My own recollection of farming from that time was of widespread use of pesticides, polluting stubble burning (with the added “bonus” of accidental destruction of pesty field boundaries), destruction of hedgerows, the deliberate concealment or obstruction of rights of way – and that things are much better in almost every sense since - but I think industrial farming hit East Anglia a long time before the author’s corner of the lakes. There were so many things that I loved about this book, not least the author’s passion for farming the land in a way that allows bees, pollinators, birds and beetles to thrive.

PASTORAL SONG | Kirkus Reviews

About the time that I left the farm my father bought four-row equipment, but by then bigger farmers were planting and cultivating with six-row equipment. The book makes it clear that with modernity and our instant culture of now we are ruining and losing many aspects of our land. When we walk back down those worn sandstone steps of the solicitors, I know that I am now the farmer. You can not help feel caught up in the prose that sometimes feels like poetry and is full of nostalgia and love for a land that James, and myself share. It was his reading of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) that opened his eyes and those of many other people about the environmental dangers of the overuse of pesticides and the culpability of both the chemical industry and governmental officials who did not challenge the industry’s claims that their products were safe for humans and wildlife.Rebanks is now trying to rejuvenate his farm by going back to the old ways, and the even older ways of setting nature back to rights in certain areas. Deeply personal but also global in significance, its pages course with love and concern so palpable I more than once wept while reading it. I creamed it with milk, a little four, pepper and salt, and it was better than anything you can get out of a can.

Pastoral Song - James Rebanks - Hardcover - HarperCollins Canada Pastoral Song - James Rebanks - Hardcover - HarperCollins Canada

At its worse this seems to be rather resentful of both sides: he seems to share equal dislike for the world of neo-liberal free-trade and globalised economics (economists in particular seem to be his rather odd bête noire) and for left-wing extremists (George Monbiot is not named in the book but the two seem to have a history of opposition). Today, family farms such as ours have become as extinct as the dodo bird and the big farmers and land corporations are doing their work with twelve-row equipment. It is the story of a global revolution as it played out in the fields of my family’s two small farms: my father’s rented farm in the Eden Valley, which we left nearly two decades ago now, and my grandfather’s little Lake District fell farm, seventeen miles to the west, where I live and work today. The final passage is one of great beauty: he and his youngest daughter out in the meadow as a barn owl swoops and dives and swirls in the falling dusk. Granted this book describes the author's farm in England, but I'm mostly referring to the US in my comments.We sit silently in the waiting room, perched awkwardly, like nervous crows, on the stiff-backed chairs.

Think Sustainability Is Simple? This Sheep Farmer Would Like

So many things are interwoven and if one thing is changed for the immediate benefit of one group, this may be at a massive and destructive cost to others. When I think about the hybrid and heirloom tomatoes I grew and the seeds I saved, I am reassured that it is worth the work, at least as long as I can do it. I had always wanted to be the farmer, the captain of the ship with my hand on the wheel, but the moment it happened it felt empty. People’s attachment to their land is renewed by each generation—through their holding on and working it. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost.

The main problem with the book is the unevenness between its dual parts: the memoir aspects are fascinating; the essayistic parts are bad. The US Midwest is Rebanks' ultimate paradigm for misguided land use, but UK commercial farming comes up smelling like acidic green muck as well. This elegy that captures the soul of British farming – its families and their land from which they are indivisible … Rebanks’s observations are rich with detail. You said that nothing about agriculture changes in our country “because the status quo works just great for a handful of giant corporations who own the food and farming system. Rebanks describes a day when he and his grandfather were rolling the field, "flattening the loose soil, tucking the seed beneath a pressed down surface.