Can market gardens help rewilding take root?

I find rewilding an inspiring idea. But, alongside its critics, I'm also troubled by some implications - particularly the idea that farmland will have to be cultivated even more intensively to produce food because other fields are turned over to nature. Is it realistic?

- Patrick Barkham

The pioneering English rewilding project at Knepp in West Sussex may produce high-quality free-range meat but George Monbiot - a big fan of rewilding - has pointed out that its meat production per hectare is so small that, if rolled out across 10% of British farmland, it would provide just three meat meals a person a year.

Small-scale, low-impact market gardening lacks significant government support and yet it is remarkably productive: as Monbiot reveals in his book Regenesis, market gardener Iain Tolhurst produces 120 tonnes of fruit and veg a year on 7 hectares. In Norfolk, the 0.4-hectare community market garden Eve's Hill Veg Co has a turnover of £96,000 ($116,000), supplies vegetables to eight shops and restaurants and about 50 families, employs three trainees and helped put more than 40 people through an introductory horticulture course.