BOOKS, RADIO AND TV
A story of restoration and hope on a Lake District farm
What to read, watch and listen to, from English Pastoral to Mountain Vets.
BOOK ENGLISH PASTORAL: AN INHERITANCE BY JAMES REBANKS, ALLEN LANE, £20 (HB)
Anyone who wishes to understand why Britain is one of the most “naturedepleted” countries on Earth and how farmers are – and, paradoxically are not – to blame needs only to read James Rebanks’ compelling and beautiful English Pastoral.
It is the story of his grandfather and father’s farms in the Lake District and how they gradually abandoned the traditional system of mixed arable and livestock farming to the detriment of their breeding curlews, lapwings and oystercatchers.
It’s lyrically told, with the young Rebanks’ close relationship with his grandfather especially poignant. But the meat and drink of his tale is how the pressure from supermarkets for farmers to reduce food costs and increase yields, which in reality was part of society’s broader imperative for progress and modernisation, forced them to grub up their hedgerows, blanket their fields in fertilisers and spray their crops with pesticides.
Rebanks describes how he sprayed a field that was choking with thistles, only to return a few days later to find the chicks in a nearby robin’s nest had died. “I knew this was my fault,” he writes. “A tiny voice inside me had said it was wrong.”
Extreme selective breeding of cows has more than doubled their output but, he tells us, more than half of all British milk is produced from cows that live permanently indoors.
The “culture of cheap food” cannot carry on, and Rebanks takes his inherited farm back to the past to restore its natural ecosystems. All that is missing, perhaps, is real insight into how our thousands of other farmers can do the same.
James Fair, wildlife journalist