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

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Nothing about that day of making silage was entirely new. The improved grass, the synthetic fertilizers, the tractors and the practice of making silage all had roots three or four decades back. But the scale and pace were different – it was all much more intense. I was experiencing the latter stages of a race almost run.

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I came home from Australia full of bright ideas about how we could modernize our farm. But Dad just shrugged and walked away, perhaps too proud to say out loud that we hadn’t the money to start buying fancy new tractors and trailers, and perhaps not entirely convinced he wanted to anyway. He seemed a bit stranded between the old ways and the new. He made do with an ageing tractor or two, and some rusting second-hand machinery, and old hay barns. We did make some silage, but now he thought we should continue to make meadow hay as we always had.

So we waited for a weather forecast of four or five fine days in July, and then started the cycle of mowing, drying, turning, baling and leading into the barns. It was a nightmare that dragged on for weeks. Our first attempt at hay was ruined by rain, so after that we took it a field or two at a time. We fiddled on slowly, trying to get some made and into the barns safely, to minimize the risk of a winter forage shortage. It was weeks of sweaty, dusty manual work in the fields and stacking bales in the barn. That meant recruiting my elderly uncle to drive the bales to the bottom of the elevator with a mechanical clamp, while my mother lifted them on to the petrol-driven elevator, and my father and I were up in the eaves, throwing them to each other and laying them down in layers, in the stack we called a ‘mew’, crossed at the joints, where they would hold each other in place until winter. Honestly, I didn’t mind the work, but I was frustrated by how slow we were compared to farms with more staff or machinery to handle the bales. I mocked my dad, saying we were like ‘Dad’s Army’.

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We might not be able to afford the latest machines, but I knew from the leaflets left by the travelling salesmen that if you really wanted to crack this modern farming game you needed to use the latest pesticides.

The spear thistles were waist-high, their purple flowers beginning to open. The bottom acre of our Cow Pasture had been taken over by them. It had become so rank that even the cows barely bothered to go there. There weren’t enough people left on our farm to scythe these weeds. They were getting out of control, and someone had to do something. I thought we were hopelessly outdated, and I was fed up that the changes my dad made still weren’t big enough or fast enough to catch up with the large modern farms. So I bought the latest thistle pesticide from the agricultural merchants we used. It was cheap. It came in a squat brown plastic bottle and I diluted it in water. I also bought a mini-sprayer that was mounted on my back with straps, called a ‘knapsack’, and spent every night for a week zapping every thistle and nettle on the farm. I swung the lance backwards and forwards until I was surrounded by a white cloud of spray, and the back of my mouth felt dry and tasted bitter. I mixed the stuff twice as strong as the instructions said, because we all knew that the ‘boffins’ always played on the safe side. Satisfyingly, the thistles and nettles were wilting by the time I passed home, their silver under-leaves turned over.

A couple of days later they were black and shrivelled. There was hardly a living thistle or nettle in the fields. Not only did it kill every thistle, but it also stopped them seeding as well. I went back and sprayed any survivors until the field was clean. Within weeks whole areas of our farm that were once plagued with thistles could now be cleared and we were able to grow grass without weeds. Work that had taken three of us several days every summer no longer needed doing. Our scythe became another museum exhibit hung in the roof of our barn, growing rusty with each passing year, triangular cobwebs stretched between blade and shaft. Our fields started to look much tidier, and more like the neat modern farms we knew. I sprayed the nettles in the stack yard, where the old machines were left to rust, and the edges of the fields where clumps of nettles and other weeds grew. This was modern farming. The spray was bloody miraculous stuff. Even my dad was won over. We were heading for the future.

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I knew we were late to the party. Synthetic pesticides had been saving crops from weeds and diseases since the Second World War. In 1939 Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Muller found that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), a chemical developed in the 1870s, could be used to kill insects. DDT was, like ammonium nitrate, a Nobel prize-winning ‘miracle’. It was used with great success to eliminate typhus almost completely from large parts of Europe during the Second World War by killing off huge numbers of mosquitoes; it was also used to eradicate malaria in America in a few short years after that. DDT was marketed to farmers as an insecticide. It could be used to kill almost any insects, fungi, bacteria or vermin that destroyed or spoiled crops, as well as insects that carried pathogens that could make farm animals sick.

I remembered my father looking utterly defeated by mildew blotches on the leaves of our barley and how sickly and wasted it looked. All our crops were vulnerable like this. The infamous Irish potato famine which was triggered by potato blight ravaging a society over-reliant on a single