Rebanks is a rare find indeed: a Lake District farmer whose family have worked the land for 600 years, with a passion to save the countryside and an elegant prose style to engage even the most urban reader. He’s refreshingly realistic about how farmed and wild landscapes can coexist and technology can be tamed. A story for us all.”— Evening Standard (London) An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Hailed as "a brilliant, beautiful book" by the Sunday Times (London), Pastoral Song (published in the United Kingdom under the title English Pastoral) is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future. Through the eyes of James Rebanks as a grandson, son, and then father, we witness the tragic decline of traditional agriculture, and glimpse what we must do now to make it right again.” Remarkable … A brilliant, beautiful book … Eloquent, persuasive and electric with the urgency that comes out of love.”— Sunday Times (London)

Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey - Country Guide Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey - Country Guide

Near the end of the book, as he catalogues all the changes that must occur to combat the farming crisis, he implicates the reader by switching to the pronoun “we.” His rhetoric fails to inspire because unlike the memoir portions of Pastoral Song, he discards concrete details for abstract ideas. He writes: “We are 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.” What decisions need to be made? How will they affect the future? Even in the climax to this section, he drifts into generalization: “Some of the solutions are small and individual, but others require big political and structural changes.”

Rebanks offers a sensible way to think about food and the planet.... His prose will transport readers, introducing them to both the harsh realities and the joys of everyday life on a piece of land that has deep, personal meaning." — Christian Science Monitor, Best of the Month Having got them hooked with his story of everyday life on the fells, he's now moved in a campaigning direction. Here, he uses his own family's story, over three generations, to encapsulate and humanise the development of farming from its labour-intensive past in his grandfather's day, through the mechanisation and chemical-laden farming of the 1970s and 1980s, to the point he's reached today, where he tries to protect and enhance the natural environment while still making a living for himself and his family. It's really well done; the personal anecdotes and lyrical descriptive passages bring what could be an over-technical topic to life and bring home the brutal consequences of large-scale agribusiness. He doesn't really go in for facts and figures, though I was quite startled to learn that 50% of British milk is now produced by cows who spend their whole lives indoors.

Pastoral Song | James Rebanks | 9780063073272 | NetGalley Pastoral Song | James Rebanks | 9780063073272 | NetGalley

Rebanks is on a passionate crusade to spread the word on “how can we farm in ways that will endure and do the least harm?” He maintains that “[a]pplying industrial thinking and technologies to agriculture to the exclusion of other values and judgments has been an unmitigated disaster for our landscapes and communities.” He goes on to say that “to have healthy food and farming systems we need a new culture of land stewardship, which for me would be the best of the old values and practices and a good chunk of new scientific thinking.” He spends a lot of time look at the financial reasons behind these changes and what’s continuing to drive practices like monoculture crops, and excessive use of chemicals in farming. Rebanks's prose is sometimes simple but often lyrical as he describes the landscape and nature around his fells farm in the Lake District of England. He says that the literary tradition of the Lake District was mostly about the middle class and asks, "Where were the farmers?" He writes about the forgotten farmers and his long legacy on the land. His family has lived in this area for hundreds of years. A] lyrical ode to traditional farming...Shot through with lyrical prose and intimate family memories, this is an immersive and stimulating call for change." - Publishers Weekly I found this a compelling read and a lovely sympathetic story of the author's life and upbringing on a small farm in the Lake District.James Rebanks’s fierce, personal description of what has gone wrong with the way we farm and eat, and how we can put it right, gets my vote as the most important book of the year ... Some books change our world. I hope this turns out to be one of them.” — Julian Glover, Evening Standard

Pastoral Song - James Rebanks - Hardcover - HarperCollins Canada Pastoral Song - James Rebanks - Hardcover - HarperCollins Canada

This book is effectively a tale of two family farms – one rented by his late Father in the Eden Valley (between the Pennines and the Lake District) and where the author grew up, and one owned by his grandfather in the Lake District which the author now farms. He then shatters this English idyll, recounting his and his father's push to modernise their farm and 'improve' their land in ways encouraged by greedy governments and supermarkets. Fertilizers were spread, fields enlarged, hedgerows and coppices cleared. The soil health decimated. Everything that happens on a farm is affected by the era it exists in,” he says. “Farming is now a term that tries to encompass a vast messy range of activities.” The New York Times bestselling author of The Shepherd’s Life profiles his family’s farm across three generations, revealing through this intimate lens the profound global transformation of agriculture and of the human relationship to the land. Our response to ecological collapse may prove to be the defining legacy of our generation, one way or the other. Many well-meaning, largely urban and middle class people have taken to the streets in the name of the planet in recent years. But waving placards and climbing on top of trains when something becomes fashionable is all show. In this brilliant, deeply moving book, James Rebanks details what true rebellion and real bravery look like.

One of the most important books of our time. Anyone who cares about our land – indeed, anyone who buys food – should read this book. Told with humility and grace, this story of farming over three generations – where we went wrong and how we can change our ways – is at the forefront of a revolution. It will be our land’s salvation.” — Isabella Tree This intimate and moving book is timely and relatable. ... With a critical and curious eye, he asks of himself—and society at large—what does it mean to be a “good” farmer?" — Civil Eats This is Nonfiction/Environment/Nature. As this one started, I wasn't feeling it. I needed to read it for a reading challenge so I plowed ahead. I eventually fell into its rhythm and I was so glad I stayed with it. This wasn't quite 5 stars, but I rounded up for the overall message. Everyone should read this, whether you grow food or eat food....this is for you. This is a timely message. I must admit I struggled with the first part of the book and the description of apparently traditional and generally benevolent farming from around 40 years ago. My own recollection of farming from that time was of widespread use of pesticides, polluting stubble burning (with the added “bonus” of accidental destruction of pesty field boundaries), destruction of hedgerows, the deliberate concealment or obstruction of rights of way – and that things are much better in almost every sense since - but I think industrial farming hit East Anglia a long time before the author’s corner of the lakes. The months after my father’s death were the hardest of my life. I had always wanted to be the farmer, the captain of the ship with my hand on the wheel, but the moment it happened it felt empty. The world seemed a dull shade of gray. Beyond our little valley, people everywhere seemed to have gone insane, electing fools and doing strange things in their anger. England was divided and broken. Suddenly in those months I felt lost. It was as if I had been following in someone else’s footsteps down a path, talking to them, reassured by them when the going got tough, and then they had disappeared. The farm was a lonely place—a poorer thing when it wasn’t shared. And with every passing year farmers were becoming fewer and fewer, a vanishingly small and increasingly powerless share of the population. Our world felt fragile, like it might now break into tiny pieces.