Remarkable…A brilliant, beautiful book…Eloquent, persuasive and electric with the urgency that comes out of love." - Sunday Times (UK) An engrossing read. The memoir is divided into three parts. Reading the first part I lost sense of time. It was so enjoyable and so interesting to read. Being a city boy all my life, I was fascinated about life on the farm. Not an easy life to be sure. A] lyrical ode to traditional farming...Shot through with lyrical prose and intimate family memories, this is an immersive and stimulating call for change." - Publishers Weekly Pastoral Songis the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future. He then shatters this English idyll, recounting his and his father's push to modernise their farm and 'improve' their land in ways encouraged by greedy governments and supermarkets. Fertilizers were spread, fields enlarged, hedgerows and coppices cleared. The soil health decimated.

Anyway I am glad this book seems to be very well liked by so many people. I hope you can read it! 😊 One quote that resonated with me, because I am so tired of seeing commercials on TV with happy people buying, buying, buying bright and shiny objects that they don’t need but they feel that they need, and the people who make the commercials are telling me I too need the bright and shiny objects to be happy…grrrrr. Rebanks' lifetime spent farming gives this book its credibility; his sensible tone gives it its power. And his eloquence describing his beloved farm gives it its beauty." — Minneapolis Star Tribune

Pastoral Song

Rebanks explores the changes of farming methods from small family farms, to larger farms that focused on machinery, genetics and businesses to now looking at a striking a balance between two- allowing ecosystems to flourish which in turn makes the land better and richer through returning to older methods, rewilding projects etc. What is good is he does so without a ros Rebanks: “… His farming dream fills me with pride, hope and fear. Pride and hope because I would of course love one or more of my children to be farming here one day in this place that has become my life. I love the idea of this old farm continuing on, and that one or more of them might feel somehing like the love I feel for this valley, and have the same sense of purpose it has given me. But I don’t want them to feel trapped in their father’s dream. I fear for them too because it is at times a crushingly hard way of life, and the economics of what we do are terrible.” p265 This intimate and moving book is timely and relatable.... With a critical and curious eye, he asks of himself—and society at large—what does it mean to be a “good” farmer?" — Civil Eats Broken up into three sections, “Nostalgia,” “Progress” and “Utopia,” Pastoral Song tells the story of one family’s journey during the rapid transition from rotational crop farming to large-scale “factory” farming that took place in the latter half of the 20th century. It documents the personal and environmental effects of this momentous change in human history through three generations of Rebanks’s family. The first section details Rebanks learning, as he calls it, “the old way,” of farming from his grandfather over the course of a year; the second is concerned with his father’s reluctant modernization of the farm, partly due to rising financial concerns; the last details the author reclaiming “the old way” of farming and promoting it as a more sustainable and environmentally friendly option than industrial farming. Each of the chapters is named slightly ironically: the first chapter does not hide some of the brutal realities and precariousness of his Grandfather’s approach; the second commendably tries to be partly even handed about the change (recognising what it has done to enable more people to be fed alongside concentrating on all that has been lost) and the third is far from a utopia but a very deliberate compromise the author has made which he knows will disappoint both “die hard production focused farmers” and “extreme wilderness-loving ecologists”

Hailed as "a brilliant, beautiful book" by the Sunday Times (London), Pastoral Song (published in the United Kingdom under the title English Pastoral) is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future. The New York Times bestselling author of The Shepherd’s Life profiles his family’s farm across three generations, revealing through this intimate lens the profound global transformation of agriculture and of the human relationship to the land. The name of the game became productivity. Ancient field systems were broken up, traditional crop rotation abandoned. Breeds of plants and animals re-engineered to produce greater yields on massive farms. 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 ...Some books change our world. I hope this turns out to be one of them.”— Julian Glover, Evening Standard Rebanks also recalls trips to Australia and the American Midwest, where he realized the true costs of intensive, monoculture farming, as opposed to the small-scale, mixed rotational farming that is traditional in the UK. Rather than wallowing in nostalgia or guilt, neither of which does anyone much good, he chronicles how he has taken steps to restore his land as part of a wider ecosystem. It takes courage to publicly change one’s mind and follow through on it, and I felt the author was aware of nuances and passionate about working with ecologists to see that his farm is heading in the right direction. He has 200 plant species growing on his land, but planted additional key species that were missing; he hasn’t used artificial fertilizer in over five years; and he’s working towards zero pesticides.The book is divided into three parts, and these are subdivided into short sections that hold anecdotal tales or brief arguments about the benefits or problems with different farming practices. Rebanks presents a nuanced view, influenced by his reading of Rachel Carson and his life on his family's farm. The overall narrative is about striking a balance between industrialisation in farming and keeping traditions alive, presented with some suggestions for future farming in the last chapter.