Pastoral Song

James Rebanks

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780063073258
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The acclaimed chronicle of the regeneration of one family's traditional English farm

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Winner of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing * Named "Nature Book of the Year" by the Sunday Times * New York Times Editors' Choice * Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize * A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Sunday Times, Financial Times, New Statesman, Independent, Telegraph, Observer, and Daily Mail

"Superbly written and deeply insightful, the book captivates the reader until the journey's end."— Wall Street Journal

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.

As a boy, James Rebanks's grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in England's Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognizable. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song.

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.

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.

[Published in the United Kingdom as English Pastoral.]

Progress

Had life gone on like that, then all would have been well. But it was not to be. When all is said and done, our lives are like houses built on foundations of sand. One strong wind and all is gone.

Harakiri (1962)

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

Rising clouds of rust-red dust trail me through the night. The wheels of the tractor I am driving churn it up as I race along the dirt road. The steering wheel in my hands judders as I hit potholes. Wire fences and the night stretch out in front of me as far as I can see. A million stars twinkle, like cheap imitation diamonds. I am in Australia. I am twenty years old. I have run away from my home, thinly veiling it behind some words about “backpacking.” But whatever I had said I was doing, I am getting as far away from my dad, and our farm, as I can. My grandfather had died three years earlier. While he was alive, it felt as if the old man had cast a spell on us all, making our way of life feel hopeful, decent, and strong, like it would last forever. His unshakable belief in it all made me think we could defy the outside world. I wore that belief like a protective cloak. I was a proud little Spartan. But with his death that spell broke, and our whole world was suddenly exposed and fragile. I could see everything around me breaking and falling apart, and I could do nothing about it. I began to fear that we might be the last generation to work like we did on our hard, northern land.

* * *

I arrived on this Australian farm—which belonged to a friend of a friend—and was set to work. I was given the job of driving a tractor to some distant land to bale some “Lucerne.” I nodded, without actually knowing what Lucerne was. I was not used to working through the night in distant countries on a strange tractor. He explained that they worked through the night because the crop still had its moisture, and that in the baking heat of the day the crop would dry out and be thrashed to dust by the machinery.

* * *

The tractor headlights illuminate a deep red Martian landscape. Everything is straight. Straight lines. Squares. The farmer told me to head down the dirt track for thirty miles. Then turn right for six blocks, then turn left for two more blocks until I reached the field. It is like navigating on a chessboard. I race past fields of cattle, eyes glowing in my lights. Around them, strange wild eyes are shining out from the bushes. I pass a tree by the side of the road. Creatures half-recognizable are lying around it, large and red. Kangaroos. Startled, they flee through the scrub along the sides of the track. I am so amazed I don’t ease off the throttle. They flank the tractor, flying. I could reach out and touch them. It is like a dream of kangaroos leaping around me. Then, before I can process what I am seeing, they are gone and I am suddenly alone in the night, with the vibration of the engine, the stars, and the red dust. And I wonder if anyone at home will believe me about the kangaroos. After an hour of feeling half-lost, I reach the mown field and work through the night, baling by the tractor’s halogen lights.

* * *

The Australian landscape was flat, unlike anything I had ever seen before. It stretched on forever, and then some. A landscape of vast, perfect fields. I was confused by how perfect it was: neat squares carved out of the bush by surveyors with a ruler on a map a century or so ago.

Land here was cheap, the scale vast. There was no history to slow anything down. Or none that was spoken of. It was a blank slate on which these modern farmers were writing the future. No old walls. No old farmsteads. No people. No bones of older things poking out through the new. Just flat fields, perfect for huge machines. Tens of thousands of sheep ranched in fields bigger than our entire farm. Herds of six hundred or seven hundred cows. All the people I met were full of enthusiasm and hope. We can out-compete everyone else in the world, one farmer told me over a beer. He was right. We were beat.

* * *

A few months later I headed home. I was hopelessly homesick, and had become crippled by it. I dreamed each night of the fells and the greenness, and our crooked, imperfect fields. And I missed the red-haired girl I’d met in the pub the night before I left.

* * *

I came back more in love with my home than ever. Our farm had never been so luminous. The hedgerows glowed green as we drove past, the meadows and pastures looked so ragged and pretty, and Dad thought I was talking gibberish. But I saw, perhaps for the first time, the full beauty of our landscape—its walls, its hedges, its stone-built farmhouses, and its old barns—and I knew that this place was as much a part of me as I was part of it.

And yet, for all this love, I returned somewhat defeated. I had a growing fear in my heart that we would struggle to survive. We couldn’t produce food to compete with the farms I had just seen. I sensed that perhaps we were the past, that our age was coming to an end.

