Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey

Product Information

Anyway I am glad this book seems to be very well liked by so many people. I hope you can read it! 😊 The New York Times bestselling author of The Shepherd's Life profiles his family's farm across three generations, revealing through this intimate lens the profound global transformation of agriculture and of the human relationship to the land. Despite this chilling essential truth, this beautifully written and searingly honest book is full of vignettes from a Fells farm, both past and present. It doesn't ever sketch over the problems with any kind of farming; ultimately the biodiversity of the land is better without any humans on it! But we are also part of nature, even if we have forgotten. Good farmers husband the land and act as caretakers. Good consumers do not seek to be so disconnected with the process of food production, with where what they eat comes from. There is a way to produce the food we need without killing our future. When we plough to the edge of the meadows, when we remove hedges, when we sow crops several times a year and make silage instead of hay, we impact nesting birds, insects, mammals, myriad plant life. We kill off the very creatures who renew the soil that will feed us again. It's time to realise that we cannot eat our profit margins. We should pay fair prices for meat and dairy and respect the animals that gave them to us. We should focus less of fast, cheap, processed food and instead (wherever possible) pay a bit more and eat a bit less, respecting the labour that went into growing crops. And we absolutely should be lobbying our government unceasingly to do something about this before it's too late. Our best hope is to return to a more mixed and rotational style of farming.

Remarkable … A brilliant, beautiful book … Eloquent, persuasive and electric with the urgency that comes out of love.”— Sunday Times (London) Rebanks: “I grew up understanding that a farm was a piece of property, a private thing owned by someone, a family’s entire wealth, or else a tangled legacy of debt and obligation. It was above all a place of work – work that defined people and gave them purpose. It was also a business, a commercial enterprise, producing food to pay the bills and feed other people … get farming even slightly wrong and people begin to go hungry, the poor first, get it badly wrong and millions starve.” p268 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.”

The name of the game became productivity. Ancient field systems were broken up, traditional crop rotation abandoned. Breeds of plants and animals re-engineered to produce greater yields on massive farms. Broken up into three sections, “Nostalgia,” “Progress” and “Utopia,” Pastoral Song tells the story of one family’s journey during the rapid transition from rotational crop farming to large-scale “factory” farming that took place in the latter half of the 20th century. It documents the personal and environmental effects of this momentous change in human history through three generations of Rebanks’s family. The first section details Rebanks learning, as he calls it, “the old way,” of farming from his grandfather over the course of a year; the second is concerned with his father’s reluctant modernization of the farm, partly due to rising financial concerns; the last details the author reclaiming “the old way” of farming and promoting it as a more sustainable and environmentally friendly option than industrial farming. 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). History, anthropology, ecology nature, farming and memoirs are all in here- a must read for everyone!

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? As he maintains, it is so-called agricultural progress that has led to large, terribly expensive machines, heavy applications of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, hormones to put on weight of beef cattle and increase production of dairy cows, and indiscriminate use of antibiotics. About the time that I left the farm my father bought four-row equipment, but by then bigger farmers were planting and cultivating with six-row equipment. Today, family farms such as ours have become as extinct as the dodo bird and the big farmers and land corporations are doing their work with twelve-row equipment. It takes them only one trip through the field to plant or cultivate an entire acre. This is an extremely informative and absorbing memoir about the changes in agriculture across three generations. James shares some serious issues and concerns, and he relates where he believes things went wrong, and what he’s doing on his own farm to ensure a sustainable future, both financially and ecologically for his own children. In three sections (“Nostalgia,” “Progress,” and “Utopia”), Rebanks writes of learning to plant barley and tending animals with his grandfather, to witnessing the seismic transition of family farms into agribusinesses across England and the United States. In these movements, he invites readers into his most intimate moments shared with his young children during their daily chores on the farm—inherited land once farmed by his grandfather. This chronology and intimacy is effective in illustrating two important points: real change takes time, especially when you are tethered to a landscape, and healthy ecosystems, including agroecosystems, are more a practice than a destination.

Pastoral Song

Pastoral Songis the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. 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. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future.

James Rebank is a farmer, son and grandson of farmers. When the old style of farming - mixed and rotational - made a final shift towards industrialised farming, he had a front row seat. Some of what he recounts, I already knew. I grew up in rural Dorset, went to school with farmers' children, played on their farms and saw some of this shift for myself - although it would be many years before I really understood what I was seeing. Even after those realisations bore fruit, there was a level of nuance that I just didn't have. Like James, I am a country person. I know the plants, trees, birds, wildlife. I feel an intense connection to the land. Everything he says here lands on fertile soil with me, confirming much of what I did know and deepening my understanding in other ways. A brilliant, beautiful book” ( Sunday Times): the New York Timesbestselling author of A Shepherd’s Lifechronicles his family’s farm in England’s Lake District across three generations as they lose and reclaim “the old ways,” revealing through this intimate lens the profound global transformation of food production and of the human relationship to the land. I will be honest, I absolutely adored “The Shepherd’s Life” and was not sure this would appeal to me. However, I was so very wrong. Rebanks has written a book that is both informative and offers an insight into his family history. Rebanks really opens up to the reader about what his family life is like, how far they have come and how far they have to go. At the same time, Rebanks reflects on modern farming and the damage that has been caused, is being caused and could be caused in the future.

Pastoral Song – A Farmer’s Journey

I cannot remember the last time I read a book that had such an impact on me. I found this absolutely fascinating and gave me so much to think about. In no way is this patronising and Rebanks can admit to his own weaknesses and downfalls. With this read you will learn about farming, natural history and family life, whilst at the same time be left with deep questions around the future of farming and of our world.

Pastoral Song gives readers an insider’s perspective into a part of society that is extremely important yet persistently overlooked by a public that takes for granted the labor—and pain—that goes into keeping their bellies full. Unfortunately, lazy prose and a fragmentary structure make for an inconsistent reading experience. 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 What a terrific book: vivid and impassioned and urgent – and, in both its alarm and its awe for the natural world, deeply convincing. Rebanks leaves no doubt that the question of how to farm is a question of human survival on this hard-used planet. He should be read by everyone who grows food, and by everyone who eats it.”— Philip Gourevitch 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.

So I hear you, James Rebanks. Maybe you can make some headway in your country, I sure hope so, but things are not going to get any better in ours before they get worse, and you know it. The bigger the better mentality is here to stay and I read what you said about us in an interview. You said that nothing about agriculture changes in our country “because the status quo works just great for a handful of giant corporations who own the food and farming system.” And that both U.S. political parties are bought off by lobbyists from Big Ag and Big Pharma.