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

the era it exists in; it is shaped by a host of powerful external forces. We are dangled like puppets, pulled to-and-fro by invisible threads. Somewhere, just out of sight, those threads are connected to how you shop, eat and vote – as they always have been. But in the past fifty years we have let those strings be pulled by supermarkets and other large corporations until most farmers have been reduced to low-price commodity producers with very little bargaining power. We are struggling to face up to the ecological disaster this has created, at the same time as producing the cheapest food in history. And instead of addressing the structural problems of a food system in which almost all the power and the profit is taken by large corporations that care little for the health of citizens, farms or ecosystems, politicians offer inadequate, thinly spread subsidies, or ‘environmental payments’, to patch over its worst effects so that it can carry on.

~

My farming friends can now be crudely divided into three groups. A third of them have begun to change their farming, finding niches to earn money, and are committed to trying to be good ecological stewards. Another third are open to change but have limited room for manoeuvre, caught as they are in the financial realities of trying to run a profitable business, often as tenants and with heavy debt. The final third are deeply sceptical – or still true believers in the intensive post-war model of farming. Talk is cheap, they say. They are focused instead on delivering what society pays for, in supermarkets – cheap commodity foodstuffs.

Our leading agricultural colleges still churn out ‘business-focused’ young farmers, fired up with productive zeal. Students are taught to be at the cutting edge of the new farming, applying science and technology to control nature. They are taught to think about the land like economists. They are taught nothing about tradition, community or ecological limits. Rachel Carson isn’t on the curriculum. Different colleges and courses elsewhere churn out young ecologists who know nothing about farming or rural lives. Education is divided by specialism, and sorts the young people into two separate tribes who can barely understand each other.

An agricultural student came to our farm last year, and when I showed him our hay meadows and explained their diversity of wild flowers and grasses, he looked at me with a mixture of confusion and contempt, as if I were a charming but delusional fool from another age. He boldly told me his tutors would recommend my fields were ploughed to get rid of the ‘weeds’ and reseeded with more modern grass. The idea that a farm might be anything more than a productive business was completely alien to him.

Thankfully, my father never sent me to agricultural college. He was old-school and thought those places turned out people that knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing. In my early twenties, I remember telling him, admiringly, about the farm of a friend of mine that was doing lots of cutting-edge technological things, and he simply said, ‘Let’s give them twenty-five years and see how they get on, before we get too carried away.’ Time was his test, not short-term profit or what was fashionable.

Agricultural education is still overwhelmingly about change and innovation, and ‘disruption’, not what is sustainable and what will work in the long run. From the modernizing perspective, the student in my hay meadow was right. The current economics of farming are such that almost no genuinely sustainable farming is profitable at present. Farming for nature is economic suicide. Produce meat at a greater cost than intensively produced chicken or pork and you are considered an anachronism on the supermarket shelf.

I have to ignore my accounts in this bid for good husbandry and hope the rest of the world comes to its senses someday soon. Of course this is no basis for a sound system, but I decided years ago that if I had to work off the farm to top up our income, to enable me to look after our land properly, then I would. There is nothing new in having to adapt and earn a crust away from the farm. I know that if we are too proud, too stubborn and too unbending, then we will be finished. We will have to learn some new tricks. But I won’t ruin our farm trying to copy the conventional model of industrialized farming that I have come to see as destructive. In this I am as stubborn as my father.

~

Isaac and I walk down the lane and find the hole in the dyke where the sheep escaped. There are tell-tale strands of wool on the thorns. Good fences, hedges and walls help us to contain the sheep where we want them to be, but naturally the sheep have their own ideas. I shove some branches through the hedge, and some more through the other side, until it is criss-crossed with sticks. Isaac isn’t sure it will turn them, so I shove in another branch and pull it until the whole patch is a rigid mass of thorns.

Our ewes and lambs are in three separate flocks, because that fits with the field pattern of our farm. We rotate them through the fields, allowing the grass to recover between grazing. Isaac, Tan, Floss and I cross these fields. Swallows swoop past us, just above the grass for the insects that our feet disturb. Isaac says they are like the ‘X-wing Starfighters’ in the Star Wars movies, as he takes extra galloping steps to keep up with my stride. The ewes and lambs raise their heads when they see us, or trot off a few feet, but mostly they are not disturbed because they know us. There is no substitute for walking the land, for feeling it give gently (as healthy soil should) beneath my boots.

I try to explain to Isaac that we must decide how and when, and with which animals,