English Pastoral by James Rebanks review – how to look after the land
At 20, James Rebanks ran away from his family farm in the Lake District to visit Australia. The vast scale of farming there both impressed and depressed him. He was homesick for the crooked fields, ancient hedges and dry stone walls of home. And he revered the traditions his grandfather had taught him. But now his grandfather was dead and his father deep in debt. Small farms like theirs, scraping by with a mix of crops and livestock, belonged to the past. Unless he could persuade his father to modernise, they were doomed.
For a time, on his return, they tried. They switched to more “efficient” breeds of sheep, stopped growing turnips and barley, sprayed pesticide to clear their pastures of thistles, and no longer laid hedges by hand. The bigger farms in the area, with their factory-like sheds and large herds of “engineered” cattle, were already ahead of the game. The farmers were changing, too – managerial “shirt and tie” types driving round in Range Rovers became the norm. The exception was a neighbour called Henry, so old-fashioned that he still spread his fields with muck from cattle yards rather than using artificial fertiliser or slurry. Poor Henry was a joke – until the soil from his fields was sent to an analyst and found to be richer than the intensively farmed land around it: “The most traditional farmer in the district had the healthiest soil.”
For Rebanks it was an epiphany. There were others too: reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; noticing the decline of curlews and other wildlife on the land; visiting the US and seeing fields of oilseed rape full of weeds resistant to pesticides; experiencing the Cumbrian floods of 2015. To earlier generations of farmers, the idea that nature is vulnerable would have “seemed like hippy or communist propaganda”. But to Rebanks it made urgent sense and he resolved to farm in a more sustainable way.
His bestselling memoir of five years ago, The Shepherd’s Life, told the story of his work with Herdwick sheep, against the backdrop of his unlikely progress from schoolboy dropout to high-flying Oxbridge graduate. It was so illuminating and comprehensive you wondered what more could be left for him to say. A lot, as it turns out: about being a farmer, not just a shepherd, and about balancing the need to make a living with a sense of duty towards future generations. The book’s last section is called Utopia. As he points out, there’s a thin line between utopianism and bullshit, and “beauty doesn’t pay the bills”. But he has put his environmental ideals into practice by planting 12,000 trees, rerouting the river across his land to create wetland areas, dispensing with pesticides, and sacrificing arable land to encourage wildlife. He’s not saying that every farm should be like his. But many farmers would benefit – and it’s estimated that there are a billion of them around the globe – by following his example.
As Rebanks points out, there's a thin line between utopianism and bullshit, and 'beauty doesn't pay the bills'
So would the rest of us. By becoming slaves to consumerism and “strangers to the fields that feed us”, we’re part of the problem. He bangs out statistics to prove the point. Half of our milk is now produced from cows that live permanently indoors. Half of our hedgerows have disappeared since the second world war. 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 heavy percussion of his polemic sometimes overwhelms the rhythm of Rebanks’s prose; he’s more persuasive when he lets personal experience speak for him. “Our land is like a poem,” he says, and rapturous metaphors become his way of both honouring and conserving nature: the tails of redstarts “like little triangular wedges of freshly cut mahogany”, “copper-bronze beech leaves, wind-brittle and crunchy like plastic crisp packets under foot”, the mist below the fells “like a milky ocean”, curlews wheeling round “in giant fairground-ride loops”, cobwebs hanging from rafters “like tangled pairs of women’s tights”, an owl hunting back and forth “like a ball rolling from one side of a glass jar to the other”, a mare in labour with one of the legs of her foal “pushing up jagged beneath the taut skin as if she had swallowed a stepladder”.
In “Digging”, Seamus Heaney wrote how, unable to handle a spade like his father and grandfather, he chose to dig with a pen instead. For Rebanks, farming and writing 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. To farm sustainably and stay solvent is a sisyphean task, but so far so good. By the end of the book, he’s the image of his grandfather, “Sisyphus with a smile on his face”.
• English Pastoral: An Inheritance by James Rebanks is published by Allen Lane (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
