Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey

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This is Nonfiction/Environment/Nature. As this one started, I wasn't feeling it. I needed to read it for a reading challenge so I plowed ahead. I eventually fell into its rhythm and I was so glad I stayed with it. This wasn't quite 5 stars, but I rounded up for the overall message. Everyone should read this, whether you grow food or eat food....this is for you. This is a timely message. James Rebanks writes with insight, honesty and a deeply entrenched love for the land. English Pastoral is thought-provoking, often challenging and at its heart is a beautifully-written story of a family, a home and a changing landscape.” — Nigel Slater, chef and author of Greenfeast But it is also those very “champions of progress” that have enabled society to develop and live healthier, longer lives. I have been thrilled by English Pastoral, an account of farming by James Rebanks. A real working farmer, whose own reading runs from Virgil to Schumpeter, he lays out in great detail just what has gone wrong, and what can be done to put it right.”— Andrew Marr, Spectator One quote that resonated with me, because I am so tired of seeing commercials on TV with happy people buying, buying, buying bright and shiny objects that they don’t need but they feel that they need, and the people who make the commercials are telling me I too need the bright and shiny objects to be happy…grrrrr.

Pastoral Song – HarperCollins Pastoral Song – HarperCollins

The noted conservative economist delivers arguments both fiscal and political against social justice initiatives such as welfare and a federal minimum wage. 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. He writes with a simplicity that hides his scholarship (how many Cumbrian farmers can quote from Virgil’s Georgics?) and some passages are right up there with Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie … This is a wonderful book. James Rebanks writes with his heart and his heart is in the right place. We should listen to him.” — Telegraph 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. The three plowshares slice the earth into ribbons, and the shining steel moldboards lift and turn and roll them upside down. The dark loamy inside of the earth is exposed to the sky, the grass turned down to the underworld. The upside shines moist from the cut. The furrows layer across the field like sets of cresting waves sweeping across some giant brown ocean. The freshest lengths are darker, the older ones fading, lighter colored, drying and crumbling, across the field. More seagulls arrive, hearing a rumor blown on the winds to the four corners of the sky. They come across the fields and the woods on eager wings, on flight lines so straight they could have been drawn on a map with a ruler. They scream and cry out to one another, excitedly, spotting the freshly turned soil. A poem describing the life and manners of shepherds; a poem in which the speakers assume the character of shepherds; an idyl. ContentsHe is eloquent — scenes of mud and guts are interspersed with quotes ranging from Virgil to Schumpeter, Rachel Carson to Wendell Berry … English Pastoral builds into a heartfelt elegy for all that has been lost from our landscape, and a rousing disquisition on what could be regained — a rallying cry for a better future.”— Financial Times

Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey - Country Guide Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey - Country Guide

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. A vividly-recalled memoir of a farming childhood, but also a forensic defence of the kind of agriculture that has nearly been wiped out. ... Perceptive, eloquent, and passionate. ... Rebanks writes so well that I can’t imagine anyone starting to read it and not being eager to read it all at once, as I did, and not being moved by the life and the landscape he describes so well. I was thrilled by it.” — Philip Pullman, #1 bestselling author of the “His Dark Materials” series?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. The months after my father’s death were the hardest of my life. 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. The world seemed a dull shade of gray. Beyond our little valley, people everywhere seemed to have gone insane, electing fools and doing strange things in their anger. England was divided and broken. Suddenly in those months I felt lost. It was as if I had been following in someone else’s footsteps down a path, talking to them, reassured by them when the going got tough, and then they had disappeared. The farm was a lonely place—a poorer thing when it wasn’t shared. And with every passing year farmers were becoming fewer and fewer, a vanishingly small and increasingly powerless share of the population. Our world felt fragile, like it might now break into tiny pieces. He then shatters this English idyll, recounting his and his father's push to modernise their farm and 'improve' their land in ways encouraged by greedy governments and supermarkets. Fertilizers were spread, fields enlarged, hedgerows and coppices cleared. The soil health decimated. Let me say that this was not a "bad" book. I liked the overall theme of what industrialized farming has done to our world, both from a people and ecological standpoint. I do think we need alternatives for our food sources so that we have the ability to choose sustainable, locally farmed goods.

Pastoral Song by James Rebanks - Ebook | Scribd Pastoral Song by James Rebanks - Ebook | Scribd

James Rebanks combines the descriptive powers of a great novelist with the pragmatic wisdom of a farmer who has watched his world transformed. English Pastoral is a profound and beautiful book about the land, and how we should live off it.”— Ed Caesar,contributing writer, The New Yorker History, anthropology, ecology nature, farming and memoirs are all in here- a must read for everyone! 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.” Early adopters are buying optical spraying systems to greatly reduce the amount of herbicide required for pre-season burnoff of weeds…. Rebanks does a fantastic job at looking at how farming has changed over his lifetime, for better or for worse, and what it means for farmers and consumers.The reason was that all the landmarks were gone. There was a time that farmers needed laborers to help them farm their land and that is why there was a house on every forty acres. But today, because the owner doesn’t live on the farm, there may not be even one house. This was a great follow-up to other books I’ve been reading recently about environmentalism and long-term thinking, such as Losing Eden (which, similarly, took inspiration from Silent Spring) and The Good Ancestor, and should attract readers of Wilding by Isabella Tree. I hope it will go far in next year’s Wainwright Prize race.

Orion Magazine - Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

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. A con, however, is our tendency towards mono-cropping which can lead to disastrous results like the Irish potato famine. The death of more than a million people and emigration of a million more, was triggered by potato blight in a society reliant on one crop. Perhaps related to this the solutions the book puts forward does seem to focus on a particular type of farm – highland, small scale which I cannot relate to many farms I know – and I suspect the upcoming book from the head of Conservation on the Holkham estate will be of much greater interest to me (see for example this New Yorker article https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...) The demise of family farms means that there are fewer and fewer people living in rural areas and that is why communities are dying on the vine and why there are fewer houses and trees – and it is also why I feel no attachment to the place where I lived from age five to age twenty-one. Today, there are no buildings or trees or any evidence that anyone has ever lived on it; it’s just 160 acres of dirt that belongs to a corporation.Particularly striking is the image of a young Rebanks lying under a tree devouring Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—a book that changed his perspective on pesticide use and, he admits, changed his life. In later sections, an environmentalists named Lucy appears to offer ideas, as well as financial support, to improve water and habitat conservation on the farm. Her ideas take root and revitalize Rebanks’s perspective on stewardship. And to flip the coin again “(w)hole civilizations disappeared because their farming methods degraded the soils,” says Rebanks. Through observations, research and conversations with farmers around the world, he has noticed that many of the very “fertilizers, medicines, pesticides, fuels, feeds, tractors and machinery that we once bought (to improve our farms) have turned out to be the very things that did all the damage.” James Rebanks’s story of his family’s farm is just about perfect. It belongs with the finest writing of its kind.”— Wendell Berry