Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey

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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.

PASTORAL SONG | Kirkus Reviews

He 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 TimesEach of the chapters is named slightly ironically: the first chapter does not hide some of the brutal realities and precariousness of his Grandfather’s approach; the second commendably tries to be partly even handed about the change (recognising what it has done to enable more people to be fed alongside concentrating on all that has been lost) and the third is far from a utopia but a very deliberate compromise the author has made which he knows will disappoint both “die hard production focused farmers” and “extreme wilderness-loving ecologists” 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. 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. This quote towards the end of the book was my favorite and sums it up nicely: "I am tired of the absolutes and extremes and the angriness of this age. We need more kindness, compromise, and balance". Indeed.

Pastoral Song by James Rebanks — Open Letters Review Pastoral Song by James Rebanks — Open Letters Review

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 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.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? 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. Superbly written and deeply insightful, the book captivates the reader until the journey’s end. ... Pastoral Song is a lament for lost traditions, a celebration of a way of living and a reminder that nature is ‘finite and breakable.’ Mr. Rebanks hits all the right notes and deserves to be heard.”— Wall Street Journal, Best of the Month

Pastoral Song | James Rebanks | 9780063073272 | NetGalley Pastoral Song | James Rebanks | 9780063073272 | NetGalley

A healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land; it nourishes and safeguards a human intelligence of the earth that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace. Rebanks's prose is sometimes simple but often lyrical as he describes the landscape and nature around his fells farm in the Lake District of England. He says that the literary tradition of the Lake District was mostly about the middle class and asks, "Where were the farmers?" He writes about the forgotten farmers and his long legacy on the land. His family has lived in this area for hundreds of years. This book tells a story of that old world and what it became. It is the story of a global revolution as it played out in the fields of my family’s two small farms: my father’s rented farm in the Eden Valley, which we left nearly two decades ago now, and my grandfather’s little Lake District fell farm, seventeen miles to the west, where I live and work today. It is the story, warts and all, of what farming was like here in my childhood, and what it became. It is about farmers like us, in our tens of thousands, across the country and around the world, and why we did the things we did—and what some of us are now trying to do to make it right. The last forty years on the land were revolutionary and disrupted all that had gone before for thousands of years—a radical and ill-thought-through experiment that was conducted in our fields. Rebanks has a gift for capturing both the allure of his beautiful surroundings and his difficult work, and for articulating the complex, worrisome issues facing farmers today. Pastoral Song enchants. ... Urgently conveys how the drive for cheap, mass-produced food has impoverished both small farmers and the soil, threatening humanity's future." — NPR.org, What We're Excited to Read Next MonthNear the end of the book, as he catalogues all the changes that must occur to combat the farming crisis, he implicates the reader by switching to the pronoun “we.” His rhetoric fails to inspire because unlike the memoir portions of Pastoral Song, he discards concrete details for abstract ideas. He writes: “We are all responsible for the new industrial-style farming. We let it happen because we thought we wanted the sort of future it promised us. Now, if we want a different kind of future, we need to make some difficult decisions to make that happen.” What decisions need to be made? How will they affect the future? Even in the climax to this section, he drifts into generalization: “Some of the solutions are small and individual, but others require big political and structural changes.” 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.” Cynics will say James plays both sides of the nature vs farming debate but that is exactly what we need. Read this if you want an honest depiction of how difficult farming can be. Rebanks dispels the myth that the life of the farmer is one of independence. They’re unforgivingly tied to trade agreements and the feeding habits of the rest of the world and he writes hauntingly about him and his father trying to keep up with the pace of modern agriculture. Rebanks offers a sensible way to think about food and the planet. ... His prose will transport readers, introducing them to both the harsh realities and the joys of everyday life on a piece of land that has deep, personal meaning." — Christian Science Monitor, Best of the Month This intimate and moving book is timely and relatable.... With a critical and curious eye, he asks of himself—and society at large—what does it mean to be a “good” farmer?" — Civil Eats