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

A farm was also a home, a taproot for a family, deep in the ground. It was still a home even if it didn’t make any money, which explained why farmers would hold on long after they should have quit, a place layered with histories, stories and memories, like sacred ground. At the same time a farm was part of a wider cultural, social and economic system, a network of families and communities doing the same work, devoted to the same breeds, plants or practices.

An old farmer once told me that it felt as if he had ceased to exist for eighteen months after he lost his cattle and sheep to the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic in 2001. It was not just that his sense of identity was bound up in his work with his animals, it was that all of his friendships and relationships were tied to those things as well, and the sales, shows and other gatherings around them, so that his links to his community disappeared when his animals went.

A farm always represented a rural dream of being independent and free, making a mark in a place, rather than being swept up in a vast exodus of strangers to a city. All this is still true, and yet I now understand that a farm is a once-wild place that was tamed for our purposes, part of an ecosystem that has often become broken or impoverished. Our fields are the coalface where we as a species meet the natural world, where our politics, our diet and our shopping choices shape the land, the wilder world around it, and even the climate. And we have often done great damage.

I have come to understand that farming, even in the traditional ways, always has costs for the natural world – it is usually a downgrade on what might be there if humans weren’t. But once we accept that, we can also see that good farmers do more than produce commodities: through benign inefficiency or good stewardship, their farms can allow a great many wild things to live in and around them; holding water that would otherwise flow off the land and flood villages, towns and cities; and storing carbon that would otherwise alter the global climate. A good farm has a public value that transcends the pitiful price the farmer gets paid for his products. One of my shepherd friends has over a million people a year walk through his farmyard on their way to and from the mountain he grazes. They come from all around the world to admire a beautiful, rugged, half-wild landscape of fellsides and becks and crafted drystone walls and old stone houses and barns.

I have come to understand that even good farmers cannot single-handedly determine the fate of their farms. They have to rely on the shopping and voting choices of the rest of us to support and protect nature-friendly, sustainable agriculture. They need government spending and trade policies to recognize that sound farming is a ‘public good’, a thing that needs encouraging and protecting.

The marginalization of farming in our national politics and culture is a tragedy because this is all about the kind of country we want to live in: a second-rate version of the broken American Midwest, or a land that reflects our own values, history, aspirations and nature. We won’t become a country of good farming by simply drifting along as we have been, letting big business become ever more powerful and insisting on ever cheaper food in their supermarkets and shops.

We have to take food much more seriously, not viewing it as a technical problem to be solved, but instead as something important in its own right, that enriches life. We need to think about how food was produced, and how our choices play out in fields somewhere. We were all responsible for the new industrial-style farming. We let it happen because we thought we wanted the sort of future it promised us. Now, if we want a different kind of future, we need to make some difficult decisions to make that happen.

We have spent too long listening to economists. They said we shouldn’t worry about local food because we had secure global supply chains. But even if that dubious claim were true (the world is much more volatile and vulnerable to human and natural crises than they admit), that isn’t why local food matters. We need local farming so that we can understand it and engage with it, and shape it to our values. That means a significant share of our nutrition should be produced locally so we can see it, participate in it, and question and challenge it when we need to. Food production is too important to be pushed out of sight and out of mind. Foodstuffs from anonymous distant global sources are rarely subject to our rules and regulations on welfare, environment or hygiene, or produced in line with our values. We are so used to being disconnected from the fields and the people that feed us that we have forgotten how totally weird this is from a historic perspective. We should not be strangers to the fields that feed us. It is bad for us to get too far from the soil and the elements, and the tough realities that sustain us. There is now a mountain of evidence that people are healthier in body and mind when they do physical work and spend time outdoors and in contact with the natural world. The modern aspiration of lifting us up and away from elemental concerns and work on the land has turned out to be exactly the opposite of what we really need.

We need to keep unsustainably produced food out of our shops and markets; it cannot be allowed to undercut nature-friendly, high-welfare farming. We must continue to produce lots of our food on British soil in order