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

Our friends sent their most experienced dog beneath the sheep to nudge them towards the fence where they could grab them. They moved slowly away from the deeper water to the makeshift pen created by the fence – just in time, because the water was already covering the grass where the sheep had stood moments earlier. And then one wilder sheep dived out of the pen into the deep water and, before the farmer could stop them, they all followed and were swept away downriver, bobbing one after another on the current. Some of them were found a few days later when the flood receded, miles downstream, their bellies swollen. Some were hanging high up in the branches of trees as the water receded. Most weren’t found; others were crushed in their barns by mudslides or drowned.

The groundsman of a golf course found a cow wandering the fairway. Black and white, and beautifully clean; it had been washed downstream during the night by the furious river and spat out on the golf course like Jonah in the illustrated book of biblical stories I had had as a child. The farmer who owned it couldn’t believe it was his when the golf club called him because it had travelled fifteen miles down the torrent.

Our landscape was left battered: there were high tide marks of rubbish across the fields and flotsam and jetsam everywhere. Even so, one person’s loss could be another’s gain. One farmer we knew had benefited from a smaller flood the month before when hundreds of tons of good firewood had swept down into his fields. He had bragged to his friends that it was ‘finders keepers’. And then this later flood swept it all away again during the night, until not a stick remained on his land. His friends laughed and told him, ‘What comes around, goes around.’

As the water receded there was a sense of confusion and shock about what had just happened. There is a bridge in Carlisle over the River Eden with a mark on it of the highest water levels for a century and a half. Not once in the following years had the water level risen higher than that mark – until the past five years when the record has been broken twice: the first time by half a metre, the second time by a metre. No one here had ever seen rain like that before. It caused hundreds of millions of pounds of damage and ruined many thousands of homes in the floodplains. In the city hundreds of houses were flooded. When the water receded, people turned their houses inside out – furniture and possessions were thrown out in the streets in sad heaps, and then into builders’ skips. Filth stained the walls.

In the weeks and months after the flood there was a new focus on how land was managed upstream of Carlisle, even many miles upstream in our valley. The farmers I knew seemed bewildered by how much rain had fallen. River systems that had seemed robust now appeared fragile and inadequate to cope with what was being thrown at them. And they say this will all get worse, much worse.

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Farmers used to assume that nature could adapt and cope with whatever we did on the land, but that is no longer credible. Our power to beat up Mother Nature has grown exponentially in my lifetime, wearing the mask of progress. And because of that we have destroyed things on a scale our ancestors would scarcely have believed. The old faith that the natural world has limitless reserves and resources has been tested to destruction. The idea that nature was vulnerable seemed like hippy or communist propaganda to my grandfather and even to my father’s generations of farmers. But it has now proved to be true: nature is finite and breakable.

Our society is right to be concerned about agriculture. The science of what has happened is chilling, and the fact that the loss of nature is escalating is even more terrifying. We are burning down forests, filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, polluting the seas with plastic, and killing off species at remarkable and devastating rates. Being aware of these sad truths marks the difference between the era my grandfather farmed in and my own. As farmers we now have to reconcile the need to produce more food than any other generation in history with the necessity to do that sustainably and in ways that allow nature to survive alongside us. We need to bring the two clashing ideologies about farming together to make it as sustainable and as biodiverse as it can be.

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We thought we had left behind the time when we needed to know about mundane things like animal muck, growing crops, feeding cattle and making hay. And because we didn’t value these things, and the old ways, we turned our backs on things that worked and forgot the vital knowledge and skills we once possessed. We didn’t value the patchwork landscape of family farms with mixed habitats and rotation of crops and livestock, and so we allowed the countryside to become more ‘efficient’, ‘monocultural’ and ‘sterile’. We didn’t value the hay meadows full of wild flowers and insects and birds, and so let them disappear too. We didn’t value the living soil beneath our feet, and so we let it compact and erode and cease to thrive. We didn’t value the hedges and coppiced woodland, and so we turned away when they ripped them out. We didn’t value simple things like cattle grazing in fields, pigs wallowing in muck, and chickens pecking in the farmyard dust, and so they ended up in vast industrial complexes. We didn’t value muck that rolled firm from the backsides of cattle, that was good for the land, and so we never mourned when their feed was changed to silage and their muck to acidic slurry that kills soil.

We worshipped machines, so we thought it was a