English Pastoral - An Inheritance

An important book and a great read!

Just finished reading English Pastoral, a very interesting book and great read by James Rebanks, and would like to tell you about it!

That title, when I started reading, meant nothing to me, but after a few hours I began to realise that this Christmas present was something special.

In English Pastoral lifelong farmer and talented writer James Rebanks relates, in at times Creatures Great and Small type story-telling, the trials and tribulations of three generations of his family on a mixed farm in the Lake District in Great Britain. 

But then he very successfully combines that with a compelling explanation of why farming practices of the 1950s and 1960s in Great Britain (and equally here in Tasmania) had to change, and how they changed, and why that change worked out really badly, for farmers, for the land, and for consumers. He then adds to that a vision of how modern agriculture can be changed to arrive at farming that feeds enough people, while creating a balance between farmed land and the natural world.

This book is by a farmer for farmers. Farmers will recognise issues the Rebanks family faced.

This is a book for anyone who buys food, so they know why they need to support farmers more.

This is a book that makes you look with new eyes at what a farm is, and can be.

This book makes you see that every parcel of land is part of a greater landscape.

In English Pastoral James describes how in the early 1960s, as a young boy, he was taken around the farm by his grandfather almost every day, and how he learnt farming from him, and learnt to love the farm his family had owned for generations. Here are some words James wrote about his grandfather:

There was something about working the land on foot behind a horse that seemed to make my grandfather see the world differently from the way later generations would see it from a powerful tractor. My grandfather knew our fields as if they were extensions of his body. He had felt the plough tremor as it scratched across the bedrock, felt it in his hands and through his boots. On foot, behind a horse, grass, soil and worms were up close - seen, heard, smelt and touched. There was nothing between him and the nature he worked with. The labour was often hard, long and perhaps sometimes boring, but I never heard him say a word to suggest that he regretted one minute of it. (page 23)

And here are some of the words that James wrote about the state of modern agriculture:

The old social contract between farmers and society is now stretched to breaking point. 

We need a new deal, a new understanding, a new system, that brings farming and ecology together. And that requires dialogue, realism, trust, and changing our behaviour as both farmers and consumers, and a willingness to pay the real price in the shops and through our taxes of food and good farming to make things as good as they should be. 

Some of the solutions are small and individual, but others require big political and structural changes. 

We have to flex our political muscles in our millions to create a politics that sees the land and what happens on it as being at the heart of building a more just and decent country (page 263).

The beauty of English Pastoral is that it was written by someone who lived on a farm his whole life, not some 'city slicker', and that it manages to combine hard-learned important messages about farming with an entertaining tale of life and nature on the land.  

Google 'James Rebanks' and you will find a lot of YouTube videos and interviews with him. 

If you would like to see James at his farm and hear him talk about his book English Pastoral and how he changed his farming methods have a look at a YouTube video here (3mins) and here (3mins).  

In 2018 James Rebanks visited Australia and talked at Australia's premier sheep and lamb conference LambEx. A YouTube video of his presentation at this conference (37 mins) you will find here.

I hope you will read English Pastoral!