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

crop wasn’t a one-off: it was a particularly disastrous (1 million people died, and a million more emigrated to escape it) version of something everyone lived in fear of prior to the advent of pesticides: failed harvests and rotting crops. Being able to grow huge quantities of nutritious affordable food to ‘feed the world’ without plagues of insects and crop diseases was revolutionary. Pesticides and artificial fertilizers offered us amazing new tools to do our work more efficiently than we ever could before. Vast amounts of food were lost to pests, diseases and vermin, or through bacteria or mould, both in the field while being grown and while being transported, stored or sold in the shops. The chemists were freeing agriculture and the human food chain from its eternal natural constraints.

~

My father spent the following summer in a blue T-shirt, on a tractor, with a giant milky cloud of pesticide rising behind him. Our old tractor trundled up the barley field, half submerged in the yellow sea. On the back was a crop-sprayer with wide booms, arms that reached out for about twenty feet on either side of the tractor. My old man was going to grow a ‘clean’ crop of barley like everyone else. The age of weeds was over.

As I watched him, I recalled how my grandfather had oozed contempt for tractors. He used them, and the machinery that came with them, but he didn’t like what they did to us, because the moment we stepped up onto them, we raised ourselves from the earth, no longer touching it, smelling it, feeling it. That sensory contact was the essence of knowing the land. Now we were spending more and more time on tractors, encased in glass, steel and plastic, and distracted with air con and the radio. He thought machine work was of a lower order of importance than working with animals or with your hands. Any fool could drive a tractor round and round a field. But they vastly increased the scope of what we could do in a day, and we had little choice. The number of people left working in the fields was declining, and the amount of time the surviving farmers spent in the fields was reducing too.

In the 1970s Grandad had had a 45-horsepower Massey Ferguson. Now our tractor had 100-horsepower, and some of our friends had 200-horsepower tractors. On the bigger farms the giant tractors could now rip out a tree by its roots as if it were a toy. We watched in awe as the new machines on those farms were used to achieve incredible efficiencies of scale, re-engineering landscapes entirely. There was little sentimentality. Fields could not be museums. Small, narrow or crooked fields created in the age of the horse were no good now. Trees, rocks, thorn bushes, walls and boggy areas got in the way of tidy machine-work. Fields were quickly made larger, flatter, better drained and less weedy. Obstacles like woodland, hedgerows, ponds, bogs or rivers were cleared, drained, straightened or filled in. There could be no barriers to machine-work. An efficient landscape was required to make food cheap. A new combine harvester might cost half a million pounds, and so it needed to cover the greatest possible number of acres to earn back its cost rather than messing around in little fields.

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On our dining-room wall hung aerial photos of our farm, taken from a light aircraft by enterprising photographers. They sold my family one of these farm pictures every few years. On them you could see how the fields and farmstead were changing size – not overnight, but steadily, a little bit at a time. By examining those photographs over time, you could see how the field boundaries were disappearing rapidly – walls, hedges and fences vanishing. On our rare excursions to southern England for a sheep sale or an agricultural show, we would stare out of the car windows amazed at whole landscapes already simplified to grow one or two crops intensively from horizon to horizon. What worked at a farm scale could also now be made to work on a much larger scale, with whole regions specializing in doing one or two things. A traditional mixed farm had limits to its scope: it needed a farmer, and people to move cattle or sheep around, lay hedges, build walls and do other craft work. The new farming needed none of that.

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My uncle and aunt went on holidays to North America to see the latest high-performance livestock and machinery at first hand. They had a better lowland farm than us and were way ahead of us in embracing change. They came back from America as evangelists for change. They brought back baseball caps and Hershey bars. We listened as they spoke of even more advanced tractors, machines and livestock, and soon these things were appearing on local farms. To the eyes and ears of people who had spent years digging drainage ditches by hand with a spade, or who had followed behind horse-drawn ploughs with frozen hands and feet, and scythed meadows until their hands blistered and their shirts were wet with sweat, these felt like giant steps forward.

~

My mother was sobbing in the kitchen, tears flowing down her face in front of everyone. None of us had ever seen this before and it filled the room with confusion, and another sensation I hadn’t experienced before: shame. The whole family had been to a farmer friend’s funeral, and afterwards there was a family row about something that seemed to be about everything but the stated cause. My father had apparently let the family down by not having the right kind of funeral coat. The men are meant to look respectful – and all the same – in thick woollen coats, dark grey or black, inch-thick to turn the grief, while they stand at the back of the church, or in the churchyard, singing old hymns about shepherds. I had no idea there was a right kind