If you get the chance to read English Pastoral, grab it with both hands - it covers some serious issues that we all need to acknowledge, and the author’s passion for the land just radiates on every page. Living in a rural area now and having gone to school with a lot of kids that have now inherited their fam At its worse this seems to be rather resentful of both sides: he seems to share equal dislike for the world of neo-liberal free-trade and globalised economics (economists in particular seem to be his rather odd bête noire) and for left-wing extremists (George Monbiot is not named in the book but the two seem to have a history of opposition).

PASTORAL SONG | Kirkus Reviews

When the old style of farming - mixed and rotational - made a final shift towards industrialised farming, he had a front row seat. Lyrical and passionate … I was gripped from the very first paragraph … Rebanks has shone a brilliant light onto a world about which the vast majority of people know little … a cri de coeur for a healthier countryside, rather than a manifesto … a magnificent book. The three plowshares slice the earth into ribbons, and the shining steel moldboards lift and turn and roll them upside down. Some unfortunate proofreading issues here, though: he almost always says “[person/people] that” rather than “who”; there are three severe homonym slips (“peddle” for pedal, “yoke” for yolk, and, worst of all, “sewn” for sown!Rebanks describes a day when he and his grandfather were rolling the field, "flattening the loose soil, tucking the seed beneath a pressed down surface. It's slow-paced, sometimes verges on "heartwarming," and could have used some editing as it meanders on for many pages.

Think Sustainability Is Simple? This Sheep Farmer Would Like

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. Rebanks really opens up to the reader about what his family life is like, how far they have come and how far they have to go. Remarkable…A brilliant, beautiful book…Eloquent, persuasive and electric with the urgency that comes out of love.Now, if we want a different kind of future, we need to make some difficult decisions to make that happen. When I was young there was cowslips and Ragged Robin everywhere, and butterflies on the thyme in the rocky rags on the fell. He comes from generations of farmers on the same land and muses over the changes that have taken place on the same land and within farming in general within the UK. His own dad struggles to keep it going, but faces unbearable pressure from the new, competitive, commercial, technology-driven ways. Rebanks’ books are a must read for all those who, like myself, rely on farmers every day and yet know nothing of the realities of the world in which they live and the pressures they face.

Pastoral Song – HarperCollins Pastoral Song – HarperCollins

Today, there are no buildings or trees or any evidence that anyone has ever lived on it; it’s just 160 acres of dirt that belongs to a corporation. In this brilliant, deeply moving book, James Rebanks details what true rebellion and real bravery look like. It documents the personal and environmental effects of this momentous change in human history through three generations of Rebanks’s family. You said that nothing about agriculture changes in our country “because the status quo works just great for a handful of giant corporations who own the food and farming system.The last forty years on the land were revolutionary and disrupted all that had gone before for thousands of years—a radical and ill-thought-through experiment that was conducted in our fields.

Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey by James Rebanks | Goodreads

I remember how hard my dad worked to continue my grandpa’s traditions only to sell a few pigs every year for little money. It was a tough old place with almost every acre used by humans, but there was much in it that was good. Her writing and reviews appear in publications such as the New York Times, Seattle Times, Orion, Terrain. People’s attachment to their land is renewed by each generation—through their holding on and working it. I found this very interesting as it does make you step back and think about what we take for granted as we gaze at the supermarket shelves.I didn’t know what was coming, or why, and some of it would take years to reach our fields, but I sensed that day might be worth remembering. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. It is a really well written book which captures the colours, the wildlife and the landscape beautifully, in places it is almost lyrical as it’s a love affair with the land. James Rebanks’s fierce, personal description of what has gone wrong with the way we farm and eat, and how we can put it right, gets my vote as the most important book of the year .