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

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By becoming slaves to consumerism and “strangers to the fields that feed us”, we’re part of the problem. He may have done this with his own money but most farmers are strongly influenced by the regime of annual payments. As he points out, there’s a thin line between utopianism and bullshit, and “beauty doesn’t pay the bills”. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. For Rebanks, farming and writing have proved complementary: while working long hours on the land, he has produced a book in a pastoral tradition that runs from Virgil to Wendell Berry.

Rebanks didn’t get on with his father and chose to spend his spare time helping out on his grandfather’s farm rather than his father’s. He brings together real evidence for the changes which are already underway and could be the basis for a sustainable foundation for both the landscape and the communities who provide stewardship for the land.I can't remember a book I've wanted to press into people's hands more this year than this resonant, immensely thoughtful look back at three generations of a farming family . 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.

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.The layout and structure of the book reflect an urgency to explain the dilemma to a wide audience in a compelling but also straightforward way. He had come to understand that both the capital-intensive commercial operations and the present-day small-scale family farming units such as he had inherited from his father were ultimately doomed. The vision of a place which brings separate worlds together, replacing an older suspicion between those who work in the place and those who simply live there.

The first section entitled Nostalgia sets out how farming in these difficult conditions came to be seen as no longer sustainable. Many of these improvements are community-inspired, reaching out beyond the traditional core farming families. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.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. International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. But he has put his environmental ideals into practice by planting 12,000 trees, rerouting the river across his land to create wetland areas, dispensing with pesticides, and sacrificing arable land to encourage wildlife.

Changes in farming practices have meant that globally the production of a given quantity of crop, such as wheat or maize, now requires two-thirds less land than it did in the early 1960s. This book can be approached at several differing levels: as a history of food production and farming in the uplands of Britain, as a fascinating insight into a precarious livelihood on the margins of economic production, or as simply an engaging tale of life in the Lake District beyond the tourist trail.

It moved me to tears, made me feel excited and optimistic , and said, so eloquently and succinctly, all the things I've been thinking and feeling . I can imagine future historians mining English Pastoral for information about ploughing and harvesting, making hay and scything thistles, pulling out ragwort and ferreting in the days before the tentacles of modern agriculture reached into the hills.