If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To earlier generations of farmers, the idea that nature is vulnerable would have “seemed like hippy or communist propaganda”. In 2015, Rebanks described life on his family farm in The Shepherds Life: A Tale of the Lake District (Rebanks 2015), which quickly became a non-fiction bestseller and was serialised by the BBC in a Book of the Week, radio broadcast.

The first section entitled Nostalgia sets out how farming in these difficult conditions came to be seen as no longer sustainable. Thus began his relationship with farming, with the land and with nature, a relationship that deepened as nature cast her spell over him, a spell into which he draws his readers. A lot, as it turns out: about being a farmer, not just a shepherd, and about balancing the need to make a living with a sense of duty towards future generations. It is a book full of love: of his grandfather, of his children and of the Lake District valley where he lives and farms . If it hadn’t been for high-tech agriculture, there would have been less food, more hunger and possibly an even greater loss of pristine ecosystems, as food production sought to keep pace with population growth.Opening with a short four-page preface, the author quickly draws the reader into this world of a family farm with a long and deep-rooted tradition and then sets the scene for a radical departure from simply carrying on with business as usual and hoping to make do. Since then, the author has become a frequent presence on radio, ranging from dedicated farming topics to general and very popular broadcasts on food, the countryside, and the environment. I can't remember a book I've wanted to press into people's hands more this year than this resonant, immensely thoughtful look back at three generations of a farming family . Perfectly judged , it made me cry (twice) and left me with a new understanding of agriculture, and a real sense of hope. While the title of the book, English pastoral, evokes an expectation of a bucolic lifestyle, the reality is somewhat different as the author makes clear.

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 now do to make it right again. There were others too: reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; noticing the decline of curlews and other wildlife on the land; visiting the US and seeing fields of oilseed rape full of weeds resistant to pesticides; experiencing the Cumbrian floods of 2015. James Rebanks is a farmer based in the Lake District, where his family have lived and worked for over six hundred years. It moved me to tears, made me feel excited and optimistic , and said, so eloquently and succinctly, all the things I've been thinking and feeling . bestselling debut, The Shepherd's Life , won the Lake District Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Wainwright and Ondaatje prizes, and has been translated into sixteen languages.He brings together real evidence for the changes which are already underway and could be the basis for a sustainable foundation for both the landscape and the communities who provide stewardship for the land. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Rebanks didn’t get on with his father and chose to spend his spare time helping out on his grandfather’s farm rather than his father’s. Our land is like a poem,” he says, and rapturous metaphors become his way of both honouring and conserving nature: the tails of redstarts “like little triangular wedges of freshly cut mahogany”, “copper-bronze beech leaves, wind-brittle and crunchy like plastic crisp packets under foot”, the mist below the fells “like a milky ocean”, curlews wheeling round “in giant fairground-ride loops”, cobwebs hanging from rafters “like tangled pairs of women’s tights”, an owl hunting back and forth “like a ball rolling from one side of a glass jar to the other”, a mare in labour with one of the legs of her foal “pushing up jagged beneath the taut skin as if she had swallowed a stepladder”.

His bestselling memoir of five years ago, The Shepherd’s Life, told the story of his work with Herdwick sheep, against the backdrop of his unlikely progress from schoolboy dropout to high-flying Oxbridge graduate.

What a terrific book : vivid and impassioned and urgent --and, in both its alarm and its awe for the natural world, deeply convincing. The author sets out a vision and moves well away from the traditional farming memoir to explain why this lifestyle of an upland family farm, dependent on traditional breeds of Swaledale and Herdwick sheep, will need to change and why this is important to all of us including those who live far away from the fells of Cumbria. It made me simultaneously proud to be British, and sad for what we have become, but hopeful that we can change.

The layout and structure of the book reflect an urgency to explain the dilemma to a wide audience in a compelling but also straightforward way.Though Rebanks may not agree, this is a manifesto for change, and unlike most manifestos, it holds the reader with a distinctive style which flows from someone who knows his patch of landscape and can draw the reader into the fields and becks without a hint of a linguistic flourish. This is a fine book describing the author's love for his Lakeland farm and his efforts to change towards a more sustainable way of farming in contrast with the over-use of chemicals and drastic draining and deforestation of the past. Three meaty sections follow with the text cleverly broken up into short subsections which are interleafed with direct experiences from the Lake District with the author’s reflections and ideas.