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

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

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

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He had come to understand that both the capital-intensive commercial operations and the present-day small-scale family farming units such as he had inherited from his father were ultimately doomed. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Sisyphus with a smile … James Rebanks with his Herdwick sheep in Cumbria. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then? English Pastoral is a joy to read and extremely moving - a book which should be read by every citizen. A wonderful, humane book told through the eyes of a man who has watched much vanish from his land, and now wants to put it back .

Since then, the author has become a frequent presence on radio, ranging from dedicated farming topics to general and very popular broadcasts on food, the countryside, and the environment. Following the recent Agriculture Bill it seems that farmers will be paid only if they enhance the environment. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. The traditional pastoral is about retreat into an imagined rural idyll, but this confronts very real environmental dilemmas.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 author sets out a vision and moves well away from the traditional farming memoir to explain why this lifestyle of an upland family farm, dependent on traditional breeds of Swaledale and Herdwick sheep, will need to change and why this is important to all of us including those who live far away from the fells of Cumbria.

While the title of the book, English pastoral, evokes an expectation of a bucolic lifestyle, the reality is somewhat different as the author makes clear. An eloquent, well-informed, and practical Lake District shepherd was a welcome addition to any conversation. He makes no bones about the hardness of the life and his frustration at having to earn money outside the farm to make ends meet. What a terrific book : vivid and impassioned and urgent --and, in both its alarm and its awe for the natural world, deeply convincing. But in spite of it all, he would have no other life, as the sight of a barn owl at dusk or a meadow of wild flowers afford a moment of wonder that make it all worthwhile.

As he points out, there’s a thin line between utopianism and bullshit, and “beauty doesn’t pay the bills”. His second book, English Pastoral, was also a Top Ten bestseller and was named the Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year. I was hoping that after a fair amount of repetition the author would branch out more boldly into the challenges faced by Lakeland farmers and in particular the influence of subsidies, grants and taxation.

In recent years, I have come across many farmers who are working hard to address the problems Rebanks identifies, whether in restoring soil fertility, improving animal welfare or encouraging wildlife to flourish. The challenge then becomes how can these livelihoods across upland Britain be maintained in the future.Estimates of this shrinkage in the areas of agricultural land have been made ranging from 8 to 11% ( https://ec. Managing to cram the whole modern history of British farming and nature into 270 beautifully written pages, this is a gem that's moving and immensely informative. And, as Rebanks says, we need mechanisms, including financial incentives, that encourage productive farms to be more friendly to nature.

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. 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. The layout and structure of the book reflect an urgency to explain the dilemma to a wide audience in a compelling but also straightforward way. Deeply personal but also global in significance, its pages course with love and concern so palpable I more than once wept while reading it. In “Digging”, Seamus Heaney wrote how, unable to handle a spade like his father and grandfather, he chose to dig with a pen instead.It's about progress and nostalgia , without being prideful or mawkish, it's about families and tradition, and the passing of time. 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. English Pastoral concludes with a description of the changes made on Rebanks’s farm in recent years.



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