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English Pastoral: An Inheritance - The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of The Shepherd's Life

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And, as Rebanks says, we need mechanisms, including financial incentives, that encourage productive farms to be more friendly to nature. What a terrific book : vivid and impassioned and urgent --and, in both its alarm and its awe for the natural world, deeply convincing.

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.The UK has an estimated 30 million sheep, and James Rebanks looks after around a thousand head on his upland farm in the heart of the English Lake District ( https://www. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then? This applies to the Andalusian goat herd and the Lapland reindeer herder, as much as to the Welsh sheep farmer. Instead of abandoning large areas of farmland to nature, Rebanks argues, we need to make productive farms better places for wildlife. I have never met anyone so roaringly, joyously in context and content as James Rebanks, belting around his farm in the rain .

Stewardship schemes reward farmers for planting trees and maintaining hedges as the author now does. 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. 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.In “Digging”, Seamus Heaney wrote how, unable to handle a spade like his father and grandfather, he chose to dig with a pen instead. This deeply engrained concept of stewardship runs like a vein of rock through these upland farming families. Rebanks is eloquent - scenes of mud and guts are interspersed with quotes ranging from Virgil to Schumpeter, Rachel Carson to Wendell Berry . Farming, unlike almost any other job, is bound up in a series of complex ropes that Rebanks captures in his own story so beautifully: family pressure and loyalty, ego, loneliness, and a special kind of peer pressure. He and his wife, Helen, a quiet pillar of strength, have planted over twelve thousand saplings and created new hedgerows.

In 1974, when Rebanks was born and I first made my way up the River Nile, after spending a month hay-timing on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales, over half of the population in sub-Saharan Africa was malnourished. English Pastoral is a joy to read and extremely moving - a book which should be read by every citizen. Removing sheep from these fells in favour of trees, or reducing headage numbers making the business of shepherding unviable, would set in motion a chain of consequences which would alter both the landscapes and the communities. The farmers were changing, too – managerial “shirt and tie” types driving round in Range Rovers became the norm. It also leaves leaves out the fact that it is several decades since the switch towards more sustainable farming was recognised in government (and to a lesser extent EU) policy.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.

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