Oxygen Conservation: English firm buys BrewDog's Kinrara Estate home to 'lost forest'
The firm, with eyes on rewilding, has acquired multiple estates in Scotland in recent years.
A company with bold aims to rewild estates in Scotland and sell carbon credits has bought BrewDog’s most prominent estate.
Exeter-based Oxygen Conservation announced this week that it had purchased Kinrara Estate in the Cairngorms National Park.
The 10,000-acre land holding had been at the centre of BrewDog’s controversial plans to plant a million-tree “lost forest” since it acquired the land in 2020.
The acquisition brings Oxygen Conservation’s land portfolio in the UK to more than 50,000 acres across 13 different estates.
The company, which invests in land for nature projects and natural capital, recently acquired Dorback Estate, a former shooting estate near Aviemore.
Oxygen Conservation also owns the 12,000-acres Invergeldie estate in Perthshire, Blackburn and Hartsgarth, two upland farms near Langholm in the Scottish Borders totalling 11,366 acres, and 500 acres known as ‘Dog Bank’ in the Firth of Tay, near Dundee.
The company has previously been criticised by campaigners for culling numbers from a herd of wild goats roaming across parts of Langholm Moor for hundreds of years for rewilding purposes.
Commenting on the sale, Lauren Carrol, chief operating officer at BrewDog, said: “Since we became custodians of this magical slice of the Scottish Highlands, we have worked with partners to restore 745 hectares of peatland and planted over 375 hectares of new woodland.
“We’re proud of all that has been achieved and of the legacy we leave, but the time is right to hand over the reins to an organisation that specialises in protecting and investing in natural capital.”
Richard Stockdale, Oxygen Conservation’s chief executive, said the company planned to “continue the ambitious woodland creation and peatland restoration projects already planned across this landscape”.
He said: “By building on the strong foundations laid by BrewDog and adding our expertise in large-scale restoration and nature-based solutions, we’re confident Kinrara can become a showcase for how people, wildlife, and wild places thrive together.”
Almost half of the saplings planted for BrewDog’s “lost forest” in 2023 died, with the company using taxpayers’ money to replace them over the past year. At the time, the beer company had received more than £1 million in public funds for the project, with a further £1.2m awarded for more planting.
BrewDog co-founder James Watt said the saplings failed due to “extreme conditions” that “resulted in a higher-than-expected failure rate, particularly Scots pine”.
Scottish Forestry, who funded the project, said tree losses in the first year were “very common”.
In a Freedom of Information request submitted by land campaigner Nick Kempe, plots sampled showed there was evidence of “lots of” birch and Scots pine natural regeneration around the dead trees.
Mr Kempe said this highlighted “the failures of the Scottish Forestry Grant system”. He claimed there were signs of “significant natural regeneration” already across the site before it was fenced for putting new trees in the ground for the large-scale forest.
Some conservationists have disputed whether trees should have been planted on vast areas of Kinrara’s moorland in the first place.
Earlier this year, research published threw the carbon capture benefit of natural regeneration on moorland into question.
In a new study, led by the James Hutton Institute (JHI) in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and Forest Research, scientists found after 25 years, the carbon stored in trees that had grown naturally did not outweigh the carbon lost from the disturbed soil in the growing process, leading to no net carbon capture.
Previous research by the JHI and the University of Stirling found that actively planting birch and Scots pine trees in heather moorland eco-systems with carbon-rich soils was linked to soil carbon losses that were similar to the amount of carbon captured in the trees. This meant no net carbon was captured in the first few decades after tree planting.
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