Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey

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Example? I say it is a good book, much of it superb writing, with paradoxical messaging that bites itself on the ankle several times. The text comes entirely from a shepherd-writer at once torn by his journey while still living this story’s outcome right now. The book IS for the most part hot on target, stirring, elegant and vital. BUT, it too often slips and becomes side-swiping, a ‘realist’s harangue’ against those who are the better and best examples because their courageous farming comes from passion and a perpetual husbandry-alignment with nature. 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. The book makes it clear that with modernity and our instant culture of now we are ruining and losing many aspects of our land. So many things are interwoven and if one thing is changed for the immediate benefit of one group, this may be at a massive and destructive cost to others. We need to think long term about the ecosystems, land, nature, wildlife and not just look at the end products wrapped in plastics in the supermarket. So many of the answers we are looking for our rooted in history if we look, even if we didn’t know why things worked like they did at the time. As a witness to his grandfather’s careful attention to the land as well as the stress and burden his own father carried trying to stay financially viable amid massive food system consolidation and modernization, Rebanks is in a unique position. And he is willing to share what he has learned, and is humble enough to admit what he has yet to figure out. “I have worked here my entire life, but I am only now beginning to know this piece of land.” Torn between what is good and what is necessary, Rebanks educates his readers on the workings of his own farm, like soil biology and animal breeding, and suggests possibilities for the future of food, such as a return to diversification in animal and plant production and a revitalization of local food-processing infrastructure. 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.

In Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey, James Rebanks offers a realistic perspective on the demands of farming as a profession and why farm systems across the world have shifted toward convenience and efficiency over the past four decades. Trying to balance both art and science, tradition and innovation within his own farm, Rebanks offers, “Our land is like a poem.” Compared to other treatises on the perils of modern agriculture, such as Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America or the Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Pastoral Song is a firsthand account of change and compromise within a multigenerational farming family that speaks to the heart our most urgent land management question: Can a commercial farm be a regenerative part of an ecosystem? Nostalgia (which broadly is the author’s reflections on his Grandfather’s more traditional approach to farming around 40 years ago in an already changing era – his Grandfather a late resister to the changes around him) The New York Timesbestselling author of The Shepherd’s Lifeprofiles 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.Hailed as "a brilliant, beautiful book" by the Sunday Times (London), Pastoral Song (published in the United Kingdom under the title English Pastoral) is 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. Superbly written and deeply insightful, the book captivates the reader until the journey’s end.” — Wall Street Journal Remarkable…A brilliant, beautiful book…Eloquent, persuasive and electric with the urgency that comes out of love." - Sunday Times (UK)

James Rebanks’s new book may be the most passionate ecological corrective since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring." — New York Review of Books 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...) When you tell her she’s beautiful you don’t add “for a woman her age.” In any discussion of matters which matter, when I hear the words, “let’s be realistic” my ears plug.James Rebanks’s fierce, personal description of what has gone wrong with the way we farm and eat, and how we can put it right, gets my vote as the most important book of the year ...Some books change our world. I hope this turns out to be one of them.”— Julian Glover, Evening Standard I’m maybe old and stupid, but I like to see them things. But you don’t see them anymore. And greed is to blame. Greed. And it will get worse if they don’t change things. 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. I must admit I struggled with the first part of the book and the description of apparently traditional and generally benevolent farming from around 40 years ago. My own recollection of farming from that time was of widespread use of pesticides, polluting stubble burning (with the added “bonus” of accidental destruction of pesty field boundaries), destruction of hedgerows, the deliberate concealment or obstruction of rights of way – and that things are much better in almost every sense since - but I think industrial farming hit East Anglia a long time before the author’s corner of the lakes. 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

While we understand the absolute urgency of these times, we choose to see that urgency stemming from the too often crippling arrogance and stupidity of academia, governance, and corporate board rooms. Humans are OF nature. The premise that our species is somehow separate and expected to correct and improve on nature, that premise is what got us here. Now, authors such as Rebanks argue we are best suited to correct the problem. Every second of every day, the supreme force that is Nature works to correct the problems that humans cause – sometimes successfully. Rebanks is a rare find indeed: a Lake District farmer whose family have worked the land for 600 years, with a passion to save the countryside and an elegant prose style to engage even the most urban reader. He’s refreshingly realistic about how farmed and wild landscapes can coexist and technology can be tamed. A story for us all.”— Evening Standard (London) Winner of the 2021 Wainwright Prize for Writing for UK Nature Writing – the book was described by the prize as “the story of an inheritance. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world have been brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things are being lost. 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 for us all.”Rebanks: “The biggest lesson I have learned is that the whole idea of the heroic individual farmer is a bit of a macho-male myth.” p249 Rebanks' lifetime spent farming gives this book its credibility; his sensible tone gives it its power. And his eloquence describing his beloved farm gives it its beauty." — Minneapolis Star Tribune History, anthropology, ecology nature, farming and memoirs are all in here- a must read for everyone!

Remarkable … A brilliant, beautiful book … Eloquent, persuasive and electric with the urgency that comes out of love.”— Sunday Times (London) It was sad reading about the demise of the family farm. How in the good old days there were harvest festivals that brought the farming community together every year, and now it’s a thing of the past. I think we are taught that progress is a good thing with no ands, ifs, or buts. I think this book is a cautionary tale…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.” 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.