English Pastoral: An Inheritance - The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of The Shepherd's Life

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James Rebanks learnt from his grandfather the 'old ways' of working the land, just as those ways were on the cusp of being abandoned. And thirty years later he inherited his father's farm just as farmers and farming were being slated as the villains of the English countryside - accused of denuding nature in pursuit of spiralling profit. James Rebanks combines the descriptive powers of a great novelist with the pragmatic wisdom of a farmer who has watched his world transformed. This is a profound and beautiful book about the land, and how we should live off it. -- Ed Caesar History, anthropology, ecology nature, farming and memoirs are all in here- a must read for everyone! English Pastoral is a work of art. It is nourishing and grounding to read ... this brave and beautiful book will shape hearts and minds. -- Jane Clarke, author of When the Tree Falls

The demise of family farms means that there are fewer and fewer people living in rural areas and that is why communities are dying on the vine and why there are fewer houses and trees – and it is also why I feel no attachment to the place where I lived from age five to age twenty-one. Today, there are no buildings or trees or any evidence that anyone has ever lived on it; it’s just 160 acres of dirt that belongs to a corporation.There was a time to live and a time to die. When he killed, he did it swiftly, with respect, but without great displays of emotion. Knowing and seeing death on personal terms, he had a kind of reverence for meat on the table. We were told not to leave a morsel, even the bacon rinds. He would have been confused that anyone could be so foolish, or rich enough, to suffer rabbits destroying a crop, or so morally elevated to think they were above killing when it was called for. He existed in nature, as an actor on the stage, always struggling to hold his ground. A risen ape, not a fallen angel." James Rebanks The name of the game became productivity. Ancient field systems were broken up, traditional crop rotation abandoned. Breeds of plants and animals re-engineered to produce greater yields on massive farms.

One of the most important books of our time. Told with humility and grace, this story of farming over three generations - where we went wrong and how we can change our ways - will be our land's salvation. -- Isabella Tree A lament for lost traditions, a celebration of a way of living and a reminder that nature is 'finite and breakable.' Mr. Rebanks hits all the right notes and deserves to be heard * Wall Street Journal *Basically, in this book, Rebanks comes out (in the last section, where Utopia must be a somewhat ironic title?) as a farmer who gets what nature conservationists have said about farming for years. He accepts that modern farming has damaged soils, reduced wildlife and increased flood risk whilst not being great for animal welfare and yet producing cheap food for us all. 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… It moved me to tears, made me feel excited and optimistic, and said, so eloquently and succinctly, all the things I've been thinking and feeling ... It is not just a beautiful book to read, but so important and so timely. A wonderful, thought-provoking, heartlifting read. -- Kate Humble The constant wanting of store-bought things he (James Rebanks’ grandfather) held in disdain. He thought these people (he and his fellow local farmers) had understood something about freedom that everyone else had missed, that if you didn’t need things–shop-bought possessions–then you were free from the need to earn the money to pay for them.

Perhaps related to this the solutions the book puts forward does seem to focus on a particular type of farm – highland, small scale which I cannot relate to many farms I know – and I suspect the upcoming book from the head of Conservation on the Holkham estate will be of much greater interest to me (see for example this New Yorker article https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...)Anyway I am glad this book seems to be very well liked by so many people. I hope you can read it! 😊 This work explains how farming used to be and how it was changed as big supermarkets forced down prices at the farmgate and the nature of the work was transformed, and land brought to the edge of ruin. Rebanks is a rare find indeed: a Lake District farmer whose family have worked the land for 600 years, with a passion to save the countryside and an elegant prose style to engage even the most urban reader. He's refreshingly realistic about how farmed and wild landscapes can coexist and technology can be tamed. A story for us all. * Evening Standard, Best Books of Autumn 2020 * James Rebanks describes the life of a Lakeland working farmer from the inside with a unrivalled truth and eloquence -- Tom Fort, author of Casting Shadows

The reason was that all the landmarks were gone. There was a time that farmers needed laborers to help them farm their land and that is why there was a house on every forty acres. But today, because the owner doesn’t live on the farm, there may not be even one house. James Rebanks describes the life of a Lakeland working farmer from the inside with a unrivalled truth and eloquence" It is a book full of love: of his grandfather, of his children and of the Lake District valley where he lives and farms ... Some books change our world. I hope this turns out to be one of them. -- Julian Glover * Evening Standard * Rebanks didn’t get on with his father and chose to spend his spare time helping out on his grandfather’s farm rather than his father’s. I can imagine future historians mining English Pastoral for information about ploughing and harvesting, making hay and scything thistles, pulling out ragwort and ferreting in the days before the tentacles of modern agriculture reached into the hills. The story he tells is one of hard work, little money and narrow horizons, reminiscent of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie but without the adolescent sex and occasional violence.About the time that I left the farm my father bought four-row equipment, but by then bigger farmers were planting and cultivating with six-row equipment. Today, family farms such as ours have become as extinct as the dodo bird and the big farmers and land corporations are doing their work with twelve-row equipment. It takes them only one trip through the field to plant or cultivate an entire acre. Rebanks is on a passionate crusade to spread the word on “how can we farm in ways that will endure and do the least harm?” He maintains that “[a]pplying industrial thinking and technologies to agriculture to the exclusion of other values and judgments has been an unmitigated disaster for our landscapes and communities.” He goes on to say that “to have healthy food and farming systems we need a new culture of land stewardship, which for me would be the best of the old values and practices and a good chunk of new scientific thinking.” As he maintains, it is so-called agricultural progress that has led to large, terribly expensive machines, heavy applications of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, hormones to put on weight of beef cattle and increase production of dairy cows, and indiscriminate use of antibiotics.