Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey

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Everything that happens on a farm is affected by the era it exists in,” he says. “Farming is now a term that tries to encompass a vast messy range of activities.” James Rebanks family has been farming in the Eden Valley in Cumbria for many years. He learned his craft particularly from his grandfather whose methods of framing owed much to the past. His own father stood on the cusp of the old and the new economical and industrial framing which caused him a great deal of internal conflict. Now it is James turn to inherit the land - in which direction will he err, the old or the new? Cynics will say James plays both sides of the nature vs farming debate but that is exactly what we need. Read this if you want an honest depiction of how difficult farming can be. Rebanks dispels the myth that the life of the farmer is one of independence. They’re unforgivingly tied to trade agreements and the feeding habits of the rest of the world and he writes hauntingly about him and his father trying to keep up with the pace of modern agriculture.

Orion Magazine - Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

James Rebanks’s new book may be the most passionate ecological corrective since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring." — New York Review of Books If I could, I would make this required reading for everyone. Regardless of where they live in the world. (America, you probably need to read this almost more than anyone else!) This is a painful read at times, but it's also full of transcendent beauty and hope. After the Second World War governments were eager to see their countries rise from the economic ashes, and they wanted to help citizens build lives that were free of hunger and disease, so they declared that it was the farmer’s job to produce “vast amounts of cheap food, and to use whatever tools were required,” Rebanks writes. “Many farmers wanted to hear this and embraced the changes. Others were swept along behind them in an attempt to survive. This new culture told consumers that food was little more than fuel and that it should cost less and less of their income.” I loved this. Such a good and thoughtful (although not exhaustive) lesson in farming, ecology, and environmental science. I love how gently he shares his experiences and how much truth there is in it. This was a very thought provoking book for me and THIS is how I like to be "preached" to: by experience and kindness and simple logic. Like a lot of farmers, James Rebanks is thoughtful. But unlike the rest of us, his thoughtfulness has helped him write a globally popular, best-selling and prize-winning book. It has even been named a New York Times editors’ book of the year, and it’s all about the questions that, as a thoughtful farmer, he can’t help but ask.Rebanks explores the changes of farming methods from small family farms, to larger farms that focused on machinery, genetics and businesses to now looking at a striking a balance between two- allowing ecosystems to flourish which in turn makes the land better and richer through returning to older methods, rewilding projects etc. What is good is he does so without a rose tinted naive outlook but is realistic at the challenges faced too. 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) Rebanks's prose is sometimes simple but often lyrical as he describes the landscape and nature around his fells farm in the Lake District of England. He says that the literary tradition of the Lake District was mostly about the middle class and asks, "Where were the farmers?" He writes about the forgotten farmers and his long legacy on the land. His family has lived in this area for hundreds of years. Rapturous … a paean to a more life-enhancing approach to farming … For Rebanks writing and farming 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.”— Blake Morrison, Guardian This book is effectively a tale of two family farms – one rented by his late Father in the Eden Valley (between the Pennines and the Lake District) and where the author grew up, and one owned by his grandfather in the Lake District which the author now farms.

Pastoral Song - James Rebanks - Harper Academic Pastoral Song - James Rebanks - Harper Academic

This book won the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing (2021), was on the longlist for the Orwell Prize for political writing (2021) and made the shortlist for The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize (2021). An engrossing read. The memoir is divided into three parts. Reading the first part I lost sense of time. It was so enjoyable and so interesting to read. Being a city boy all my life, I was fascinated about life on the farm. Not an easy life to be sure.Rebanks offers a sensible way to think about food and the planet. ... His prose will transport readers, introducing them to both the harsh realities and the joys of everyday life on a piece of land that has deep, personal meaning." — Christian Science Monitor, Best of the Month Rebanks's connection to the land is palpable in the stories he tells of his grandfather and parents. As a young boy, Rebanks describes himself as work shy and easily captivated by the TV, "in danger of becoming a disappointment," that is, until his grandfather takes him under his wing. His father, a somewhat surly man, doesn't have the temperament or patience to engage the youngster. Rebanks only begins to understand the tensions of the economic realities of the farm as he grows into adulthood and realizes the weight of responsibility that rested upon his father's shoulders. Having got them hooked with his story of everyday life on the fells, he's now moved in a campaigning direction. Here, he uses his own family's story, over three generations, to encapsulate and humanise the development of farming from its labour-intensive past in his grandfather's day, through the mechanisation and chemical-laden farming of the 1970s and 1980s, to the point he's reached today, where he tries to protect and enhance the natural environment while still making a living for himself and his family. It's really well done; the personal anecdotes and lyrical descriptive passages bring what could be an over-technical topic to life and bring home the brutal consequences of large-scale agribusiness. He doesn't really go in for facts and figures, though I was quite startled to learn that 50% of British milk is now produced by cows who spend their whole lives indoors. Rebanks is on a passionate crusade to spread the word on “how can we farm in ways that will endure and do the least harm?” He maintains that “[a]pplying industrial thinking and technologies to agriculture to the exclusion of other values and judgments has been an unmitigated disaster for our landscapes and communities.” He goes on to say that “to have healthy food and farming systems we need a new culture of land stewardship, which for me would be the best of the old values and practices and a good chunk of new scientific thinking.” 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 land as part of a wider ecosystem. It takes courage to publicly change one’s mind and follow through on it, and I felt the author was aware of nuances and passionate about working with ecologists to see that his farm is heading in the right direction. He has 200 plant species growing on his land, but planted additional key species that were missing; he hasn’t used artificial fertilizer in over five years; and he’s working towards zero pesticides.