Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey

Product Information

This is an extremely informative and absorbing memoir about the changes in agriculture across three generations. James shares some serious issues and concerns, and he relates where he believes things went wrong, and what he’s doing on his own farm to ensure a sustainable future, both financially and ecologically for his own children. Having got them hooked with his story of everyday life on the fells, he's now moved in a campaigning direction. Here, he uses his own family's story, over three generations, to encapsulate and humanise the development of farming from its labour-intensive past in his grandfather's day, through the mechanisation and chemical-laden farming of the 1970s and 1980s, to the point he's reached today, where he tries to protect and enhance the natural environment while still making a living for himself and his family. It's really well done; the personal anecdotes and lyrical descriptive passages bring what could be an over-technical topic to life and bring home the brutal consequences of large-scale agribusiness. He doesn't really go in for facts and figures, though I was quite startled to learn that 50% of British milk is now produced by cows who spend their whole lives indoors.

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

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. Rebanks explores the changes of farming methods from small family farms, to larger farms that focused on machinery, genetics and businesses to now looking at a striking a balance between two- allowing ecosystems to flourish which in turn makes the land better and richer through returning to older methods, rewilding projects etc. What is good is he does so without a rose tinted naive outlook but is realistic at the challenges faced too. 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.” Each 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” 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 ChoiceLyrical and passionate … I was gripped from the very first paragraph … Rebanks has shone a brilliant light onto a world about which the vast majority of people know little … a cri de coeur for a healthier countryside, rather than a manifesto … a magnificent book.” — Literary Review The New York Times bestselling author of The Shepherd’s Life profiles his family’s farm across three generations, revealing through this intimate lens the profound global transformation of agriculture and of the human relationship to the land. 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.

Pastoral Song – HarperCollins Pastoral Song – HarperCollins

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. Pastoral Song gives readers an insider’s perspective into a part of society that is extremely important yet persistently overlooked by a public that takes for granted the labor—and pain—that goes into keeping their bellies full. Unfortunately, lazy prose and a fragmentary structure make for an inconsistent reading experience. History, anthropology, ecology nature, farming and memoirs are all in here- a must read for everyone! 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. 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)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. There were many accolades from some very fine authors regarding this book: Wendell Berry; Richard Flanagan, and Philip Gouretivich. Superbly written and deeply insightful, the book captivates the reader until the journey’s end.” — Wall Street Journal 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 Times 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.

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

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 This 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. This book is effectively a tale of two family farms – one rented by his late Father in the Eden Valley (between the Pennines and the Lake District) and where the author grew up, and one owned by his grandfather in the Lake District which the author now farms. My grandfather’s solicitor was simply spoken of as Charles, as in We’d better ask Charles about that, when anything remotely legal came up. Little market towns like ours have long had a smattering of middle-class professionals who serve the needs of farmers and others who live from the land. Everything that happens on a farm is affected by the era it exists in,” he says. “Farming is now a term that tries to encompass a vast messy range of activities.”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.

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

In Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey, James Rebanks offers a realistic perspective on the demands of farming as a profession and why farm systems across the world have shifted toward convenience and efficiency over the past four decades. Trying to balance both art and science, tradition and innovation within his own farm, Rebanks offers, “Our land is like a poem.” Compared to other treatises on the perils of modern agriculture, such as Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America or the Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Pastoral Song is a firsthand account of change and compromise within a multigenerational farming family that speaks to the heart our most urgent land management question: Can a commercial farm be a regenerative part of an ecosystem? A vividly-recalled memoir of a farming childhood, but also a forensic defence of the kind of agriculture that has nearly been wiped out. ... Perceptive, eloquent, and passionate. ... Rebanks writes so well that I can’t imagine anyone starting to read it and not being eager to read it all at once, as I did, and not being moved by the life and the landscape he describes so well. I was thrilled by it.” — Philip Pullman, #1 bestselling author of the “His Dark Materials” series? 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.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.