Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey

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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 Month 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. This was a brilliant book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. James Rebanks is a farmer in Cumbria. He comes from generations of farmers on the same land and muses over the changes that have taken place on the same land and within farming in general within the UK. 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. Rebanks: “I grew up understanding that a farm was a piece of property, a private thing owned by someone, a family’s entire wealth, or else a tangled legacy of debt and obligation. It was above all a place of work – work that defined people and gave them purpose. It was also a business, a commercial enterprise, producing food to pay the bills and feed other people … get farming even slightly wrong and people begin to go hungry, the poor first, get it badly wrong and millions starve.” p268

What particularly stood out for me in this book was how Rebanks showed many themes are intertwined. With farming modernised and following business models and looking at scientifically engineering genetics of crops and animals this has a negative effect on the quality of soil, isn’t sustainable, wildlife is lost and becomes extinct and interestingly human communities too begin to break down. We are more entertwimed then we realise and we need to wake up and start thinking about this soon.

This was a great follow-up to other books I’ve been reading recently about environmentalism and long-term thinking, such as Losing Eden (which, similarly, took inspiration from Silent Spring) and The Good Ancestor, and should attract readers of Wilding by Isabella Tree. I hope it will go far in next year’s Wainwright Prize race. The main thrust I think of the author’s arguments is captured in this compromise. At its worse this seems to be rather resentful of both sides: he seems to share equal dislike for the world of neo-liberal free-trade and globalised economics (economists in particular seem to be his rather odd bête noire) and for left-wing extremists (George Monbiot is not named in the book but the two seem to have a history of opposition). But more commonly he argues against entrenched positions (that farmers are either all bad or all good) and bifurcation (for example colleges which turn out either economics focused MBA farmers or nature loving ecologists but without ever bringing the two into dialogue). 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. Author James Rebanks’ memoir, is written with a prose that’s so poetic, it’s fair to say it touches the soul, and was extremely moving.

Near 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.” 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 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 will be recommending this book to others - it’s vital that the author’s message gets out there. As he quotes at the end of the book, as said by Mayson Weir, Dowthwaite Head Farm:

Pastoral Song

English Pastoral’ is a beautiful portrayal of an English farming family, this is incredibly enjoyable as well as being insightful. I absolutely loved this. 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.