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

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Stewardship schemes reward farmers for planting trees and maintaining hedges as the author now does. By becoming slaves to consumerism and “strangers to the fields that feed us”, we’re part of the problem. The power of English Pastoral lies not just in the passion and eloquence of its prose or the clarity of its argument.

This final section is perhaps the most lyrical of the three, and the description in the last few pages of an encounter at dusk with a barn owl hunting across his pasture land is as fine a piece of nature writing as one could hope for. The vision of a place which brings separate worlds together, replacing an older suspicion between those who work in the place and those who simply live there. Vivid, accessible, inspiring - a story about one man's emerging land ethic, and an appreciation of the old ways in modern times . The UK has an estimated 30 million sheep, and James Rebanks looks after around a thousand head on his upland farm in the heart of the English Lake District ( https://www.

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. Estimates of this shrinkage in the areas of agricultural land have been made ranging from 8 to 11% ( https://ec.

Rebanks may not have made much money out of farming, but happily, both for him and for us, the pen has proved mightier than the sward. Perfectly judged , it made me cry (twice) and left me with a new understanding of agriculture, and a real sense of hope.The challenge then becomes how can these livelihoods across upland Britain be maintained in the future. As he points out, there’s a thin line between utopianism and bullshit, and “beauty doesn’t pay the bills”. Rebanks leaves no doubt that the question of how to farm is a question of human survival on this hard-used planet. I can't remember a book I've wanted to press into people's hands more this year than this resonant, immensely thoughtful look back at three generations of a farming family .

If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. On the other side the author does not tackle perverse incentives that still remain such as the 'red diesel' subsidy that encourages farmers to use massive machinery and undertake ploughing and drainage operations that may have a negative effect on the environment. But it is also uplifting : Rebanks is determined to hang on to his Herdwicks, to keep producing food, and to bring back the curlews and butterflies and the soil fertility to his beloved fields.Changes in farming practices have meant that globally the production of a given quantity of crop, such as wheat or maize, now requires two-thirds less land than it did in the early 1960s. In 2015, Rebanks described life on his family farm in The Shepherds Life: A Tale of the Lake District (Rebanks 2015), which quickly became a non-fiction bestseller and was serialised by the BBC in a Book of the Week, radio broadcast. In 1974, when Rebanks was born and I first made my way up the River Nile, after spending a month hay-timing on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales, over half of the population in sub-Saharan Africa was malnourished. Heralded as a 'masterpiece' by the New Statesman, it was shortlisted for the Ondaatje prize, and longlisted for the Rathbones Folio prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Often, these areas, including the area described by the author, coincide with locations of high value for nature conservation and tourism where there is a demand for public access.