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

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James Rebanks's story of his family's farm is just about perfect. It belongs with the finest writing of its kind -- Wendell Berry Wonderful [...] I can't imagine anyone starting to read English Pastoral and not being eager to read it all at once, as I did" It’s not only the story of one farming family, but also a clear and well-argued proposal for a new attitude towards an essential resource, which has been cheapened and exploited, with ultimately harmful environmental consequences. Rebanks is a rare find indeed: a Lake District farmer whose family have worked the land for 600 years, with a passion to save the countryside and an elegant prose style to engage even the most urban reader. He's refreshingly realistic about how farmed and wild landscapes can coexist and technology can be tamed. A story for us all. * Evening Standard, Best Books of Autumn 2020 *

Rebanks also recalls trips to Australia and the American Midwest, where he realized the true costs of intensive, monoculture farming, as opposed to the small-scale, mixed rotational farming that is traditional in the UK. Rather than wallowing in nostalgia or guilt, neither of which does anyone much good, he chronicles how he has taken steps to restore his la Nostalgia (which broadly is the author’s reflections on his Grandfather’s more traditional approach to farming around 40 years ago in an already changing era – his Grandfather a late resister to the changes around him)This was a brilliant book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. James Rebanks is a farmer in Cumbria. He comes from generations of farmers on the same land and muses over the changes that have taken place on the same land and within farming in general within the UK. The snag with the last part of the book is that whilst it seems clear that what is happening on the author’s land is good for wildlife, and generally an environmental improvement, we don’t get told that this is the way forward, economically and in terms of food production, probably because it isn’t! That’s a mild criticism but it’s unsurprising. I don’t think anyone has ‘the answer’ and the author doesn’t claim that he does, but I guess he would say, and I’d agree, that what he is doing is part of the answer but more of a part of the answer in improving the ecology of farmland than in feeding the world. English Pastoral is a work of art. It is nourishing and grounding to read ... this brave and beautiful book will shape hearts and minds. -- Jane Clarke, author of When the Tree Falls

Basically, in this book, Rebanks comes out (in the last section, where Utopia must be a somewhat ironic title?) as a farmer who gets what nature conservationists have said about farming for years. He accepts that modern farming has damaged soils, reduced wildlife and increased flood risk whilst not being great for animal welfare and yet producing cheap food for us all. What particularly stood out for me in this book was how Rebanks showed many themes are intertwined. With farming modernised and following business models and looking at scientifically engineering genetics of crops and animals this has a negative effect on the quality of soil, isn’t sustainable, wildlife is lost and becomes extinct and interestingly human communities too begin to break down. We are more entertwimed then we realise and we need to wake up and start thinking about this soon.

Retailers:

This is Nonfiction/Environment/Nature. As this one started, I wasn't feeling it. I needed to read it for a reading challenge so I plowed ahead. I eventually fell into its rhythm and I was so glad I stayed with it. This wasn't quite 5 stars, but I rounded up for the overall message. Everyone should read this, whether you grow food or eat food....this is for you. This is a timely message. This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all. The power of English Pastoral lies not just in the passion and eloquence of its prose or the clarity of its argument. It carries the authority of one who has not just thought about these problems, but lived them. It is a timely and important book. * TLS * Through the eyes of James Rebanks as a grandson, son, and then father, we witness the tragic decline of traditional agriculture, and glimpse what we must now do to make it right again. As an evocation of British landscape past and present, it's up there with Cider With Rosie."

Nostalgia' recounts his awakening to the pattern of farming traditions, as his grandfather cast a guiding arm round the awkward boy who couldn't break through his father's brusque and careworn bearing. His grandfather's fields became his classroom, where he "walked and rode with him through the seasons", listening to tales "full of horses", watching from the tractor the plundering gulls following the plough, and wondering "whether the cows worked for my grandfather, or the other way round". With his farm education complete, Rebanks realises he is a true believer in "that old farming world", but at the same time he doubts that a Lakeland mixed farm like his can survive without leaving the old traditions behind.

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English Pastoral is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and how the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. But this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future.