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

Remarkably, this process of intensification is still speeding up, not slowing down. The largest British herds now have more than 1,000 cows, and some herds globally have tens of thousands. More than 50 per cent of British milk is now produced from cows that live permanently indoors. The cows are changing so fast in the elite herds that only the first daughters of each generation are kept for the herd, because by the time they calve for the second time, a year later, the genetics of the next generation of cows (a year younger) are superior to theirs.

~

As the animals disappeared indoors, the large gangs of farm workers that had once played games of football on our flattest field vanished. The last of our live-in farm workers, Stuart, had left his little bedroom in my grandfather’s house to live in the local town in 1978. He had been like an extension of the family, and was nursed by my grandmother when he had cancer. He had been even more of a teacher to my father about practical farming matters than my grandfather had. Such men (and women) were everywhere thirty years ago. They knew the fields intimately, sometimes better than the farmer. But fewer people worked in the fields with every passing year. Now, most people would never set foot in the fields that fed them – which was either liberation from a kind of mindless drudgery, or a loss of contact with the vital processes that sustain us, depending on your point of view.

~

Our lives were becoming more fragmented, more private, closed off behind doors. The local dances that my father’s generation had known no longer really took place. Drink driving laws in the 1980s had mostly stopped the journeys that made many of these social events possible. The pub in our village had closed twenty years earlier and now the men mostly stayed at home. Some of my father’s friends had resisted this for as long as they could, and had various cross-country scrapes on the way back from more distant village pubs: being chased by the police when half-cut across fields of turnips or barley and triumphantly tumbling into farmhouses in the early hours covered in mud. The village hall began to deteriorate and fill with dust. There were fewer people in the villages, and they were getting older. People now wanted to retire from the town to a nice village in the countryside, and they had more money than the last of the local farm workers, so there was a shift in the social mix of the villages to become more middle class. There was a cultural shift as well, that came with TV, an influx of new residents and the technology of the modern world. Many people’s lives now seemed to revolve around the cultural orbit of the local town – its shops, cinema and leisure centre – rather than the local farming landscape. Harvest festival and the village hall auction of fruit, jams, toffee and bread meant something important when I was a child, but had now fizzled out and become meaningless.

~

The big modernizing farmers we knew sounded a lot like Earl Butz. They had often been educated in agricultural colleges and were true believers in the gospel of efficiency. They were ‘businessmen’, engaged in a desperate race to be the survivors, as everyone else fell behind, gave up and stopped farming. Everything had to be big and fast. They were ruthless capitalists. Dad was a bit confused by them. He said they were ‘shirt and tie’ farmers; ‘too flash’ with their fancy Range-Rovers. They didn’t get their hands dirty and they sounded as if they worked for a corporation – listing data about their milk yield average per cow, grain moisture content, or their costs of production. They often had dozens of people working for them. The big new farms had a high staff turnover because the work was now deskilled, boring and dirty – more like repetitive factory work than the skilled ‘stockmanship’ or ‘field craft’ that had gone before. Immigrant workers came and went, without anyone really knowing their names. The old farm workers had often thought of themselves as equals in work to the boss (at least in our landscape where the farms were small), but now workers didn’t go anywhere near the farmhouse. Dad thought these farmers were forgetting their values, getting above themselves. Most confusing was the fact that they didn’t do any of the things that made farming a joy: the hands-on working with animals and skilled fieldwork. He pitied them, even though they were a lot wealthier than he was, because he couldn’t think of anything worse than being a kind of corporate boss stuck in an office.

~

My old man is sawing logs with his chainsaw. Its two-tone whine echoes back from the distant trees. I am picking up the logs – their ringed cross-sections a bright sappy orange – that drop behind him. I throw them into our trailer to take home to dry for the fire. The smaller branches are thrown into a heap and later torched. We are clearing one of the old thorn dykes that once we would have laid and maintained, but now we have given up on it.

We had mostly stopped laying hedges the old-fashioned way, by hand. Like scything thistles, it took time and men we no longer had. When the last of our farm workers, John, grew old and left, the skilled work that he had helped make possible began to go undone. At first the hedges simply became shaggier and raced for the sky, but over the years their bottoms ceased to be dense and tangled and full of different plants, and all that remained was a line of ageing and scruffy thorn trees. The branches reached out and scratched our