About Claire Whittle
Claire is a Veterinary consultant and new entrant farmer with 11 years of experience as a practising farm vet in and around the South of England, the North West, Midlands and North Wales.
After several years working as a commercial farm vet, Claire became disillusioned with her role as a clinical vet as she felt she was always putting sticking plasters over problems rather than identifying the root cause of disease on farms. Presented with an opportunity to try her own hand at farming, Claire took the leap to leave practice and start the Regenerative Vet consultancy alongside running an upland beef farm in North East Wales - aiming to demonstrate that farming and nature can work in harmony.
After reading the book ‘Wilding’ by Isabella Tree in 2019, in which she learned that not only do we have dung beetles in the UK, but that the products she was prescribing as a vet, the chemical antiparasitics, had a hugely detrimental impact on them, Claire was unable to find further information and so, with a team of farmers and entomologists, she helped set up ‘Dung beetles for Farmers’ – an online resource that aims to improve the conservation status of dung beetles throughout the UK and beyond.
This was the beginning of an understanding that the natural environment can play a valuable role in animal health and that there are often unintended consequences of veterinary and other agricultural inputs on farmland ecosystems, e.g. the negative impact of chemical antiparasitic products on natures’ own parasite control, the dung beetle - and their far wider impacts on river systems and farmland birds. To further understand the relationship between ecosystem, wildlife and human health, she undertook a Postgraduate certificate in Conservation Medicine from the University of Edinburgh in 2020 and completed a course in Holistic Management with the Savory Institute in 2021. That same year, she won a Nuffield Scholarship to research the question “Can Regenerative Agriculture improve the health and welfare of Livestock?” where she travelled throughout the UK and gained an in-depth knowledge of farming profitably with low inputs whilst maximising health and welfare. She also travelled across the United States and Australia which ingrained the importance of maximising resilience whilst farming in an unstable climate. You can read the report and watch the video of Claire’s Nuffield findings here:
She has worked with companies such as Yeo Valley, First Milk and The Woodland Trust to engage farmers on the value of biodiversity for livestock health as well as working with individual farmers from lowland dairy farms to upland sheep and beef.
Claire regularly speaks at venues across the UK on parasite control, nature for livestock health and landscape design and her ‘dung beetle safaris’ have become a legendary part of Groundswell, the regenerative agriculture festival in the southwest with over 300 people coming along this year alone. Claire works alongside the team at British Pasture Leather to engage fashion companies and students on sourcing materials from regenerative systems. In 2024, Claire was the keynote speaker for the Wildlife Trust’s ‘Lacey Lecture’ and in 2025 was awarded the Pasture for Life - Russ Carrington award for ‘Best Newcomer’ for her work in changing the face of veterinary practice in the UK and her role as new entrant farmer. She has been shortlisted as a finalist for ‘Dairy Industry Woman of the Year’ awards by RABDF and has been nominated for the ‘Nuffield Greener Futures Award’ this year. And just in case that's not enough, she's also a keen hedge layer!
