English Pastoral by James Rebanks (100 books to read .txt) 📕

my family was very good at explaining anything we did or offered much by way of clear analysis of what was happening to the farming world around us. So I began to read to try and get answers. I loved the classic farming books like A. G. Street’s Farmer’s Glory and Henry Williamson’s The Story of a Norfolk Farm, and I slogged through countless textbooks that were full of useful information, but dull as dishwater. I learned that we were a ‘mixed’ and ‘rotational’ farm. Mixed because we grew a number of different crops and kept a few different types of livestock, and rotational because our fields were worked in a sequence that was centuries old.

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The whole history of farming was really the story of people trying and often failing to overcome natural constraints on production. Chief amongst these was the fertility of the soil. Farmers learned the hard way through endless experimentation, trial and error, discovering that if we overexploited our soil, ecosystems would collapse, and our ability to live and prosper with it. Fields could not produce the same crops over and over again without becoming exhausted. This was because each crop took certain nutrients from soil, emptying its bank of fertility eventually, and then crop diseases and pests would build up in the tired ground until they became devastating. Nature would punish the farmer for his arrogance. Whole civilizations disappeared because their farming methods degraded their soils.

The solution arrived at from all this struggling and failing was to rotate fields through different crops and uses: some sown with grain, some grazed by livestock, and some left unused and weedy to rest and recover. Different types of crops put different nutrients and organic matter back into the soil through their roots or crop waste after the harvest. After growing wheat, the farmer might sow oats, or, if the soil grew tired of cultivation, rest the fields, leaving them fallow (unused). This sequence helped restore the soil and ensured the fields would feed the crops in the future. My father and grandfather no more knew why this rotation worked than the ancient farmer, but two millennia later they had still abided by the same basic rules. It seemed kind of amazing to me that I could have grown up on a farm, and had eleven years of schooling, and never once had anyone explain to me why these things were done.

As I read through this library of our varied attempts to find farming systems that would sustain us, one of the strangest aspects I discovered was that the field pattern I knew was not timeless – it had once been something quite different. Medieval English peasants had divided their cropping lands into lots of little strips (with the pastures held as commons and each household having a right to graze a certain number of animals). In the cropping fields, each strip was allocated to a different peasant farmer, until he or she had several scattered around the parish, their amount of land reflecting the number of mouths they had to feed. Each peasant grew a range of crops like oats, barley, rye and other staples. Fields divided like barcodes would have baffled my grandfather. Why trudge around between strips, when land could have been parcelled up in larger, more efficiently sized fields? Why waste time walking between the strips and carrying around ploughs, hoes, scythes or sickles? Why leave a wasteful no man’s land of a foot or two between each strip? But I learned that having these different strips provided useful barriers to slow down the spread of plant diseases and crop-destroying pests, gave homes to pollinators and insects that preyed on the pests, and safeguarded against extreme weather by ensuring each family had their food supply spread in different areas of the parish, so that risks like drought or crop disease were mitigated. But the underlying principle was to have multiple crops in rotation, as on the ancient farmer’s field – and on my grandfather’s land on a different scale. The unbreakable law of the field was sustaining soil health and fertility.

Over the centuries there were major advances in our struggle to fertilize the fields and changes in the ways of parcelling out the land, not least in the ‘enclosure’ of those medieval communal strip fields into larger privately farmed fields in fewer hands. In the seventeenth century British farmers discovered that they could boost the fertility of their soil by planting clover. Clover fixed atmospheric nitrogen (the invisible key to crop fertility) into the soil through its roots, and turned the unproductive fallow period into continuing production (previously, this extra nitrogen was only accessible to farmers through lucky lightning strikes). It could be grazed with sheep or cattle (which provided additional harvests of meat, milk and wool), and this grazing killed arable weeds and trampled muck and organic matter into the turf, keeping the microbiology of the soil working and in good health. (The effect of sheep on tired crop-growing land was known as the ‘golden hoof’ because they made crop land healthy and productive again.) In my childhood, my grandfather still sowed clover with the barley, so that after harvesting the grain the half green stubble could be grazed by the sheep.

I understood now that my grandfather had fussed over the muck from his cows because it was an important part of the nutrient cycle of the farm – something no sensible person would waste. Everything taken from a field to be eaten by a human, or an animal, took nutrients away from the soil that had to be replaced. I learned that over the past 200 or 300 years the ever-increasing demand for food from a growing population meant that many soils were becoming over-cropped and exhausted because ploughing (even in a rotational system featuring clover crops) took a toll on the soil and impoverished it over time. No one had told me this. But my grandfather did tell stories about his grandfather using