Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey

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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 This book won the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing (2021), was on the longlist for the Orwell Prize for political writing (2021) and made the shortlist for The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize (2021). 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. There were many accolades from some very fine authors regarding this book: Wendell Berry; Richard Flanagan, and Philip Gouretivich.

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

James Rebanks is a historian and farmer. English Pastoral is a memoir that presents a view of English farming beginning during his grandfather's farming days and ending in 2020 at the book's publication. The New York Times bestselling author of The Shepherd's Life chronicles his family's farm in England's Lake District across three generations, revealing through this intimate lens the profound global transformation of agriculture and of the human relationship to the land. The three plowshares slice the earth into ribbons, and the shining steel moldboards lift and turn and roll them upside down. The dark loamy inside of the earth is exposed to the sky, the grass turned down to the underworld. The upside shines moist from the cut. The furrows layer across the field like sets of cresting waves sweeping across some giant brown ocean. The freshest lengths are darker, the older ones fading, lighter colored, drying and crumbling, across the field. More seagulls arrive, hearing a rumor blown on the winds to the four corners of the sky. They come across the fields and the woods on eager wings, on flight lines so straight they could have been drawn on a map with a ruler. They scream and cry out to one another, excitedly, spotting the freshly turned soil. Winner of the 2021 Wainwright Prize for Writing for UK Nature Writing – the book was described by the prize as “the story of an inheritance. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world have been brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things are being lost. 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 for us all.”Let me say that this was not a "bad" book. I liked the overall theme of what industrialized farming has done to our world, both from a people and ecological standpoint. I do think we need alternatives for our food sources so that we have the ability to choose sustainable, locally farmed goods. 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.” It was sad reading about the demise of the family farm. How in the good old days there were harvest festivals that brought the farming community together every year, and now it’s a thing of the past. I think we are taught that progress is a good thing with no ands, ifs, or buts. I think this book is a cautionary tale…

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

The UN says that 5 million people move from rural communities to urban ones every month, the greatest migration in human history. Much of this took place two or three generations ago in Britain, the first industrial nation. So ours is now one of the least rural societies on earth. The majority of people now live in towns and cities, and we tend to give little serious thought to the practical realities of farming, the vital moment when we come up against the natural world. Pastoral Song gives readers an insider’s perspective into a part of society that is extremely important yet persistently overlooked by a public that takes for granted the labor—and pain—that goes into keeping their bellies full. Unfortunately, lazy prose and a fragmentary structure make for an inconsistent reading experience. James Rebanks combines the descriptive powers of a great novelist with the pragmatic wisdom of a farmer who has watched his world transformed. English Pastoral is a profound and beautiful book about the land, and how we should live off it.”— Ed Caesar,contributing writer, The New Yorker We are choking to death on our own freedoms. The merest mention that we might buy less, or give anything up, and we squeal like pigs pushed away from the trough.” In three sections (“Nostalgia,” “Progress,” and “Utopia”), Rebanks writes of learning to plant barley and tending animals with his grandfather, to witnessing the seismic transition of family farms into agribusinesses across England and the United States. In these movements, he invites readers into his most intimate moments shared with his young children during their daily chores on the farm—inherited land once farmed by his grandfather. This chronology and intimacy is effective in illustrating two important points: real change takes time, especially when you are tethered to a landscape, and healthy ecosystems, including agroecosystems, are more a practice than a destination.

Like a lot of farmers, James Rebanks is thoughtful. But unlike the rest of us, his thoughtfulness has helped him write a globally popular, best-selling and prize-winning book. It has even been named a New York Times editors’ book of the year, and it’s all about the questions that, as a thoughtful farmer, he can’t help but ask.