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

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But in spite of it all, he would have no other life, as the sight of a barn owl at dusk or a meadow of wild flowers afford a moment of wonder that make it all worthwhile.

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. Rebanks is a rare find indeed: a Lake District farmer whose family have worked the land for 600 years, with a passion to save the countryside and an elegant prose style to engage even the most urban reader. Following the recent Agriculture Bill it seems that farmers will be paid only if they enhance the environment. Heralded as a 'masterpiece' by the New Statesman , it was shortlisted for the Ondaatje prize, and longlisted for the Rathbones Folio prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. bestselling debut, The Shepherd's Life, won the Lake District Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Wainwright and Ondaatje prizes, and has been translated into sixteen languages.What a terrific book : vivid and impassioned and urgent --and, in both its alarm and its awe for the natural world, deeply convincing.

bestselling debut, The Shepherd's Life , won the Lake District Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Wainwright and Ondaatje prizes, and has been translated into sixteen languages. English Pastoral concludes with a description of the changes made on Rebanks’s farm in recent years.

If you want a detailed analysis of how we could bring about the sorts of changes that he and many of us would like to see, you will be better served by Dieter Helm’s Green and Prosperous Land. 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 now do to make it right again.

Rebanks may not have made much money out of farming, but happily, both for him and for us, the pen has proved mightier than the sward. It is therefore no surprise that Rebanks has matched his first publication with this second book, which again quickly became a bestseller helped along by a public desperate to take advantage of a blast of fresh Lake District air in the midst of a pandemic. Poor Henry was a joke – until the soil from his fields was sent to an analyst and found to be richer than the intensively farmed land around it: “The most traditional farmer in the district had the healthiest soil.

The sky is full of winged silhouettes and screaming beaks, and streaks of white seagull shit splatter like milk down on to the soil. To earlier generations of farmers, the idea that nature is vulnerable would have “seemed like hippy or communist propaganda”.

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. This is a fine book describing the author's love for his Lakeland farm and his efforts to change towards a more sustainable way of farming in contrast with the over-use of chemicals and drastic draining and deforestation of the past. This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all. I was hoping that after a fair amount of repetition the author would branch out more boldly into the challenges faced by Lakeland farmers and in particular the influence of subsidies, grants and taxation.In 2015, Rebanks described life on his family farm in The Shepherds Life: A Tale of the Lake District (Rebanks 2015), which quickly became a non-fiction bestseller and was serialised by the BBC in a Book of the Week, radio broadcast. In recent years, I have come across many farmers who are working hard to address the problems Rebanks identifies, whether in restoring soil fertility, improving animal welfare or encouraging wildlife to flourish. The traditional pastoral is about retreat into an imagined rural idyll, but this confronts very real environmental dilemmas. Since then, the author has become a frequent presence on radio, ranging from dedicated farming topics to general and very popular broadcasts on food, the countryside, and the environment. Estimates of this shrinkage in the areas of agricultural land have been made ranging from 8 to 11% ( https://ec.