Gow is an outspoken rewilder widely credited with bringing back the beaver in England. As he returns his Devon sheep farm to wild nature, he is also breeding storks, wildcats, red-backed shrikes, glowworms and even adders to return to the countryside. Over the hedge, Banbury, his neighbour, is proud to be an intensive farmer, producing milk and beef cattle behind tightly clipped hedges.
Documentary-maker James Dawson started following Gow as he sold the last of his sheep, planning a film about the dramatic changes brought about by rewilding his farm. Then, when Dawson first visited Gow, he was put up at the Banburys, where wife Linda has turned former pigsties and old sheds into holiday cottages. As soon as Dawson met Derek Banbury over breakfast in the farmhouse kitchen, he knew he had to make a rather different film.
As well as a boundary, both Dereks share a certain charisma, bloody-mindedness, business acumen and, actually, a love of animals. Gow is an imposing, fast-talking, sweary Scot who criticises “showers of morons” in conservation for convening endless committees while species plummet towards extinction. He’s equally disdainful of farmers “spaffing” public money on Land Rovers and sticking sheep on overgrazed pastures and feeding them fish-meal from the Gambia, “raping what’s left of a disastrous environment to produce something that nobody wants”.
Meanwhile, Banbury, who has an impish grin and quick wit, is unrepentant about agribusiness. The population’s getting bigger. It’s not getting smaller, and everyone is going to be happy if they’ve got full bellies.
I’ve done it for 50 years and I won’t change. I won’t change.” Or will he? I find both Dereks in the Banburys’ kitchen, where Linda is doling out tea and cake and Banbury’s four grownup children (three daughters and one son) and dogs are bustling around.
They are preparing to welcome an audience of farmers, neighbours and friends to a special preview of Derek vs Derek, which is being shown on a temporary screen erected in the Banburys’ biggest, newest barn. Banbury is laughing, but he is also raging: the production company was duty-bound to bring in a health and safety officer, and he’s been instructed to reduce the number of chairs in the barn. Nobody tells me what to do!” he says.
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