same idea.
Twenty metres of hedge, with a species count you can check.