* * *

In the months that followed, I began to see what was happening to us much more clearly. I understood why my old man was struggling to make a living. What good was a farm like ours, battered by the wind and rain for six months of the year? What good were crooked fields and higgledy-piggledy old buildings? What hope was there for farming on this tiny scale? I had seen a new breed of bigger, faster, and more intensive farmers, and now men like them were also emerging from the wreckage of our landscape. I felt embarrassed that my own family hadn’t managed to keep up. We were too small, too old-fashioned, too conservative, too poor, and now, probably, too late to find a place in this brave new world.

* * *

At home, everywhere I looked things seemed outdated. Tractors had replaced horses as the main source of power on the farm a generation earlier. But the tractor implements my grandfather and father used were only slightly bigger versions of what had come before. In our stackyard, the rusting corrugated-tin “implement shed” was full of items of old horse-drawn machinery. The beams in our farmhouse kitchen were still covered in horse brasses. The past had departed, but it had left behind many of its tools, and they were gathering dust in our barns. Ancient tack hung from the beams of our loft, leather crumbling, brittle, covered in white cobwebs: harnesses, yokes, bridles, girths, and horseshoes. There was even a handheld walking seed drill tucked in the beam of our barley loft, with a spreading mechanism that was played by hand like a fiddle. And a pair of horse spurs from the Boer War on the hearth where Grandad had sat to read the newspaper, as if someone had taken them off five minutes earlier. I held those spurs one day and realized that I was part of a traditional working life that was being pulled out of shape. No one on the modern farms hand-pulled turnips or milked old cows for the house twice a day.

* * *

My father became weighed down with the responsibility of keeping our farm going with all its growing debt. He became rougher and harder to deal with: he seemed to have just one plan—to outwork our problems. Slog it. Get up earlier. Work later. He was irritated by any show of softness in me, as if we couldn’t afford to be anything other than tough as hell. He wasn’t one for explaining anything in words, but his actions said we had no choice but to copy what everyone else was doing. We needed new machines and new breeds of sheep and cattle; we had to cut costs and corners. We had fallen way behind and now were hopelessly trying to catch up. I was arrogant enough to begin to pity my father for not having all the answers, for not changing things even faster, for not knowing how to win this fight. He carried our growing overdraft on his shoulders like a sack full of rocks. And I became full of a rough kind of pessimism, cynical and angry. We only had one choice: to embrace change and modernize. I had come to feel ashamed at how “backward” our farm was. I sensed that history didn’t care. It was like a train: it leaves the station, and you can shout “come back” or “you’ve gone the wrong way” all you like, but it is gone down the tracks and you are left behind.

* * *

The game playing out on our farm was taking place across the entire British countryside. In many ways, what was happening was “progress.” It is easy to forget that farming is literally a matter of life and death; easy to forget how amazing it is to live without ever having to worry where your next meal is coming from—for dinner to always just be there, and better than that, to have a choice of what you eat. And yet hunger was only a generation away for many families in Britain and around the world.

My grandparents had lived through the food shortages and periodic high prices that were common in Britain in the early decades of the twentieth century. This scarcity could be seen in the small stature of the oldest people I knew, who often stood a foot or so shorter than their sons and grandsons. Rationing in wartime was a stark reminder that food could not be taken for granted, when feeding the country required importing 20 million tons of food a year and overseas supplies were vulnerable. These were long years of queuing outside shops for scarcely available goods, cheating and black-market trading for foods as basic as eggs and butter. And so, by 1950, British farmers had been tasked with improving food security and feeding a nation of 50 million people, and were encouraged by government subsidies and guaranteed prices. In the decades that followed they rose to that challenge: producing much more food, much more cheaply. The modern supermarket was the culmination of what people wanted—an eye-popping miracle in historical terms, food in quantities and varieties beyond the wildest dreams of anyone prior to the twentieth century.

In my childhood, my mother’s friend Anne, from up the village, was always popping around and telling us how cheaply she had bought a lump of gammon, a bag of frozen chips, or some washing powder. The first big supermarket that opened, fifteen miles away, on the edge of Kendal, was an aircraft-hangar-sized industrial shed, with a huge tarmac car park, and stuffed full of things that were so low-priced it was all people could talk about. Anne would draw at her cigarette and regale us with tales of the things she had bought, or what they had had in the café and how little it had cost. She had stopped baking homemade cakes and teased my mother for being so old-fashioned. She said having a vegetable garden was a waste of time because she could buy everything from the store much more cheaply than you could grow it.

