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

took some of what had been Henry’s land. He sent in a soil analyst to work out what he should add to the soil to make the land more productive (assuming that it would need artificial fertilizer or lime to get it into full efficient production). Intensively farmed land was regularly soil-tested to see what artificial nutrients needed applying.

But the analyst reported back that the soil was some of the best he had ever tested. Henry’s soil was healthy. It needed nothing. It was full of earthworms – rich and fertile. My father found this news a revelation. It shook him, because it said something about what the new farming was doing to the land. The most traditional farmer in the district had the healthiest soil. The men had discussed it in the pub. Dad said the way farming was going was insane, and that old Henry had known more than the rest of us ‘daft fuckers’ put together.

For weeks afterwards, as we passed Henry’s farm, Dad would tell me that we were bloody fools. This news confirmed something Dad had always felt in his gut. Deep down he had never really believed in many of the changes, and with every passing year he was becoming more sceptical. We were doing these new things because we had to – getting more cattle and sheep, acquiring bigger machines, making these changes and meanwhile losing good people – and yet where was it all heading? If modern farming made the soil worse, and reduced it to a junkie requiring more and more hits of shop-bought chemicals, then how sustainable was it? Dad couldn’t step out of it entirely, but he saw right through it. Rather than admire our friends and relatives who were creating huge new farming businesses, with enormous buildings and loads of machinery and staff, he worried for them. He thought their world was ugly, built on debt, and increasingly risky and volatile; it would all come crashing down around them someday. And when it began to, and some of the biggest farms went bankrupt, he defended them and said we had all been fools once. There was no pleasure in seeing farmers losing their farms.

My father knew the truth lay in Henry’s soil.

~

The old farmers said that where there was muck there was money. They knew they had to feed the soil – and with the right stuff – or they were robbing it and would come unstuck.

The manure in my grandfather’s middens was full of digested roughage from crops like hay. It rotted down over the winter and then was cast on to the fields by the muck-spreader like a kind of compost. But as we shifted to feeding our cattle with silage and bought-in high-protein feeds, our farm began to produce more and more muck of an entirely different kind. Our cows now splattered jets of slurry out of their rears. Slurry is much higher in nitrogen than midden muck and emits noxious gases. It cannot be kept in a heap, but we didn’t have an expensive new storage lagoon for it either. Dad was constantly worried that if we didn’t spread it straight away, it would run off the yards and down to the river and pollute it and we would go to jail. So I spent nine winters spreading shit.

The new farming had taken two mutually beneficial things – grazing animals and fertilizing fields – and separated them to create two massive industrial-scale problems in separate places. The farms with thousands of animals had more muck than their land could possibly accommodate, while the crop farms now had no animals, and thus no muck to fertilize plants, so were entirely reliant on Haber-Bosch fertilizers. Livestock in the new systems were now creating muck so acidic that the soil it was spread on began to compact and die. Crop-growing farms were top-dressing with ammonium nitrate and killing their soil. Everywhere, on both sides of this insane division, the unseen living things in soil (billions in every teaspoon of healthy soil) which had once made it all work were being killed off.

~

A mile or two past Henry’s land my father pointed to a field being ploughed by the roadside. A giant red tractor was pulling a huge blue plough. I could sense he was alarmed by something. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there are no seagulls or crows following the plough.’ This was a shocking thing to him. ‘There must be no worms in those fields. They’ve all been killed off with slurry,’ he said.

~

In those years, my bedroom window looked out over the farmyard, and three feet beneath the sill were a series of through-stones jutting out. I had never cared much for being in the house, and had snuck out ever since I could reach the stones, and had never shaken the habit. After working long days with my father, I was sick of being told what to do and him knowing my every move, so I would go wandering at night. I would dangle my legs out until my feet were on those stones, climb along sideways, Spiderman-style, until I got to the back-kitchen roof that sloped down to the field. And then I would be off and away out of anyone’s sight. Five minutes later I would be over the brow of the hill. I would often go and watch our flock graze and would let the growing lambs come up to me, and judge which would be the future stars. When the sheep wandered off, I would lie with my back to a stone or tree trunk or climb an old oak tree. I loved the wild things that still lived in our fields. The hares that grazed among the sheep. The oystercatchers that laid three eggs in the top of the rotten gate stoop by the field I had worked with my grandfather years before. The rooks that foraged for worms and leatherjackets in our pastures. The kestrel that hovered above the rougher