Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today's January 21st, 2020, and my guest is author, journalist, and conservationist Isabella Trey.

Her latest book, which is the subject of this week's episode, is Wilding.

The Return of Nature to a British Farm Isabella. Welcome to Econ Talk.

Thank you.

This is a rather extraordinary story, and beautifully told, a very personal story about you, how you and your husband,

let your 3,500 acre farm, which is the NEP castle, a state, a NEP is spelled K-N-E-P-P.

The NEP castle, a state, which is about 50 miles south of London.

You let it go wild. You let it return to nature, and your book is the story of the expected and unexpected things that happened.

But you began as farmers, so what went wrong? Why did you decide to give up farming?

It took us 17 years to realize what was wrong with our land.

It's basically very, very heavy clay.

I think the innuit, I suppose, have dozens of different words for different types of snow, aren't they?

In the old Sussex dialect, we have 35 different words for mud. That's how much it governs our lives living on this stuff.

It's like unfathomable porridge in the winter. When you've had a wet winter like we just had now,

you literally can't get heavy machinery onto the land sometimes for six months of the year.

You can't do any heavy maintenance, any ditch clearance, no maintenance of hedgerows, and you can't sew spring crops.

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