English Pastoral by James Rebanks review – how to look after the land
Written by Blake Morrison
We are becoming slaves to consumerism ... the UK’s favourite shepherd returns with a paean to a more life-enhancing approach to farming
At 20, James Rebanks ran away from his family farm in the Lake District to visit Australia. The vast scale of farming there both impressed and depressed him. He was homesick for the crooked fields, ancient hedges and dry stone walls of home. And he revered the traditions his grandfather had taught him. But now his grandfather was dead and his father deep in debt. Small farms like theirs, scraping by with a mix of crops and livestock, belonged to the past. Unless he could persuade his father to modernise, they were doomed.
For a time, on his return, they tried. They switched to more “efficient” breeds of sheep, stopped growing turnips and barley, sprayed pesticide to clear their pastures of thistles, and no longer laid hedges by hand. The bigger farms in the area, with their factory-like sheds and large herds of “engineered” cattle, were already ahead of the game. The farmers were changing, too – managerial “shirt and tie” types driving round in Range Rovers became the norm. The exception was a neighbour called Henry, so old-fashioned that he still spread his fields with muck from cattle yards rather than using artificial fertiliser or slurry. Poor Henry was a joke – until the soil from his fields was sent to an analyst and found to be richer than the intensively farmed land around it: “The most traditional farmer in the district had the healthiest soil.”
As Rebanks points out, there's a thin line between utopianism and bulls**t, and 'beauty doesn't pay the bills'
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