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

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The logic chain is simple: we have to farm to eat, and we have to kill (or displace life, which amounts to the same thing) to farm. Being human is a rough business. But there was a difference between the toughness all farming requires and the industrial ‘total war’ on nature that had been unleashed in my lifetime. Despite their inevitable ruthlessness, the original farming societies often had ethical or moral codes that forbade over-exploitation of the land and emphasized the need to take nature as a guide. In the Old Testament, Leviticus 19:9, God gives Moses the Commandments that the Jews should live by and in amongst those well-known rules, most of which form the basis of our own laws, is this forgotten and long-ignored instruction:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest … you shall leave them for the poor and the alien …

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My father wasn’t much of a churchgoer, but he believed in something similar. He thought that things should have limits and constraints. He believed in moderation and balance. And he died hating what had happened to farming. He had seen enough of it to know it had become a corruption of all he had loved and cared about. In the last decade of his life he had no time for its fucked-up logic. He was saddened by what it had done to families, rural communities, animals and nature. He lost interest in trying to keep up with the big farmers on our own land. He acted as if it was all a stupid game that he wasn’t interested in playing. So he looked after his own land, and just held on. He never got to see the new farming at its global extreme and wouldn’t have thanked you for the opportunity. But in the months after his death my wife Helen and I travelled to the American Midwest for the first time. Twenty years earlier I had seen something of the new farming emerging in Australia (enough to know what was coming) but I knew now that the Midwest was the logical conclusion of all that was happening. The efficiency endgame. My farming apprenticeship ended by seeing that future in its purest form.

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We drove down the highway, past shabby farmsteads with flaking paintwork and rotting wood, past tumbling-down tobacco barns cut through with shards of sunlight. Past abandoned cars and rusting farm machinery, and black cattle standing in paddocks next to farmhouses. Past towns that seemed half-abandoned, with boarded-up shops and houses with Confederate flags in the windows and ‘VOTE TRUMP’ signs on the front lawn. Shutters were closed and leaves gathered on the porch; churches with billboards promised redemption for drug addicts. Flakes of snow fell but didn’t settle.

We had travelled to the heart of American farming country to stay with an old friend in Kentucky. It was winter and it felt like it might never end. We were made welcome in the white clapboard farmhouse that was full of books. We ate good simple food and talked about our families and our farms. But as hard as we tried to be cheerful, it felt as if we had stumbled into someone else’s grief. There was a sense of impending doom about the coming election results. This had once been a thriving landscape of small- and medium-sized farms. Now it felt like a landscape littered with ghosts and relics.

Our friend drove us around the county in his white pick-up truck, with his sheepdog in the back and his red toolbox and wrenches in the footwell. He told us about his people, past and present, and introduced us to farmers who were holding on. They all told us the same thing: America had chosen industrial farming and abandoned its small family farms, and this was the result – a landscape and a community that was falling apart. They showed us fields of oilseed rape that were full of weeds because they were now resistant to the pesticides that had been overused. They spoke of mountains ripped open for minerals, and rivers polluted, and farming people leaving the land or holding on in hidden poverty. And the worse it all got, the more people seemed to gravitate to charlatans with their grand promises and ready-made scapegoats to focus all their anger on. I felt I had landed in a future that didn’t work, and the people I met sensed my unease. ‘You haven’t seen anything yet,’ they told me.

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The vast black fields of Iowa go on forever. The soil, rich and deep, is flecked with the stubs of corn stalks. It lies exposed to the wind and rain for half the year. And grows like hell the other half. I heard the young woman say that she loved this landscape, that in summer you could ‘hear the corn growing’. But to my old-world eyes, this wintry desert had little romance or history in it.

It is a landscape of big skies – and below, all is dark, flat and bleak. It offers little but utility. The farms look like something out of that Grant Wood painting – American Gothic. And the iconic homesteader and his wife must have left for the city or are in the house watching TV, because there aren’t many people in these landscapes. Everything old was rotting. Barns leant away from the wind, roofs half torn off. Corn towers and grain elevators broke the flat black horizon and shone silver in the sunlight. Giant pyramids of orange corn stood in the rain, under the arms of grain elevators. The ploughed fields butted up to the picket fences of the crumbling farmsteads and stretched from horizon to horizon. It was an expanse of corn, soybeans and pig sheds. This was the agricultural landscape that Earl Butz demanded.

I was travelling with an agronomist whose passion was soil, and how to change farming to protect