Its beauty is not only in the writing but in what is behind it: a gentle and wise sensibility that is alive to the human love affair with the land and yet also intimately cognisant of our collective and systematic cruelty towards it. Rebanks is eloquent - scenes of mud and guts are interspersed with quotes ranging from Virgil to Schumpeter, Rachel Carson to Wendell Berry .

It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and how the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. Across Europe, the future impact of agricultural reform and changing patterns of trade is bringing into focus the issue of land abandonment. 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. He and his wife, Helen, a quiet pillar of strength, have planted over twelve thousand saplings and created new hedgerows.Towards the end of this lyrical and passionate book, the farmer James Rebanks describes how he is moving towards producing food using the minimum amount of artificial inputs, such as chemical fertilisers. Vivid, accessible, inspiring - a story about one man's emerging land ethic, and an appreciation of the old ways in modern times . The first section entitled Nostalgia sets out how farming in these difficult conditions came to be seen as no longer sustainable. As he points out, there’s a thin line between utopianism and bullshit, and “beauty doesn’t pay the bills”. Most people are now largely illiterate when it comes to agriculture and ecology,’ says Rebanks, who has shone a brilliant light onto a world about which the vast majority of people know little.

In the meantime, farmers elsewhere were chopping down woodlands, draining marshes, destroying the microbiology of the soil and banishing nature.He may have done this with his own money but most farmers are strongly influenced by the regime of annual payments.

Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then?There were others too: reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; noticing the decline of curlews and other wildlife on the land; visiting the US and seeing fields of oilseed rape full of weeds resistant to pesticides; experiencing the Cumbrian floods of 2015. 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. He's refreshingly realistic about how farmed and wild landscapes can coexist and technology can be tamed. I see farmers starting to work together to make this place even better, finding ways to farm around wilder rivers.