English Pastoral: An Inheritance - The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of The Shepherd's Life

Product Information

He brings together real evidence for the changes which are already underway and could be the basis for a sustainable foundation for both the landscape and the communities who provide stewardship for the land. But it is also uplifting : Rebanks is determined to hang on to his Herdwicks, to keep producing food, and to bring back the curlews and butterflies and the soil fertility to his beloved fields. This book can be approached at several differing levels: as a history of food production and farming in the uplands of Britain, as a fascinating insight into a precarious livelihood on the margins of economic production, or as simply an engaging tale of life in the Lake District beyond the tourist trail. After a while he realised that he was no longer going outside to work because he had to, but because he wanted too. Changes in farming practices have meant that globally the production of a given quantity of crop, such as wheat or maize, now requires two-thirds less land than it did in the early 1960s.

Seen in these terms, Rebanks is making a plea for a better understanding of a much wider picture, which is about a way of life as much as the landscape or animal husbandry. Alternatively, it can be taken as a challenge to both politicians and the public to think through how we map out a future for these landscapes and the people who live in marginal economic situations. In “Digging”, Seamus Heaney wrote how, unable to handle a spade like his father and grandfather, he chose to dig with a pen instead.The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song. Rebanks is at his best when focusing on his home patch rather than railing against economists, supermarkets and cheap food.

This applies to the Andalusian goat herd and the Lapland reindeer herder, as much as to the Welsh sheep farmer. Perfectly judged , it made me cry (twice) and left me with a new understanding of agriculture, and a real sense of hope.I see farmers starting to work together to make this place even better, finding ways to farm around wilder rivers. For Rebanks, farming and writing have proved complementary: while working long hours on the land, he has produced a book in a pastoral tradition that runs from Virgil to Wendell Berry. The traditional pastoral is about retreat into an imagined rural idyll, but this confronts very real environmental dilemmas. Our land is like a poem,” he says, and rapturous metaphors become his way of both honouring and conserving nature: the tails of redstarts “like little triangular wedges of freshly cut mahogany”, “copper-bronze beech leaves, wind-brittle and crunchy like plastic crisp packets under foot”, the mist below the fells “like a milky ocean”, curlews wheeling round “in giant fairground-ride loops”, cobwebs hanging from rafters “like tangled pairs of women’s tights”, an owl hunting back and forth “like a ball rolling from one side of a glass jar to the other”, a mare in labour with one of the legs of her foal “pushing up jagged beneath the taut skin as if she had swallowed a stepladder”. This deeply engrained concept of stewardship runs like a vein of rock through these upland farming families.

Rebanks didn’t get on with his father and chose to spend his spare time helping out on his grandfather’s farm rather than his father’s. If you want a detailed analysis of how we could bring about the sorts of changes that he and many of us would like to see, you will be better served by Dieter Helm’s Green and Prosperous Land. It is therefore no surprise that Rebanks has matched his first publication with this second book, which again quickly became a bestseller helped along by a public desperate to take advantage of a blast of fresh Lake District air in the midst of a pandemic.English Pastoral builds into a heartfelt elegy for all that has been lost from our landscape, and a rousing disquisition on what could be regained - a rallying cry for a better future. He and his wife, Helen, a quiet pillar of strength, have planted over twelve thousand saplings and created new hedgerows.

Towards the end of this lyrical and passionate book, the farmer James Rebanks describes how he is moving towards producing food using the minimum amount of artificial inputs, such as chemical fertilisers. On the other side the author does not tackle perverse incentives that still remain such as the 'red diesel' subsidy that encourages farmers to use massive machinery and undertake ploughing and drainage operations that may have a negative effect on the environment. If it hadn’t been for high-tech agriculture, there would have been less food, more hunger and possibly an even greater loss of pristine ecosystems, as food production sought to keep pace with population growth. Removing sheep from these fells in favour of trees, or reducing headage numbers making the business of shepherding unviable, would set in motion a chain of consequences which would alter both the landscapes and the communities. The bigger farms in the area, with their factory-like sheds and large herds of “engineered” cattle, were already ahead of the game.And we’re so addicted to cheap food, however dubiously produced, that we spend only a third as much on it as people did in the 1950s.