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

same twice. I am beginning to learn how to read our meadows properly, and I am proud of them. It is a new kind of pride, to add to my knowledge of my sheep and cattle. I have always seen their beauty, their swaying waves of colour, but I didn’t see, or understand, their wild biodiversity. My grandfather taught me about the grasses, but he never mentioned the wild flowers. My grandmother and mother would talk about the prettiest flowers in our meadows, but were often unsure what their names were and would promise to check The Observer’s Book of British Wild Flowers that lived in the telephone drawer.

As the months passed after my father’s death, I became more aware of how little I really knew about the nature of our valley, so I paid a botanist to do a plant survey. Within seconds of him walking into our best hay meadow, I could see that he knew how to read it in ways that I could not. He splayed a collection of flowers in his hand and talked me through them, pleased that I was interested. After an hour or two it became clear that our meadows were much better, more biodiverse, than we’d imagined. Our fields weren’t ruined – and it wasn’t too late. He was finding obscure plants that he had to look up in his books – plants he’d rarely seen before or had not expected to find here. By the end of the first day, he was sunburnt and glowing with enthusiasm. He had recorded over ninety species in the first meadow. Some modern intensively farmed fields of grass now have just four or five species in them, sometimes only one species. He pointed out plants that I had never noticed before in my fields and told me their stories: arctic eyebright, confused eyebright, marsh pennywort. And he gave names to plants I had known my whole life but still had remained ignorant about, such as wood cranesbill, marsh cinquefoil, melancholy thistle, ragged robin, harebell, flea sedge, marsh ragwort. He found close to 200 species of plants and grasses on the farm, many of them on the endangered ‘red list’. He also realized that half a dozen important species weren’t in our meadows, so we set to work reintroducing them with 6,500 tiny plug plants, each one dug in by hand.

The botanist taught me something else important, that ‘nature’ isn’t something that just lives around my fields and on the scruffy edges – it lives within the fields as well, in the soil and in the sward. Rare plants are wonders, but we also need lots of common plants too. A field with twenty species of flowers and grasses in it may not be as ecologically pristine as a wild beaver-made meadow, or a bison-grazed woodland clearing, but that doesn’t render it worthless. It is much richer and better for nature than a flowerless silage field. Some fairly common plants like red or white clover, or daisies, or buttercups, provide a lot of food for insects like bees.

The idea that land must be either perfectly wild or perfectly efficient and sterile is unwise and blinding; it is a false and unsustainable simplification. When we despair and reduce our world view to black and white – ‘farming’ is bad; ‘nature’ is good – we lose sight of vital distinctions and nuances. We make every farmer who isn’t a saint a villain. We miss the actual complexities of farming, the vast spectrum between those two extremes and the massive scope for nature-friendly farming that exists between them. Some quite modest farming changes at scale could be revolutionary. Whatever the farming system, there are ways to nudge things to get lots of nature back into it. Just as marginal farming gains over the past fifty years incrementally squeezed nature out of our fields, the process can be reversed.

~

We won’t win any prizes for our farming or make a lot of money from it. And it won’t ‘feed the world’ (the proud boast of the least sustainable farming systems), though we can contribute to that. To some farmers at the more intensive and industrial end of the spectrum, our ways will seem like a nostalgic daydream. They will make different choices: they will feed more people more cheaply than we will. Every farm cannot and shouldn’t be exactly like ours, but that’s OK. To have a robust and resilient food system we need many different kinds of farmers. Diversity is a strength in farming, as in so much else. But whatever the farm type, they can be vastly better for nature with some tweaks, and by being supported to shift away from damaging practices.

~

It is late afternoon now, and the shadows on the southern face of the fell are lengthening. I have seen that the calf is fine and full of milk, its coat licked into curls by its fussing mother. I walk across our land and feel a sense of joy at the way it is changing. My simple rule is that wherever you stand on our farm you should never be more than 300 yards from another different kind of valuable habitat. I want a farm full of birdsong, insects, animals and beautiful plants and trees. It should run overwhelmingly on sunlight – not on fossil fuels. We are shifting to using fewer drugs and chemicals, and less bought-in feed. We use almost no pesticides, and I hope it can soon be none. Already we are off-grid for electricity, with solar panels instead of mains electricity, and the next stage is a mini hydro or wind turbine. Recently we were carbon-audited and were found to be trapping much more carbon than we were using, or releasing, and I think we can trap much more.

None of this is at odds with breeding a great flock of sheep or a herd of cattle. The fertilizers, medicines, pesticides, fuels, feeds, tractors and machinery that we once bought that made our