English Pastoral: An Inheritance

Farmers are often portrayed as the villains in the media I consume. Whether through harmful, intensive farming practices damaging the environment or limiting access to the few open spaces that we have around us. I get a very one sided view of the situation.

With the ongoing controversy around the inheritance tax, I was finding it difficult to sympathise with the farming community. I decided to educate myself and try to see a different perspective on farming. This book proved a wonderful choice.

This is a very honest and personal story of a family farm in the Lake District. It raised some difficult questions and suggested some potential solutions. But most importantly it made me care more about farmers and their struggles. Things in life are rarely black and white and I understand now that my view was overly simplistic. I'll try to remember this story and have more empathy in the future.

Pastoral Songs is heart-wrenching and hopeful at the same time. The beginning of the book opens upon the author's childhood and covers how he learned the traditional way of farming from his grandfather. The midsection covers how he and his father modernized the farm after his grandfather died and how they began to regret doing so, and the last third covers how he begins to reverse the damages done. It is not a technical book or a guide to traditional farming; rather, it is a story of one man and how he relates to his fields, woods, and hills.

Recommended by my daughter who moved to the Lake District earlier this year, I absolutely loved this book. It talks about issues that I believe most of us are more or less aware of, but makes them a lot more tangible and personal.

It's a book in three parts - in the first part, Rebanks talks about his childhood helping out on his grandfather's fell farm in the Lake District, which his grandfather is farming in the old, “traditional” way.

The second part, and perhaps the most powerful one to me, describes the modernisation of farming over the last few decades, with the availability of new technology, pesticides and chemical fertilisers, and the pressure for efficiency and productivity forcing farmers into ever more intensive farming practices in order to survive. Rebanks becomes increasingly disillusioned with this trend, seeing the impact it has both on nature and on the farmers themselves.

The final part is all about Rebanks inheriting his grandfather's farm after his father's death, and trying to farm it in a as-sustainable-as-possible way. This is the most hopeful and almost romantic part, although he is at pains to point out that this type of farming barely pays the bills and he has to work off the farm to make ends meet.

Unless our food system, with its emphasis on cheap prices (especially for meat) and the major supermarkets driving a race to the bottom, is completely changed, then sustainable farming will forever be an unrealistic option for the vast majority of farmers.