According to English landowner and conservation pioneer Charlie Burrell, “Everyone wants to feel that it’s possible to do something and if you’ve got a real hope story — that you can transform an agricultural desert into something which is very rich and biodiverse — it becomes all possible and something that you can do.”

At Knepp Castle in Sussex, a county in South East England, that’s what Burrell has done. He’s abandoned industrial farming practices and allowed nature to take over his 3,460-acre estate, with striking results.

This video tells the story of how Burrell transformed his commercially farmed land with soil that was “dead, just dirt” into a rich and biodiverse environment.