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

They used to call England a ‘green and pleasant land’ but in truth it was never entirely green, nor entirely pleasant. It was a tough old place with almost every acre used by humans, but there was much in it that was good. And yet the truth is that the countryside that feeds us has changed. It is profoundly different from even a generation ago. The old working landscapes and the wildlife that lived in them have mostly disappeared, replaced by an industrial farming system which in its scale, speed and power is quite unlike anything that preceded it. This new farming has proved to be both productively brilliant and, we now know, ecologically disastrous. The more we learn about this change, the more unease and anger we feel about what farming has become. Our society was created by this farming, and yet we increasingly distrust it.

This was a lousy time to inherit a farm. I was now solely responsible for making the decisions about how we managed my family’s land. In the months after my father’s death five years ago I began to feel a kind of despair. Our role was now being challenged and criticized as never before. Reports of bad news and scientific studies about the decline and loss of wild things on farmland became commonplace on the TV and radio. Rainforests were burned, rivers poisoned, soils eroded, and countless landscapes made sterile and bereft of nature. Anger filled the newspapers and the news. Being a farmer felt for the first time like something you were supposed to say sorry for. And with some sadness and shame I could see that there was truth in all this. My new role wasn’t heroic, as I had imagined it would be in my youth. It was just confusing and complicated, and fraught with doubts. Countless choices – some large and fundamental, and others tiny, incremental and day-to-day – that would shape this little bit of England for better or for worse were now mine to make. It felt like a lot rested on my knowledge, or lack of it, and my values and beliefs. And I was suddenly aware how constrained my choices were, and how little I knew. I would have to work out how to make money from our land without wrecking it. I had inherited a complex bundle of economic and ecological challenges – and that, perhaps, was what it really meant to be a farmer.

When we lose our way, it often pays to retrace the footsteps on our journey until we get back to familiar territory. In those painful first months, my grandfather’s farming became for me such a moment from which I could navigate through what had happened in order to understand what had gone wrong. I thought a lot about how he managed his land and cared about his animals and the natural world around him. I tried to understand afresh what it meant to be a farmer. I returned in memory to a day spent ploughing a field in April, nearly forty years ago. Every detail was frozen in my head. Forty years doesn’t sound long ago, but in farming terms it is like returning to the age of the dinosaurs. Perhaps I would only discover old mistakes, or get a nostalgic sense of what that traditional farming was. But I returned to the past with a sense of hope, that it might hold some of the answers – and help me to work out what kind of farmer I could, and must, become.

~

As I sat in the back of his tractor watching the seagulls, it felt as if Grandad and the seagulls behind his plough were part of the same whole, the one as true as the other. They both had timeless claims on the earth; they both belonged to the same cycle in that landscape. They needed each other. I was aware, perhaps for the first time, with absolute clarity that we were farmers and that defined us beyond anything else. We changed the earth to grow food so that we, and others, could live. My grandfather was rooted in work, connected to the soil and the crops and the animals upon it. I loved his closeness to the land. I was dimly aware that lots of people didn’t live like us. Most families, even in our village, had traded in their relationship with the land for new lives away from the fields, birds and stars.

Earlier that spring my grandfather had decided it was time for my farm ‘education’ to begin. He set out to teach me the ways of his world. I had perhaps always been vaguely aware of the cycles of the work, as I had trailed after the men since I could walk, but this was different. He had sensed in the preceding months that the farm was losing me. I was work-shy and beginning to hide in the house, huddled by the TV. He knew that I would either learn to love farming now, or drift away and be lost from it forever. I was old enough to be prised away from the house and the women – to start learning and be useful. I didn’t get on well with my father, and that was poisoning my view of the farm. I would try to help him and would inevitably do something wrong and be shouted at. He seemed rough and best avoided. Skulking inside was easier. But I felt ashamed, because I knew this wasn’t the boy I was supposed to be. I was in danger of becoming a disappointment.

~

The old farmhouse glass had imperfections in each pane – whorls, like knots in an oak-tree trunk – which distorted the sycamore tree in our garden, the clouds and the electricity pylons. I thought the fields were