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. 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.”

James Rebanks's story of his family's farm is just about perfect. It belongs with the finest writing of its kind -- Wendell Berry This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all. Rebanks also recalls trips to Australia and the American Midwest, where he realized the true costs of intensive, monoculture farming, as opposed to the small-scale, mixed rotational farming that is traditional in the UK. Rather than wallowing in nostalgia or guilt, neither of which does anyone much good, he chronicles how he has taken steps to restore his land as part of a wider ecosystem. It takes courage to publicly change one’s mind and follow through on it, and I felt the author was aware of nuances and passionate about working with ecologists to see that his farm is heading in the right direction. He has 200 plant species growing on his land, but planted additional key species that were missing; he hasn’t used artificial fertilizer in over five years; and he’s working towards zero pesticides. 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 ... It is not just a beautiful book to read, but so important and so timely. A wonderful, thought-provoking, heartlifting read. -- Kate Humble For Rebanks it was an epiphany. 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. To earlier generations of farmers, the idea that nature is vulnerable would have “seemed like hippy or communist propaganda”. But to Rebanks it made urgent sense and he resolved to farm in a more sustainable way.Lyrical and illuminating ... will fascinate city-dwellers and country-lovers alike. * Independent - 10 Best Non-Fiction Books of 2020 * It’s not only the story of one farming family, but also a clear and well-argued proposal for a new attitude towards an essential resource, which has been cheapened and exploited, with ultimately harmful environmental consequences.

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. As an evocation of British landscape past and present, it's up there with Cider With Rosie."

I’m maybe old and stupid, but I like to see them things. But you don’t see them anymore. And greed is to blame. Greed. And it will get worse if they don’t change things. The power of English Pastoral lies not just in the passion and eloquence of its prose or the clarity of its argument. It carries the authority of one who has not just thought about these problems, but lived them. It is a timely and important book. * TLS *

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. I can imagine future historians mining English Pastoral for information about ploughing and harvesting, making hay and scything thistles, pulling out ragwort and ferreting in the days before the tentacles of modern agriculture reached into the hills. The story he tells is one of hard work, little money and narrow horizons, reminiscent of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie but without the adolescent sex and occasional violence. I wonder what the neighbouring farmers make of this book and also what the wider farming community will think of it. There is something for everyone here – it’s a good story. But will the farmers who read it think that its author has just gone over to the townie environmentalists or will they see this tale as indicating a way forward for some of them to follow in other hills and dales? About the time that I left the farm my father bought four-row equipment, but by then bigger farmers were planting and cultivating with six-row equipment. Today, family farms such as ours have become as extinct as the dodo bird and the big farmers and land corporations are doing their work with twelve-row equipment. It takes them only one trip through the field to plant or cultivate an entire acre.This work explains how farming used to be and how it was changed as big supermarkets forced down prices at the farmgate and the nature of the work was transformed, and land brought to the edge of ruin. The reason was that all the landmarks were gone. There was a time that farmers needed laborers to help them farm their land and that is why there was a house on every forty acres. But today, because the owner doesn’t live on the farm, there may not be even one house.

The constant wanting of store-bought things he (James Rebanks’ grandfather) held in disdain. He thought these people (he and his fellow local farmers) had understood something about freedom that everyone else had missed, that if you didn’t need things–shop-bought possessions–then you were free from the need to earn the money to pay for them.I really enjoyed the first part of the book that involved him learning about farming from his grandfather.