Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey

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Remarkable … A brilliant, beautiful book … Eloquent, persuasive and electric with the urgency that comes out of love.”— Sunday Times (London)

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

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… 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 (UK)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 Pastoral Song] is a work of art. It is nourishing and grounding to read when the world around us is so full of fear. This brave and beautiful book will shape hearts and minds." - Jane Clarke, author of When the Tree Falls 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.” Although seemingly close to Isabella Tree (and her “rewilding” at Knepp) his focus is not on rewilding (which in its fullest sense he sees as firstly impractical on any scale, and secondly as leading to either even more intensive and damaging farming on the land left for growing food or to the import of food and the exporting of the environmental damage) but on altering the practices of farms in lots of ways which improve their impact and on altering people’s attitudes to the quality, convenience and price of what they eat. He argues that any natural system has an alpha predator and that enlightened man has the potential to be the best such alpha. James Rebanks’s story of his family’s farm is just about perfect. It belongs with the finest writing of its kind.”— Wendell Berry

Summary and reviews of Pastoral Song by James Rebanks Summary and reviews of Pastoral Song by James Rebanks

Our response to ecological collapse may prove to be the defining legacy of our generation, one way or the other. Many well-meaning, largely urban and middle class people have taken to the streets in the name of the planet in recent years. But waving placards and climbing on top of trains when something becomes fashionable is all show. In this brilliant, deeply moving book, James Rebanks details what true rebellion and real bravery look like. A memoir of three generations of men farming one Lake District farm, Rebanks takes us through the modern agricultural revolution, what it did to the land and the pressures on farmers which forced them to go along with it. Rebanks is an incredible writer, who combines a passionate love for, and knowledge of, his farming work with lyrical, powerful prose. Just as in reading The Shepherd’s Life before it, I was challenged, moved and changed by this book. Rebanks’ books are a must read for all those who, like myself, rely on farmers every day and yet know nothing of the realities of the world in which they live and the pressures they face.

Pastoral Song

The New York Times bestselling author of The Shepherd's Life chronicles his family's farm in England's Lake District across three generations, revealing through this intimate lens the profound global transformation of agriculture and of the human relationship to the land. He is eloquent — scenes of mud and guts are interspersed with quotes ranging from Virgil to Schumpeter, Rachel Carson to Wendell Berry…[ Pastoral Song] 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 (UK)

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

Remarkable … A brilliant, beautiful book … Eloquent, persuasive and electric with the urgency that comes out of love.” — Sunday Times (London) 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. 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) 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 TimesA 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. 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.” There were many accolades from some very fine authors regarding this book: Wendell Berry; Richard Flanagan, and Philip Gouretivich. 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. Scott Shane's outstanding work Flee North tells the little-known tale of an unlikely partnership ...

Pastoral Song - James Rebanks - Hardcover - HarperCollins Canada Pastoral Song - James Rebanks - Hardcover - HarperCollins Canada

Thank the gods of agriculture for James Rebanks. … A lyrical narrative of experience, tracing 40 years and three generations of farming on his family’s land as it is buffeted by the incredible shifts in scale, market, methods and trade rules that have changed farming all over the world.… We experience that esoteric life through Rebanks’s evocative storytelling, learning with him to appreciate not only the sheep and crops he’s learning to tend, but the wild plants and animals that live among and around them.”— New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice

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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.