Derek Gow and Derek Banbury share a hedge line in Devon and, for most of the past three years, very little else. Gow, an outspoken rewinder widely credited with bringing the beaver back to England, is returning his Devon sheep farm to wild nature. Banbury, his neighbour, is proud to be an intensive farmer, producing milk and beef cattle behind tightly clipped hedges.

A new documentary, Derek vs Derek, follows the bickering pair across three years. An illuminating and unexpectedly funny film, it opens with Banbury's blunt verdict on Gow's transformation of his land.

"It's like he's just gone mad," Banbury says. "And the madness is now crossing the road on to my land."

Gow is no ordinary farmer. On his rewilded acreage he is breeding storks, wildcats, red-backed shrikes, glowworms and even adders for release into the English countryside. His work on beavers made him one of the most recognizable voices in British rewilding. Banbury, by contrast, keeps his hedges tightly clipped and his operation intensive — milk and beef, the way his family has farmed for generations.

The film's premise is simple: put two ideologically opposed neighbours on camera and see what happens. Gow and Banbury "should hate each other", as the Guardian's report on the film puts it. Instead, what emerges over three years of filming is what the paper calls an "unexpectedly heartwarming" portrait of rural England.

The Guardian review, published on 18 September 2026, frames the documentary as both funny and illuminating — a rare film that takes seriously the convictions of a conventional farmer while charting the radical experiments happening over the hedge.

For Gow, the stakes are ecological. His breeding programmes target species that have vanished or nearly vanished from the English countryside: storks, wildcats, red-backed shrikes, glowworms, adders. For Banbury, the stakes are equally real — a working farm, a livelihood, and a landscape he keeps, in his own telling, in disciplined order.

"The man's a psychopath when it comes to hedgerows," is how one observer characterizes Banbury's regime — a line that captures the film's comic register, where the conflict is real but the affection, eventually, is too.

The film's title, Derek vs Derek, plays on the coincidence that both men share a first name — and, as the documentary suggests, more than that. Both are Devoniains, both are stubborn, and both believe deeply in their version of what the countryside should be.

Derek vs Derek arrives amid a broader cultural reckoning with how Britain farms. Rewilding has moved from the fringe to mainstream policy debates, and beavers — the animal Gow is credited with restoring to England — are now at the centre of arguments about rivers, flooding and biodiversity.

What sets the film apart, according to the Guardian's account, is its refusal to caricature either man. The rewilder is not a crank; the intensive farmer is not a villain. The result is a documentary about farming at war that turns out, against expectation, to be heartwarming.

Whether the pair's truce survives the next hedge-cutting season remains to be seen. But for audiences, the film offers a rare thing: an argument about land, nature and livelihood conducted with humour on both sides of the road.