A ENVIRONMENTAL farm is taking steps to return its land back to nature after launching an extensive rewilding project.

Jordans Farm, in Wakes Colne, is a 35-acre farm which is used as arable land and for horse and sheep grazing.

Owner Alex Stevenson acquired the farm in March last year and is committed to helping the environment.

She is a landscape architect and garden designer and regularly gets involved in voluntary work, such as campaigning against the controversial Rivenhall incinerator.

Now Alex is looking to rewild 21 acres of the farmland.

She is leading the project and work is already underway to strategically trim pastures for skylarks and as well as ghost pond restoration works.

Alex said: “I do not intend to be part of the generation who did nothing when we had a chance to do something.

“When I was dreaming of doing this, it did not have a name, but I would look at tracts of land around Coggeshall and I knew how I could manage them to enable nature to thrive.

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“When the opportunity presented to buy Jordan’s Farm in Wakes Colne, we knew if we did not go for it, we would regret it.

“I see my role as that of an enabler. Rewilding is about letting a space return to its natural state, but that state was created by a mixture of influences, such as many of the grazers and predators that are no longer present in our landscape.

“In addition, that state is never static, it continually changes from grassland to scrub to woodland and back again.

“We have also carried out some ghost pond restoration work this month in conjunction with the Farming Wildlife Advisory Group.

“Literally digging out former ponds which have been filled in to increase agricultural production and currently are being filled in on development sites to increase the developable area.

“I will be and am doing a lot more. Connecting these 20 acres with the wider landscape is crucial so animals can move between habitats.

“I am doing this on the farm and hope to reach out to my neighbours.”