Our vegetable plot was in our farmhouse garden, and it was Dad’s job to dig it over and get the potatoes into the ground. He hated gardening. After one of Anne’s visits, Dad stabbed the fork into the thin stony soil, and it sang as it hit rocks beneath his feet. The soil in our garden seemed to be the poorest on the farm, as if it were made of handfuls of baked clay rocks. Each spring Dad led in endless barrow-loads of well-rotted straw muck from the calf pens to help it. His spade had a broken shaft and lay by the wall where he had thrown it in disgust when he dug up the last of the potatoes in winter, so he disappeared for twenty minutes to fit a new one. Then, when he returned, he dug a long, straight trench about a foot deep and threw in lots of the muck. I stuck the potatoes on top of the muck and covered them lightly with soil. The potatoes were seeding, because we were a bit late getting them in, and were sprouting with blind white shoots. Something simmered up inside him. He asked Mum how much a bag of potatoes cost in the supermarket. Then he started mumbling calculations about how many hours he spent on growing ours. He declared that growing them was a waste of time. He said Anne was bloody right. Mum countered with a hymn of praise to the fresh garden spud, but he was not having it. Half the buggers were rotten last year with potato blight, he said. That autumn the vegetable garden was sown with grass, and we bought potatoes from town.

* * *

Over the years, supermarkets began to drive down the prices we received for the things we sold. By the time I got back from Australia, things were becoming desperate. One day we traveled to the local livestock market to sell a load of fattened sheep, with Dad complaining about how little they were worth and that we would be ripped off by the sheep dealers who bought for the supermarkets.

On the way back, we drove past some big lowland farms. Dad was staring miserably at the land beside the road. “Christ, they’ve given that field some bag.” He was stunned by the bulk and color of the crops growing in their fields. The grass was growing insanely fast and was an ungodly dark green—they had been doused in synthetic fertilizer. His comment seemed half in admiration, half in horror—as if he wasn’t sure whether this farmer was pushing it all a bit too far.

* * *

No one in my family was very good at explaining anything we did or offered much by way of clear analysis of what was happening to the farming world around us. So I began to read to try to get answers. I loved the classic farming books, like A. G. Street’s Farmer’s Glory and Henry Williamson’s The Story of a Norfolk Farm, and I slogged through countless textbooks that were full of useful information but dull as dishwater. I learned that we were a “mixed” and “rotational” farm. Mixed because we grew a number of different crops and kept a few different types of livestock, and rotational because our fields were worked in a sequence that was centuries old.

* * *

The whole history of farming was really the story of people trying and often failing to overcome natural constraints on production. Chief among these was the fertility of the soil. Farmers learned the hard way through endless experimentation, trial and error, discovering that if we overexploited our soil, ecosystems would collapse, and our ability to live and prosper with it. Fields could not produce the same crops over and over again without becoming exhausted. This was because each crop took certain nutrients from soil, emptying its bank of fertility eventually, and then crop diseases and pests would build up in the tired ground until they became devastating. Nature would punish the farmer for his arrogance. Whole civilizations disappeared because their farming methods degraded their soils.

The solution arrived at from all this struggling and failing was to rotate fields through different crops and uses: some sown with grain, some grazed by livestock, and some left unused and weedy to rest and recover. Different types of crops put different nutrients and organic matter back into the soil through their roots or crop waste after the harvest. After growing wheat, the farmer might sow oats, or, if the soil grew tired of cultivation, rest the fields, leaving them fallow (unused). This sequence helped restore the soil and ensured the fields would feed the crops in the future. My father and grandfather no more knew why this rotation worked than the ancient farmer, but two millennia later they had still abided by the same basic rules. It seemed kind of amazing to me that I could have grown up on a farm, and had eleven years of schooling, and never once had anyone explain to me why these things were done.

As I read through this library of our varied attempts to find farming systems that would sustain us, one of the strangest aspects I discovered was that the field pattern I knew was not timeless—it had once been something quite different. Medieval English peasants had divided their cropping lands into lots of little strips (with the pastures held as commons and each household having a right to graze a certain number of animals). In the cropping fields, each strip was allocated to a different peasant farmer, until he or she had several scattered around the parish, their amount of land reflecting the number of mouths they had to feed. Each peasant grew a range of crops, like oats, barley, rye, and other staples. Fields divided like barcodes would have baffled my grandfather. Why trudge around between strips, when land could have been parceled up in larger, more efficiently sized fields? Why waste time walking between the strips and carrying around plows, hoes, scythes, or sickles? Why leave a wasteful no-man’s-land of a foot or two between each strip? But I learned that having these different strips provided useful barriers to slow down the spread of plant diseases and crop-destroying pests, gave homes to pollinators and insects that preyed on the pests, and safeguarded against extreme weather by ensuring each family had their food supply spread in different areas of the parish so that risks like drought or crop disease were mitigated. But the underlying principle was to have multiple crops in rotation, as on the ancient farmer’s field—and on my grandfather’s land on a different scale. The unbreakable law of the field was su...