Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey

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Early adopters are buying optical spraying systems to greatly reduce the amount of herbicide required for pre-season burnoff of weeds…. The months after my father’s death were the hardest of my life. I had always wanted to be the farmer, the captain of the ship with my hand on the wheel, but the moment it happened it felt empty. The world seemed a dull shade of gray. Beyond our little valley, people everywhere seemed to have gone insane, electing fools and doing strange things in their anger. England was divided and broken. Suddenly in those months I felt lost. It was as if I had been following in someone else’s footsteps down a path, talking to them, reassured by them when the going got tough, and then they had disappeared. The farm was a lonely place—a poorer thing when it wasn’t shared. And with every passing year farmers were becoming fewer and fewer, a vanishingly small and increasingly powerless share of the population. Our world felt fragile, like it might now break into tiny pieces.

Orion Magazine - Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

James Rebanks writes with insight, honesty and a deeply entrenched love for the land. English Pastoral is thought-provoking, often challenging and at its heart is a beautifully-written story of a family, a home and a changing landscape.”— Nigel Slater,chef and author of Greenfeast

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. 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.

Pastoral Song - James Rebanks - Harper Academic Pastoral Song - James Rebanks - Harper Academic

One of the hardest aspects to understand in how farming affects nature,” says Rebanks, “is that there is often a time lag between cause and effect.” The post-war cult of cheap food soon began to create immense pressures on the farms and fields from which that food came, forcing farmers to “search for every productivity gain possible.” Rebanks realized that farming had been reduced to a “financial and engineering (against nature) challenge rather than understood as a biological activity.” 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 It’s gorgeous … I can’t recommend it enough.”— Caitlin Moran,NYT bestselling author of How to Be a WomanThis is Nonfiction/Environment/Nature. As this one started, I wasn't feeling it. I needed to read it for a reading challenge so I plowed ahead. I eventually fell into its rhythm and I was so glad I stayed with it. This wasn't quite 5 stars, but I rounded up for the overall message. Everyone should read this, whether you grow food or eat food....this is for you. This is a timely message.