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

Our farm has transformed in the past ten years because a lot of people with environmental knowledge spent time with us and helped us to change how we think and how we manage our land. Lucy Butler and Will Cleasby came many years ago from Eden Rivers Trust and began our conversion. Thank you to the current staff of Eden Rivers Trust for carrying on that good work, including Elizabeth, Lev, Tania and Jenny.

Rob Dixon has helped us understand our land, particularly our wild plants, and has got his hands very dirty laying dykes and planting the missing plug plants that will begin to flower in our meadows in the next two or three years.

Caroline Grindrod has perhaps had as much influence on our farm as anyone in the past few years, through teaching us about soil and grassland management, and she deserves sincere thanks.

Lee Schofield and other colleagues at the RSPB have been an interesting sounding board to exchange views with and have also shaped our thinking. Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree were kind hosts and guides to what they have done at Knepp Castle – which has also influenced the way I think about our farm. Cain Scrimgeour and Heather-Louise Devey helped us to better understand our moths and bats and made our wildlife fun with their fresh perspective. Thank you to Becky Wilson for doing our carbon audit and multiple soil tests and bringing it to life with her enthusiasm. Thank you to the Woodland Trust for supporting us with trees. Thank you to everyone who has donated to do projects across the valley – particularly the Bray family. Thank you to Natural England and Environment Agency staff who have made good stuff happen behind the scenes. Thank you to Paul Arkle for helping us navigate the bureaucracy required to get our farm into the best environment schemes, and for being so enthusiastic about what we are trying to do. Thank you to James Robinson for his insights into dairy farming, and the challenges of doing anything different in the current system.

Huge thanks are due to my friend Danny Teasdale, who has helped us both understand rivers better, and found the money and the diggers to get stuff done. Danny is a pragmatic conservationist of the kind we need everywhere – if you’d like to help him do conservation works in this valley, please donate to his work (www.ucmcic.com). I am proud of our Nature-Friendly Farming Partnership and hope it goes from strength to strength.

Thank you to everyone who has volunteered to plant trees and hedgerows. Thank you to all of our school partners who remind us all the time how lucky we are to live here, and how much joy there is in sharing it.

Readers should also know that we are not unique or special: this valley and the next are full of good farming people all finding new ways to manage their land better for food production and for nature. There are a lot of very good farmers who care, and they give me hope.

~

The following friends kindly read the manuscript of this book and provided helpful feedback: Nicola Wilding, Adam Bedford, Rob Dixon, Caroline Grindrod, Kathryn Aalto and Patrick Holden. Thank you also to Jane Clarke for reading the manuscript and providing incisive comments.

Any mistakes, of fact or judgement, that remain are mine alone.

Thank you to Malcolm Maclean for letting me stay in the ‘bungalow’ on Uig when I needed headspace.

Thank you to Maggie Learmonth and Ozman Zafar for being good friends and being there when needed. Thank you to my Polish brother Lukasz for coming one bad spring and just helping me without asking for anything in return; you picked me back up. And thank you to Nick Offerman for showing my work respect, making me laugh and being a class act.

Thank you to Ian and Liz for all you do for us when things get a bit manic.

Thanks to my mum for being there and supporting us.

Thank you to my children Molly (totally uninterested), Bea (mildly uninterested), Isaac (proud cheerleader) and Tom (completely oblivious and single-handedly responsible for about a year of delays) and my beautiful, tough and very smart wife Helen. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Helen. I am so lucky to have you backing me, doing all the mundane stuff that no one celebrates but without which our life would be a shambles. None of it gets done without you shoving me forwards and propping me up when the going gets tough. I love you.

Lastly, this book was inspired by two of my heroines – Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs – writers who dared to question the ‘accepted wisdom’ of their age and fight back against the dogmas making things worse for ordinary people. And my sincerest thanks and respect to my friend Wendell Berry who lit a way in the dark, long ago, for us all to follow.

THIS IS JUST

THE BEGINNING

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First published 2020

Copyright © James Rebanks, 2020

Page 1: ‘Pastoral’ definition from The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, twelfth edition, eds. Angus Stevenson and Maurice Waite (Oxford: OUP 2011). Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

Page 7: Quotation from The Georgics: A Poem of the Land by Virgil, trans. Kimberley Johnson (London: Penguin Classics 2009).

Translation