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

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Following the recent Agriculture Bill it seems that farmers will be paid only if they enhance the environment. 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. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and how the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. This is a course of action that increasing numbers of farmers will have to pursue as we leave the EU’s subsidy system. It also leaves leaves out the fact that it is several decades since the switch towards more sustainable farming was recognised in government (and to a lesser extent EU) policy.

This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.

I think, genuinely, this is the best book I've read this year, and one of the most important books of recent years. I really enjoy James Rebank books and his latest is a really smart way of thinking for future living and farming. He clearly sees that the farm and this way of life have been passed to him, and there is a duty, not just to carry on as before, but to improve the holding and secure a viable enterprise which could be handed on. 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.

An eloquent, well-informed, and practical Lake District shepherd was a welcome addition to any conversation. As he points out, there’s a thin line between utopianism and bullshit, and “beauty doesn’t pay the bills”. 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”.He brings together real evidence for the changes which are already underway and could be the basis for a sustainable foundation for both the landscape and the communities who provide stewardship for the land.

In terms of what he has to say, if not the style of saying it, much of Rebanks’s critique of modern farming could have been written by a well-informed green activist, although Rebanks doesn’t evince much enthusiasm for the current fashion for rewilding. 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 . What a terrific book : vivid and impassioned and urgent --and, in both its alarm and its awe for the natural world, deeply convincing. I was gripped from the very first paragraph, where he describes joining his grandfather on tractor and plough: ‘Black-headed gulls follow in our wake as if we are a little fishing boat out at sea.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.